Slide 60 of 99
Notes:
After losing the race to the Moon in the late 1960s, the Soviets concentrated their efforts on a highly successful series of small space stations. The crowning achievement was the launch of the modular “Mir” space station in 1986 and the new “Energia” heavy-lift rocket a year later. After this, the Soviets proposed a “Mir-2” station that would have been even larger than the American Space Station Freedom. The illustration depicts one possible Mir-2 design from the late 1980s.
The end of the Cold War however forced the new Russian Space Agency to set its sights lower after the costly Energia project was mothballed in the early 1990s. By 1993 the Russians were talking about a smaller 2-man “Mir 1.5” in place of the larger station. It would have consisted of the same basic core module as Mir, but new smaller (and cheaper-) research modules would have been used.
