On March 23, 2001, at 8:59 a.m. Moscow time, a group of Russian cosmonauts on Southern Fiji’s island gazed up at the sky and waited. And then, there they were: for a few fleeting seconds, a sequence of golden lights streaked across the sky, leaving behind a trail of smoke. Sonic booms accompanied the spectacle created when objects break the sound barrier.
That was the end of the Mir space station’s 1.9 billion km (1.2 billion miles) journey around the world. After carefully orchestrated burns from its thrusters, Mir’s 134-tonne modular structure re-entered Earth’s atmosphere, eventually crashing into the South Pacific Ocean Uninhabited Area (SPOUA), a region 34 times the size of France surrounding Point Nemo — a famous center of a spacecraft cemetery, an expansive, scattered rubbish dump for obsolete items in Earth’s orbit in the frigid and desolate South Pacific.