20 years of the ISS
This month marks two decades of human occupation on the International Space Station. Nisha Beerjeraz-Hoyle looks at the ISS’s history and how it’s preparing a new generation of space explorers
How the ISS is preparing for a new generation of space explorers
ith each sunrise we awake and go about our daily lives with little thought that 400km above Earth, a group of humans are living in an orbiting laboratory. Travelling at 27,600km per hour, they see 16 sunrises a day and make one orbit around our planet in just 90 minutes. There are generations growing up today who have only known a time when the human race lived both on and off planet Earth.
For the past 20 years there has been a continuous human presence in space on the International Space Station (ISS). It began two decades ago this month when, on 2 November 2000, the crew of Expedition-1 – US astronaut William ‘Bill’ Shepherd, and Russian cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko – docked their Soyuz spacecraft with the ISS, climbed through the hatch and switched on the lights. Since their arrival, a steady crew rotation means the ISS has never once gone unoccupied.
The ISS is an engineering marvel: the largest structure ever built in space. It weighs around 420,000kg (more than 320 cars) and at 109m is longer than a football pitch. Modular in design and constructed over 13 years, it has eight solar arrays, a main truss ‘backbone’ and pressurised habitation modules. The living quarters are altogether larger than a six-bedroom house and include six sleeping
Wquarters, two bathrooms, a gym and a 360° view bay window called the Cupola. “When you look at the whole assembly, there were around 37 Space Shuttle flights,” says NASA astronaut Jeff Williams, who saw four trips to the ISS, including STS-101, the third mission devoted to its construction. “And there were also about roughly 40 Russian rocket launches that supported the assembly of the ISS. Most of those flights took up a major component; some were logistics missions that supplied the ISS.”
Getting ready
Back in 2000 the ISS was a fraction of its current size with just three modules providing the basics for permanent habitation. Zarya was the first module launched into orbit in 1998 (funded by the US, and built and launched by the Russian space agency Roscosmos), shortly followed by the US-built and launched Unity module. After an 18-month delay, the Russian-built Zvezda, which would provide life support systems for the ISS, was connected to Zarya in September 2000, in readiness for the first crew.
Williams explains: “It was not an easy road even to get to that point: not only the political support but the technical integration of all of these components that
A docked Space Shuttle was a familiar sight on the ISS until the 2003 Columbia disaster put Shuttle flights on hold
The Soyuz capsule took over from the Shuttle as transport to the ISS needed to go together.” By 1993, nine years had passed since US President Reagan’s missive to build a space station within the decade. Space Station Freedom, as it was then called, had undergone several redesigns as NASA engineers struggled with the challenges of building a large, stable structure in space.
But the fall of the Soviet Union made way for former adversaries to forge new partnerships, and Roscosmos brought invaluable experience from its own space stations, Salyut and Mir. Together with the Canadian Space Agency, ESA and Japan’s JAXA, collaboration between 15 nations saw a truly International Space Station emerge.
Pulling together
The strength of this partnership was demonstrated when the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy cost the lives of all seven astronauts on board and halted further flights of the Shuttle. Williams lost close friends that day. “It’s a great testimony to the strength of the partnership, particularly between the US and Russia... just to keep the ISS going while we addressed the issues that caused the Columbia tragedy, which of course grounded the Space Shuttle for between
2-3 years.” This led to the now familiar sight of the Russian Soyuz capsule transporting Russian, US and European astronauts to the ISS.
The ISS is not just a beautiful space habitat, but primarily a unique science laboratory, allowing for experiments that aren’t possible on Earth. These range from studying how both the human body and plants react to life in space, to understanding how materials behave in microgravity. The science >