LONDON: The International Space Station’s first three-man crew moved in on Nov. 2, 2000, 15 years ago Monday, the first of 45 expeditions to date that have logged a decade and a half of continuous human presence in low-Earth orbit.
Some 220 individuals have visited or lived aboard the sprawling laboratory complex to date, building the outpost piece by piece, working through complex research, enduring tragedies on Earth and celebrating hard-earned triumphs, all in the vacuum of space at an altitude of 250 miles and a velocity of 5 miles — more than 80 football fields — per second.
The numbers boggle the mind.
Building the station required 37 dedicated space shuttle flights to deliver the lab’s solar arrays and truss segments, nine U.S., Japanese and European pressurized modules, the station’s Canadian-built robot arm, science racks, experiment hardware, spare parts and myriad other components.
Russia launched two heavy-lift Proton rockets to deliver the Russian-built, NASA-financed Zarya storage and propulsion module and the Zvezda command module, launched a pair of airlock/docking modules aboard Soyuz boosters and built a third that was delivered aboard a space shuttle.
Equally important if not more so, the Russians have launched 44 Soyuz crew ferry craft to date, carrying 131 cosmonauts, astronauts and space tourists to the space station.
The steady stream of Soyuz spacecraft provided the transportation backbone that kept the outpost operational when the shuttle was grounded after the 2003 Columbia disaster. And in the wake of the shuttle fleet’s retirement in 2011, the Soyuz is the only vehicle currently able to carry crew members to and from the station, serving as a lifeboat between dockings and departures.
A cadre of 122 astronauts and cosmonauts representing nine nations has carried out 189 spacewalks to build and maintain the space station, logging 1,184 hours — 49.3 days — of EVA time. Another spacewalk, the 190th, is on tap Nov. 6. All told, station spacewalkers have logged seven times more than the 166 hours of spacewalk/moonwalk time spent by the Apollo astronauts during orbital test flights and moon missions.
