Fifteen years ago today — March 14, 1995 — U.S. astronaut Norman Thagard launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on mission Soyuz TM-21, along with Russian cosmonauts Gennady Strekalov and Vladimir Dezhurov.
(Soyuz TM-21 mission patch. The annotation at the top refers not to the Soyuz launch, but to Mir space station expedition EO-18. Creative Commons image from Wikimedia Commons.)
Thagard was the first NASA astronaut to launch on a Russian rocket, and then the first American to stay aboard the Mir space station.
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