On February 20, 1962, John Glenn, the oldest of seven astronauts selected by NASA for Project Mercury’s spaceflight training (and later a U.S. senator), became the first American to orbit Earth, doing so three times. His voyage aboard the Friendship 7—preceded by cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s orbit 10 months earlier—marked a new phase in the space race and made Glenn (pictured below entering the spacecraft) a national hero.

The Soviet Union launched the core module of the space station Mir on February 20, 1986. Mir supported human habitation from March 14, 1986, to June 15, 2000, which included an uninterrupted stretch of occupancy of almost 10 years. It hosted more than 100 people from 12 countries, including a series of U.S. astronauts in 1995–98 as part of a Mir-space shuttle cooperative endeavor. Mir also hosted a record that still stands: Between January 1994 and March 1995, cosmonaut-physician Valery Polyakov set an endurance record of more than 437 continuous days (plus 18 hours) in space.