Controlled deorbit of Mir (2001)
The guided reentry of the Mir space station into the South Pacific on March 23, 2001, covered by a 200-million-dollar third-party liability policy bought by the Russian space agency.
An object too massive to burn up entirely cannot be left to a natural reentry, whose impact point can only be predicted to within a few hours: it has to be deliberately slowed so that it reenters on a calculated trajectory, over an uninhabited stretch of ocean. Such a controlled reentry sharply reduces casualty expectation, but does not eliminate it, because braking burns can fail or be imprecise, and the fragment footprint stretches for thousands of kilometers. Mir shows how the launching state, strictly liable for ground damage under the 1972 convention, chose to transfer part of that risk to the market through a policy dedicated to that single operation. It set the method still followed: a planned reentry, a published impact zone, and liability insurance limited in time to the maneuver.
On March 23, 2001, a Progress cargo craft docked to Mir performed the braking burns, and the station, with a mass on the order of 130 tonnes, reentered the atmosphere at about 05:44 UTC near Fiji, its fragments falling into the South Pacific east of New Zealand. The Russian space agency had bought a 200-million-dollar third-party liability policy for the operation from Russian insurers, reinsured in the London market.
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