The Space Shuttle Docked with Mir.

Before there was the International Space Station , the reigning orbiting spaceport was Russia's Mir. Pictured above in 1995, the United States Space Shuttle Atlantis docked with the segmented Mir . During shuttle mission STS-71 , astronauts answered questions from school students over amateur radio and performed science experiments aboard Spacelab . The Spacelab experiments helped to increase understanding of the effects of long-duration space flights on the human body . Last year, after 15 years of successful service, the decaying Mir space station broke up as it entered the Earth's atmosphere .