The Russian space station Mir ended its mission on 23 March 2001, when it was brought out of its orbit, entered the atmosphere and was destroyed. Major components ranged from about 5 to 15 years in age, and included the Mir Core Module, Kvant-1, Kvant-2, Kristall, Spektr, Priroda, and Docking Module. Although Russia was optimistic about Mirs future, the country's commitments to the International Space Station programme left no funding to support Mir. The deorbit was carried out in three stages. The first stage was waiting for atmospheric drag to decay the orbit to an average of . This began with the docking of Progress M1-5. The second stage was the transfer of the station into a orbit. This was achieved with two burns of the Progress M1-5's control engines at 00:32 UTC and 02:01 UTC on 23 March 2001. After a two-orbit pause, the third and final stage of Mir'''s deorbit began with the firing of Progress M1-5's control engines and main engine at 05:08 UTC, lasting a little over 22 minutes. The atmospheric entry at the altitude of occurred at 05:44 UTC near Nadi, Fiji. Background After the construction of the International Space Station began in 1998, Russian resources were split between the two stations. In 2000, Roscosmos signed an agreement with MirCorp to lease the station for commercial use, with the Soyuz TM-30 mission, intended to prepare the station for future use and conduct some commercial research, being flown later that year. This was to have been followed by more missions, including flights with space tourists. Due to the Russian government being concerned about MirCorp's ability to fund these missions, Roscosmos decided against funding the continued operation of Mir. In November 2000, Roscosmos decided to deorbit Mir, and the next month Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov signed an order to do so. By this stage Mir was well past the end of its design life, and Roscosmos General Director Yuri Koptev believed that "any of its systems could well fail at any time". Therefore, it was decided to deorbit it while it was still functioning rather than risk it falling back to Earth out of control, like Skylab in 1979 and Salyut 7 in 1991, potentially dropping debris over a populated area. Process The Mir Deorbit Monitoring Group, whose members were located in the Russian Mission Control Center (RMCC) and ESOC, was monitoring the whole dynamic phase