Euromir

Euromir was a pair of European Space Agency missions in which ESA astronauts flew to the Russian space station Mir, flown as Columbus precursor flights to prepare for the International Space Station. Euromir 94 ran from 3 October to 4 November 1994 with ESA astronaut Ulf Merbold and carried 28 European experiments. Euromir 95 was the second such mission: in March 1995 ESA announced Thomas Reiter of Germany as the crew member to fly, with Christer Fuglesang of Sweden as his stand-by, after both trained at the European Astronauts Centre in Cologne and at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonauts Training Centre near Moscow. That mission was planned to last 135 days, carry 41 European experiments, be the longest flown by a non-Russian astronaut to that date, and include the first spacewalk by an ESA astronaut. The planned launch date of Euromir 95 was 22 August 1995.