On this day in space! Oct. 6, 1992: US and Russia sign human spaceflight agreement for joint missions to Mir space station

On Oct. 6, 1992, the United States and Russia signed an agreement to share astronauts and cosmonauts on human spaceflight missions.

Known as the Agreement on Human Spaceflight Cooperation, this plan laid out the details for the joint Shuttle-Mir Program. Under this program, NASA's space shuttles would fly to Russia's Mir space station and carry Russian cosmonauts on board.

Meanwhile, American astronauts started flying in the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, which still carries international crews to the International Space Station to this day.

a space shuttle with open cargo bay hangs separated from a space station floating above. — Space shuttle Atlantis departs the Mir space station during NASA's STS-79 mission. (Image credit: NASA)

Why it mattered

The signing of the Agreement on Human Spaceflight Cooperation between the United States and Russia set the stage for what has become over 30 years of international cooperation in space between not just the two countries, but over a dozen others as well.

At the time, the agreement was aimed solely at the Shuttle-Mir program, which sent seven American astronauts to the Mir space station between 1994 and 1998. During those years, 10 NASA space shuttle missions visited Mir.

Mir would eventually host 125 cosmonauts and astronauts from 12 different countries throughout its 13 years in orbit. Mir was deorbited on March 23, 2001, when it fell from space to burn up in Earth's atmosphere, with any surviving debris falling into the Pacific Ocean.

An image of the International Space Station, with its many solar panels and modules, floating above Earth in space — (Image credit: NASA)

In 1993, one year after the U.S.-Russia space agreement went into effect, Russia joined NASA in what would become the International Space Station, a cooperative project to build the largest single crewed spacecraft ever in orbit. NASA, Russia's Roscosmos and three other space agencies (from Japan, Canada and Europe), oversee a group of more than 15 countries working on the ISS.

Russia even launched the first component of the International Space Station in 1998.

Want more space history? Check out our full On This Day In Space Story archive and watch our On This Day In Space videos on YouTube.

The eclipsed moon of May 26, 2021, shines behind the European Southern Observatory's Paranal Observatory in Chile.

On this day in space! Oct. 5, 1962: The European Southern Observatory is born

On this day in space! Oct. 5, 1962: The European Southern Observatory is born to build telescope eyes that scan the universe from Chile's high desert

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.

With contributions from

Tariq Malik Editor-in-Chief