On this day in space! May 12, 2000: Last spacewalk at Mir space station

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On May 12, 2000, two Russian cosmonauts embarked on the 80th and final spacewalk at the Mir space station.

On May 12, 2000, two Russian cosmonauts embarked on the 80th and final spacewalk at the Mir space station. This was also the first commercially financed spacewalk.

NASA's wingless M2-F2 lifting body crashed on Rogers Dry Lakebed at the Dryden Flight Research Center in California on May 10, 1967. (Image credit: NASA)

MirCorp decided to lease Mir from the government so they could use it for space tourism. The two cosmonauts spent about 5 hours repairing damages and conducting tests outside the station. They also inspected the station's external hardware to look for signs of wear and tear.

This was all done in preparation for commercial crew missions that never happened, because Russia deorbited the Mir space station the following year.

On This Day in Space: See our full 365-day video archive!

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Hanneke Weitering
Hanneke Weitering
Contributing expert

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos.