In essence, the Mir manned station not only concentrated the experience of solving various applied tasks in orbital flight conditions but also extended the sphere of applying scientific methods in space, that had been beyond the reach of Mankind before.
When performing research, a thorny, not simple way has been passed: from 1.5 ton of science hardware used to perform astrophysics observations aboard the Salyut orbital station to 11.5 ton of special-purpose loads of the Mir station.