🌃 Good night.
Good evening, beautiful insomniacs, and welcome back to Nova After Dark. I’m your host, and boy, do I have a story for you tonight that proves something I’ve always suspected: the Cold War ended not with a bang, but with a bureaucratic handshake and a whole lot of awkward small talk in zero gravity. So today marks the final mission of the Shuttle-Mir program—that’s STS-91 in 1998, when Discovery launched to wrap up what might be the most bizarre friendship in human history. See, after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the Russians and Americans looked at each other like two guys who’d been arm-wrestling for forty years and suddenly realized, “Hey, we could probably both use a drink.” And instead of just grabbing a beer, they decided to build a space station together. Because when you’ve been enemies since before television, the logical next step is to share a really expensive vehicle orbiting Earth at 17,500 miles per hour. What could go wrong? ...