19951776 Club
Atlantis locks onto Mir; two nations share the largest spacecraft in orbit
Twenty years after Apollo-Soyuz, an American shuttle docks with a Russian station for the first time since 1975, swapping crews and retrieving astronaut Norman Thagard.
Twenty years earlier, American and Soviet crews had shaken hands in orbit during Apollo-Soyuz — then nothing. On June 29, 1995, Space Shuttle Atlantis, on mission STS-71, closed the final few feet of distance and locked onto the Russian space station Mir, becoming the first U.S. spacecraft to dock with a Russian one since 1975. The joined vehicles formed the largest spacecraft in orbit at the time. Atlantis swapped out Mir's resident crew, retrieved NASA astronaut Norman Thagard, and hauled home data from joint life sciences experiments — all of it groundwork for a station neither country could yet build alone…
