Built originally to carry the Buran space shuttle orbiter on its back, the lone completed Mriya found a second life as a commercial heavy-lift icon. On 11 September 2001 — a day shadowed by tragedy elsewhere — the An-225 lifted five Ukrainian T-80 tanks totalling 253 tonnes and set 124 world records in a single flight[^10]. Over its career the type accumulated 240 world records, from heaviest single-piece cargo (a 189-tonne generator in 2009) to the longest cargo item ever flown (42-metre wind-turbine blades in 2010). Though the sole airworthy Mriya was destroyed at Hostomel in 2022, its legacy endures as the apotheosis of brute-force aeronautical engineering.