Earth Facing Porthole from the first flight to the Mir station — Mir EO-1 Soyuz T-15

Through this looking glass, the crew of Kizim and Solovyov watched the Earth stream by, and both the Mir and Salyut 7 space stations on improvised docking maneuvers.

Soyuz T-15 was the first mission to Mir, and so it also has the mission name MIr EO-1. After 52 days at Mir, it departed to Salyut 7 for an extended stay, and then returned to Mir again. On this mission, Kizim became the first human to spend a full year in space.

In a rush to get Mir operational by the 27th Communist Party Congress, they did not have the intended Soyuz-TM automatic docking craft ready, and so the older design was used, necessitating an approach to Mir from one side and then manual maneuver to the other side and then a manual dock. At Salyut, they restarted the abandoned station, stripped 20 instruments that could be reused on Mir, and brought 400 kg of equipment back to Mir. This was the last flight of the Soyuz-T spacecraft.

Their window to the world was machined by hand from a block of aluminum and then anodized. Festooned with mission numbers and approval stamps. Two panes of vita ultra white lead glass. 36cm diameter. It just arrived from Poland.