Yuri Semenov, president of RSC Energia, the aerospace company that manufactured and operated the space station Mir, officially confirmed Friday that Russia's ground tracking stations had not spotted the station overhead and it should now be presumed scuttled in the south Pacific.

The "Unprecedented" Mission

The night began with "sadness" in the control room, but "life goes on" -- and the first braking burn went smoothly.

The second burn also worked as planned , as did the third.

After that, Mir slipped off the radar and then, with increasing velocity, out of the sky and into history .

He also said that NASA has never pressured his agency into deorbiting the station, although U.S. space officials had previously stated that Russia should focus its efforts on honoring its International Space Station (ISS) obligations.

Both men said that Russia may manufacture and launch a new station that would be dubbed "Mir 2," which might be manned at certain intervals. However, neither would estimate when this would happen.

Mike Baker, head of NASA human spaceflight programs in Russia and an observer of the event, told reporters that he had never doubted that Russians would succeed in deorbiting Mir safely, even though it was a complicated task.

Koptev said that "we have not erred by one millimeter."

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According to a weary Victor Blagov, deputy chief of air flight at MCC, this was an exaggeration. However, Blagov wryly noted, "we were given [a target area length of] 3,730 miles (6,000 kilometers), and that was hard to miss."

As the crowd in the Mission Control Center outside Moscow broke up, Russia's top space brass dispersed, praising the station for its contribution to the exploration of space, but the underlying mood was still clear: Russia's future in manned cosmonautics lies with the ISS.