Then, when NASA retired the Space Shuttle Program in 2011, all three seats on each Soyuz flight were again reserved for expedition crews. Others who trained for flights included soprano singer Sarah Brightman and former *NSYNC member Lance Bass, but those trips fell through.
A DAY IN SPACE STATION SOFTWARE
Over the next few years, software entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth, engineers Gregory Olsen, Charles Simonyi, and Richard Garriott, businesswomen Anousheh Ansari, and Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté also visited the station (in fact, Simonyi visited twice). His flight, however, would not be the last. In April 2001, engineer Dennis Tito paid $20 million to become the first commercial ‘spaceflight participant,’ spending a week aboard the ISS. Those taxi flights permitted, for the first time, fare-paying visitors. Russia sent up regular Soyuz ‘taxi’ flights, whose crews spent a few days working with the expedition crew, dropped off a fresh ship, then returned home in the old one. But because the shuttles didn’t usually linger for long, the crew needed an emergency escape option. In the early days, rotating crews of three were dropped off and picked up by space shuttles. Since the initial arrival of Shepherd, Gidzenko, and Krikalev to the space station, 63 additional expedition crews have lived and worked on the ISS for periods lasting from a few months to more than a year. Recently, a Cygnus cargo ship dropped off a new toilet (which, admittedly, is a necessity), along with Estée Lauder skincare products for an in-space advertising campaign. Their cargo has also contained birthday cards, holiday gifts, specific toothpaste, a 3D printer, and even an espresso machine. However, these resupply missions aren’t only about restocking necessities.
In addition, 73 Russian Progress freighters, 34 commercial Dragon and Cygnus cargo ships, nine Japanese H-II Transfer Vehicles (HTVs), and five European Automated Transfer Vehicles (ATVs) have delivered essentials such as food, water, clothes, experiments, fuel, tools, and spare parts.
The ISS weighs close to a million pounds (450,000 kilograms) and has a habitable volume greater than a six-bedroom house (13,700 cubic feet, or about 400 cubic meters).īuilding, restocking, and crewing this colossal edifice in the sky has so far taken 37 Space Shuttle missions, 63 Soyuz flights, and even a recent trip on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon. As you can imagine, all those additions ad up. The station’s physical structure is also impressive: a suite of Russian living and research quarters, an American lab, a European lab, a Japanese lab, three connecting nodes, a Canadian robot arm, a multi-window cupola (with 360-degree views of Earth), and a football-field-sized truss structure, which holds four sets of solar arrays, batteries, and radiators. It’s even served as the site for the first space marriage, as well as the first space marathon. But the ISS has also hosted the world’s oldest spacewalker, the oldest woman in space, and the first pair of spacewalking grandfathers. The station’s past residents include the first astronauts from South Africa, Brazil, Sweden, Iran, Malaysia, South Korea, Denmark, and the United Arab Emirates. But unlike any other satellites you may spot above, the ISS has hosted 242 people from no less than 19 sovereign nations since its construction began in December 1998. National Lab, and humanity’s brightest man-made star, the station is readily visible to the naked eye as it tracks across the night sky. The International Space Station (ISS) is one of the grandest engineering endeavours of all time. But when they finally flicked on the lights of the International Space Station, they cemented themselves as the orbiting lab’s first full-time crew.Īs the members of Expedition 1 clasped hands in brotherly solidarity, they heralded the dawn of 20 years - and counting - of humanity’s continuous presence in space. It took two days flying aboard a Soyuz spacecraft for former Navy SEAL Bill Shepherd, fighter pilot Yuri Gidzenko, and engineer Sergei Krikalev to reach their destination. Early on November 2, 2000, two Russian cosmonauts - along with an American astronaut who once boasted he could kill a man with a knife - squeezed through a narrow hatch orbiting some 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth’s surface.
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