RSS
Home
International Space Station is 10 years old: your guide to everything ISS
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
It's traveled more than a billion miles in space, required 114 spacewalks, and today, the International Space Station (ISS) is ten years old. It's the largest, and most technically complex, spacecraft ever built.
A testament to international cooperation, the space station began life with the launch of the Zarya module on Nov. 20, 1998. The bus-sized component was sent aloft from Kazakhstan, and has continued to grow ever since.
Currently the Endeavour STS-126 and the ISS Expedition 18 crews are hard at work adding major upgrades to the station. The crew capacity will be increased from three persons to six. A host of other improvements, including a first-ever refrigerator and a new, second toilet, will kick off the next decade of ISS service.
If you'd like to take a guided tour of the space station and see how crew members live, here's an animated guide. Or, enjoy this interactive 10-year retrospective.
Explore the front and back of the ISS, with a closer look at individual modules with this fun feature. When you watch NASA TV and see all those people working in Mission Control at Johnson Space Center in Houston, here's what everyone is doing, system by system.
Want to find out when the ISS or other spacecraft will be flying over your hometown? NASA provides this tracking resource that's usable in several ways.
The space station is basically an orbiting scientific laboratory. From health to commercial applications, the ISS and its crews have provided a wealth of experiments conducted over the years. If you'd like to access information on every science experiment conducted to date, there's a huge encyclopedia-style reference, sorted by research category, here.
Who's served aboard the space station? Learn about every Expedition crew --and their individual patches--here.
There are hundreds of free photos here. Focus on the Japanese Experiment Module, Kibo, at this reference.
If you'd like to build your own model of the space station, here's a set of 1:100 drawings to help you. To understand what flight controllers mean when they discuss the space station flight attitudes, here's a handy little illustrated interactive guide.
Listen in to mission audio as ground controllers and astronauts communicate live (when available). NASA TV offers live coverage of missions and features on space missions.
Have a question for a crew member? Ask it here. You can also search a thorough database of all questions asked of ISS crew members and shuttle teams while in flight here.
The space shuttle is launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Their portal offers insight into every facet of shuttle and payload preparations and launches.
How many spaceflights has it taken to build the space station to its current configuration and support the crews onboard?
American: 27 Space Shuttle flights Russian: 2 Proton flights 17 Soyuz crew flights 1 Soyuz assembly flight 30 Progress resupply flights European: 1 Automated Transfer Vehicle flight
Want to find out about the different types of space vehicles used to haul space station supplies and components aloft? Learn about each of them at this portal. Years ago, when I was writing space news, a fan wrote my editor with, he said, his only complaint: he was from Canada, and I hadn't yet singled out the Canadarm and the Mobile Servicing System. So, for my Canadian friends and readers, here's Canadarm2.
To mark the annniversary, NASA provided this overview of the space station and its international partners.
The station is a venture of international cooperation among NASA, the Russian Federal Space Agency, Canadian Space Agency, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, and 11 members of the European Space Agency, or ESA: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. More than 100,000 people in space agencies and contractor facilities in 37 U.S. states and throughout the world are involved in this endeavor.
"The station's capability and sheer size today are truly amazing," said International Space Station Program Manager Mike Suffredini. "The tremendous technological achievement in orbit is matched only by the cooperation and perseverance of its partners on the ground. We have overcome differences in language, geography and engineering philosophies to succeed."
Only a few weeks after the U.S.-funded, Russian-built, Zarya module was launched from Kazakhstan, the space shuttle carried aloft the Unity connector module in December 1998. Constructed on opposite sides of Earth, Unity and Zarya met for the first time in space and were joined to begin the orbital station's assembly and a decade of peaceful cooperation.
Ten years later, the station's mass has expanded to more than 627,000 pounds, and its interior volume is more than 25,000 cubic feet, comparable to the size of a five-bedroom house. Since Zarya's launch as the early command, control and power module, there have been 29 additional construction flights to the station: 27 aboard the space shuttle and two additional Russian launches.One hundred sixty seven individuals representing 15 countries have visited the complex. Crews have eaten some 19,000 meals aboard the station since the first crew took up residence in 2000. Through the course of 114 spacewalks and unmatched robotic construction in space, the station's truss structure has grown to 291 feet long so far. Its solar arrays now span to 28,800 square feet, large enough to cover six basketball courts.
“Sixty years ago, people in Europe were fighting one another,” said Alan Thirkettle, ISS Program Manager, European Space Agency. “Now, they’re working together, working on spacecraft and space stations. Two decades ago, the Cold War was still going on and here we are working with the Russians, the Americans, the Japanese, the Europeans, everyone working together. It seems a far better thing to be doing than what we were doing 60 years ago."
The International Space Station hosts 19 research facilities, including nine sponsored by NASA, eight by ESA and two by JAXA. Cooperation among international teams of humans and robots is expected to become a mainstay of space exploration throughout our solar system. The 2005 NASA Authorization Act recognized the U.S. orbital segment as the first national laboratory beyond Earth, opening it for additional research by other government agencies, academia and the private sector.
By the time the first element launch anniversary rolls around on Nov. 20, the space station will have completed 57,309 orbits of the Earth, a distance of 1,432,725,000 miles. If the station had been traveling in a straight line instead of in orbit, it would have passed the orbit of Pluto and be in the outer reaches of our solar system.
Other fun stuff: USA Today has a good interactive feature showing how the space station came together over the last decade.
Have any questions? Feel free to ask in the comment section, below.
Happy birthday, ISS--and here's to many more years of fruitful on-orbit work.
Image credit: NASA
Related Articles:
Add a Comment
