Mir burned up over the South Pacific today! 15 years and 104 missions. Some of those pieces were 27 tons and they survived re-entry. I watched the livestream online — incredible to see. Anyone else feel a little sad?

It was a beautiful and chaotic end. The ISS is already up there as the successor so it's not the end of space station history. But Mir was an icon.

The fishermen in the Pacific who saw it must have been terrified — a fireball of metal streaking across the sky at dawn. Incredible timing.