On October 31, 2000, three astronauts from the United States and Russia blasted off from Kazakhstan on a two-day flight into space. Their destination: a 109 metre-long floating station perched above the Earth.
This Expedition 1 crew’s job was to bring the new International Space Station (ISS) to life by doing something no one had done before: spend four months in orbit assembling life support and communications systems needed for a long-term stay in space.
In the last 25 years, the ISS has seen over 290 people from 26 countries visit the space station. Most have been professional astronauts, but sometimes, space tourists and even movie directors have paid a visit.
The space laboratory has hosted more than 4,000 experiments from over 5,000 researchers from 110 countries, according to the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the American space agency.
It’s also the main training ground for deep space missions. Astronauts are using it to prepare for the upcoming Artemis missions, which will bring humans back to the Moon’s surface for the first time in more than 50 years – and if
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