![]() ![]() On 12 April 2021, at a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, then-Deputy Prime Minister Yury Borisov announced he had decided that Russia might withdraw from the ISS programme in 2025. They also agreed, in preparation for this new project, that the United States would be involved in the Mir programme, including American Shuttles docking, in the Shuttle– Mir programme. In September 1993, American Vice-President Al Gore and Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin announced plans for a new space station, which eventually became the International Space Station. With both space station projects in jeopardy, American and Russian officials met and proposed they be combined. However the collapse of the Soviet Union required these plans to be greatly downscaled, and soon Mir-2 was in danger of never being launched at all. Simultaneously, the USSR was conducting planning for the Mir-2 space station, and had begun constructing modules for the new station by the mid 1980s. Congress was unwilling to provide enough money to build and operate Freedom, and demanded NASA increase international participation to defray the rising costs or they would cancel the entire project outright. Increasing costs threw these plans into doubt in the early 1990s. The plan spearheaded by Germany and Italy included a module which would be attached to Freedom, and with the capability to evolve into a full-fledged European orbital outpost before the end of the century. In early 1985, science ministers from the European Space Agency (ESA) countries approved the Columbus programme, the most ambitious effort in space undertaken by that organization at the time. The Japanese Experiment Module (JEM), or Kibō, was announced in 1985, as part of the Freedom space station in response to a NASA request in 1982. In 1984 the ESA was invited to participate in Space Station Freedom, and the ESA approved the Columbus laboratory by 1987. In the early 1980s, NASA planned to launch a modular space station called Freedom as a counterpart to the Salyut and Mir space stations. Falling budgets and rising cold war tensions in the late 1970s saw these concepts fall by the wayside, along with another plan to have the Space Shuttle dock with a Salyut space station. More ambitious was the Skylab-Salyut Space Laboratory, which proposed docking the Skylab B to a Soviet Salyut space station. One such concept was International Skylab, which proposed launching the backup Skylab B space station for a mission that would see multiple visits by both Apollo and Soyuz crew vehicles. The ASTP was a great success, and further joint missions were also contemplated. This culminated in the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, the first docking of spacecraft from two different spacefaring nations. Axiom Orbital Segment) before being deorbited by a dedicated NASA spacecraft in January 2031.Īs the space race drew to a close in the early 1970s, the US and USSR began to contemplate a variety of potential collaborations in outer space. The ISS is expected to have additional modules (e.g. ![]() As of December 2023, 273 individuals from 21 countries have visited the space station. This also means that the ISS sustained the longest continuous human presence in space. The first long-term residents, Expedition 1, arrived on 2 November 2000, and since then the station has been occupied for 23 years and 65 days. The first ISS component was launched in 1998 and subsequent major modules were launched by Proton rockets, Soyuz rockets and Space Shuttles. The ISS programme was formed from prior plans to construct a permanently crewed Earth-orbiting station: the United States's Space Station Freedom and Soviet Union's Mir-2. The ISS maintains an orbit with an average altitude of 400 kilometres (250 mi) and circles the Earth in roughly 93 minutes, completing 15.5 orbits per day (meaning that it passes over a fixed point on earth approximately once every 90 minutes). Other spacecraft can dock to the station via its eight docking and berthing ports. These pressurized modules are further specialized based on their research, habitation, storage, spacecraft control and airlock functions. ![]() The most striking feature about the ISS is the Integrated Truss Structure, which connects the large solar panels and radiators to the pressurized modules. These agencies are: NASA ( United States), Roscosmos ( Russia), JAXA ( Japan), ESA ( Europe), and CSA ( Canada).įunctionally, the station is divided into two sections: the Russian Orbital Segment assembled by Roscosmos and the US Orbital Segment assembled by NASA, JAXA, ESA and CSA. As implied by its name, the International Space Station is a collaboration of five national space agencies and other contractors. The station resides in low Earth orbit and has a primary purpose of performing microgravity and space environment experiments. The International Space Station ( ISS) is the largest space station to have ever been built. ![]()
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