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This is an unprecedented space series: for 25 years people have been living off the planet without stopping for a moment.
International Space Station This weekend marks a quarter-century of continuous stays, with a guest list of about 300 — mostly professional astronauts, but also occasionally including space tourists and film directors. The first full-time residents opened the hatch on 2 November 2000.
With only five years left on the scientific outpost, NASA is counting on private companies to launch their own orbiting stations with even larger and broader customers.
Here’s a look at what’s happened and what’s next:
first astronaut of the space station
NASA’s Bill Shepard and Russia’s Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko flew. Russian Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan on October 31, 2000. They arrived at the dark, humid, three-room station two days later and spent nearly five months on the ship, making the place not only functional but hospitable.
Shepherd, a former Navy SEAL who retired in 2002, serves on a space station advisory committee with Krikalev, now a high-ranking Russian space official.
While relations between the US and Russia are “pretty bad” on a national level, “from person to person and even from space agency to space agency, they’re actually quite good,” Shepherd told The Associated Press.
290 visitors and counting
According to NASA calculations, 290 people from 26 countries have visited the space station. Seven are there now, representing the US, Russia and Japan.
Most visitors have flown in as a courtesy to their homeland.
The first person to pay his own way – California businessman Dennis Tito – started with the Russians in 2001, over NASA’s objections. Starved for cash, Russia continued to fly private clients, including Russian film crews, in 2021.
NASA is now embracing space tourism and inviting private crews for two-week stays. A few months ago, the first astronauts in decades from India, Poland and Hungary arrived at the station, along with the station’s first female commander, Peggy Whitson. ,space Brings people together,” she said.
hang up call to space station
The operation may seem easy and boring as astronauts come and go, but “there’s nothing routine about it,” former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a recent presentation.
Among the more serious stumbles: the near-drowning of an astronaut, a docking that sent the station into a wild spin, persistent cracks and air leaks, and the ever-growing threat of space junk.
Shepherd is surprised that it is still going strong. “The fact is that in many things it has more than double its design life,” he said.
touch of home
Life on the space station has greatly improved since Shepard and his crew hardened it.
“It is now a four-star hotel,” he said. “You couldn’t ask for better accommodations, at least in space.”
Now the size of a football field with several laboratories, the station features an Internet phone for the astronauts’ personal use and a glassed-in cupola or cupola for key views and displays of Earth.
Canadian guitar-playing astronaut Chris Hadfield famously performed David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and other tunes from that perch more than a decade ago.
The experimental hothouse also added color and zip, yielding chili peppers and zinnias. An espresso machine also got a brief test, as did a cookie-baking oven. But there are still no showers or laundry facilities – only sponge baths, in which dirty clothes are thrown away rather than washed.
ups and downs of station life
Astronauts have gotten married and welcomed newborn children while serving on the space station. One of the new space dads — Mike Finke — is at it again, more than 20 years after dialing in from orbit to his wife’s delivery room.
Station residents have also faced a heart-wrenching situation. An astronaut’s mother died in a car accident in 2007. And in 2011, scott kelly He was in the middle of a five-month stay when his sister-in-law, US Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, was shot in the head and survived.
Others have faced delayed returns, the most recent and extreme case involving stranded astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. Their planned week-long test flight of Boeing’s new Starliner capsule turned into a station stay of more than nine months, with NASA switching to SpaceX for the return trip.
science in zero gravity
Thousands of experiments have been conducted, many of which have been conducted on astronauts themselves. Several years ago, the urgency of medical tests increased when an astronaut was diagnosed with a blood clot in a vein in his neck. Doctors monitored the treatment from a distance until the patient returned home safely.
NASA also began a study on twins with the Kelly brothers. Scott Kelly participated in NASA’s first year-long expedition in 2015 and 2016, and compared his body to Mark’s identical twin on the ground. mark kelly Also contributed to astronomy, leading a shuttle mission to deliver and install the Cosmic Particle Detector. Upgrades are planned for next year.
SpaceX will handle the decommissioning of the station.
NASA is paying SpaceX about $1 billion to boot the space station from orbit as early as 2031. The company will launch a heavy-duty capsule to dock with the station and take it for a fiery reentry across the Pacific.
Before that happens, Axiom Space will remove the module it plans to send to the station. That free-flying module will form the nucleus of Axiom’s own space station. Other companies are working on their own concepts.
NASA wants to avoid interoperability between the International Space Station and its successors, while preserving America’s continued human presence in orbit.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. AP is solely responsible for all content.