When Soviet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev launched to the Mir station in May 1991 from Baikonur in the Kazakh SSR, he was a citizen of the Soviet Union, and when he finally landed 311 days later the country that sent him had dissolved, his home city of Leningrad had been renamed St Petersburg, and his monthly pay was worth almost nothing

On 18 May 1991, a Soyuz TM-12 rocket lifted off from the steppe at Baikonur Cosmodrome carrying a 32-year-old flight engineer named Sergei Krikalev to the Soviet space station Mir. A five-month mission that became tenKrikalev launched with commander Anatoly Artsebarsky and British chemist Helen Sharman, the first Briton in space. What he watched from the portholeMir traced a path that carried it over the western Soviet Union roughly every 90 minutes. The city that became St PetersburgIn June 1991, weeks after Krikalev launched, the citizens of Leningrad voted in a referendum to restore the city’s original name. The Russian space agency Krikalev would one day help run did not exist when he launched.