Mir

Vladimir Chelomei is born in what is now Poland; a brilliant mechanician, he will build the design bureau that rivals Korolev's.

Vladimir Komarov dies when Soyuz 1's parachute fails to deploy, the first in-flight fatality of any space programme. The rushed, half-tested spacecraft becomes a warning the engineers had raised in vain.

Feoktistov becomes a principal designer of the Salyut and Mir stations, the orbital homes at the centre of this history.

Aboard Salyut and Mir, the Oazis and later Svet greenhouses attempt to grow peas, wheat and other plants, the first steps toward closed-loop life support and, one day, food on a Mars ship.

Though the crewed Almaz programme is cancelled, Chelomei's TKS transport spacecraft and its modules become the basis of the add-on modules for Salyut 7, Mir and eventually the ISS.

The last of the Salyut line and the immediate predecessor of Mir; it will host the first woman's spacewalk, a near-fatal fuel leak, and the astonishing 1985 rescue of a dead station.

The reactor explosion becomes the great symbol of Soviet technological hubris and secrecy, even as, two months earlier, the USSR launches Mir, the crown of its space engineering.

The core of Mir reaches orbit, the first modular, permanently crewed space station, designed to be expanded module by module over a decade. It will become the great school of long-duration spaceflight.

A planned all-female Soyuz mission that Savitskaya would command is cancelled after the Salyut 7/Mir handover; she leaves the corps and enters engineering and, later, politics.

Vladimir Titov and Musa Manarov complete the first mission longer than a year (365+ days) aboard Mir, a deliberate probe of the human limits for a possible Mars mission.

Polyakov flies to Mir for eight months as a physician-cosmonaut, monitoring the crew and himself through the medical stresses of long-duration flight.

After a 1988 mission to Mir, Savinykh becomes a leading figure in Russian geodesy and university administration, a link between spaceflight and Earth science.

Japanese quail eggs are incubated and hatched aboard Mir, among the first vertebrates to develop from egg to chick in space, though the hatchlings struggle to orient without gravity.

Russia and the United States agree to dock the Space Shuttle with Mir and fly American astronauts aboard, turning a Cold War fortress into the prototype of the International Space Station.

Physician-cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov launches for the longest single spaceflight in history, 437 days aboard Mir, proving a human can survive the round-trip time to Mars, and studying his own body to prove it.

Kondakova launches to Mir for a five-month mission, the first genuinely long-duration flight by a woman, demonstrating that women can endure the missions the men had monopolised.

A Progress freighter collides with Mir during a manual docking test, puncturing the Spektr module and depressurising it, the worst crisis of the international Mir era, survived by quick improvisation.

Kondakova flies aboard Atlantis to Mir, one of the first Russian women to ride the American shuttle, the international era of Russian spaceflight in person.