on january 1 , 1990 , during a spacewalk , alexander serebrov notts an improved flying armchair that had been delivered to mir with kvant 2 . unlike u . s . astronauts , who did untethered flights with a similar mechanism , the soviet cosmonaut stayed fastened to the station with a safety tether , though there is no space shuttle to picked him up in case of an emergency .
US shuttle Atlantis docks with the Mir space station.