The question is: was this vast expenditure worth it? The station soaks up $4bn a year in maintenance costs and service flights. The final bill for constructing the ISS came to more than $100bn. For years, astronauts were preoccupied with constructing the station, and only relatively recently have they been able to concentrate on doing serious science, including running more than 3,000 experiments in collaboration with thousands of scientists on Earth. Assembly of the station began in 1998 and required more than 30 flights by US space shuttles and 40 by Russian rockets to take components and modules to the station before its completion in 2011. In the end, the two nations agreed on a plan for the ISS’s construction, with Canadian and Japanese space agencies also agreeing to join the project, along with the European Space Agency, of which the UK is a key member. So it sought to get them involved in a joint space programme so that it could keep them at home and give them some degree of input. “America wanted to prevent Soviet space experts from getting snapped up by rogue states as the USSR disintegrated. “It was also a highly pragmatic move by the United States,” said Professor Anu Ojha, a director of the National Space Centre, Leicester.
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Its space engineers had already gained considerable experience of long-term space missions with their own small orbiting Salyut stations and the much larger Mir station. However, forecasts of costs indicated these would be alarmingly high – until the collapse of the Soviet Union offered an opportunity to cooperate with Russia. Plans to build a permanent orbiting space station were first drawn up in the 1980s by Nasa. “That has been a critically important lesson for us.” “Running the International Space Station has shown us that human beings can make their homes away from their own planet in outer space, which is a truly hostile environment,” said astrobiologist Professor Charles Cockell of Edinburgh University. And these domestic details are important, scientists insist.
International space station purpose series#
More mundane aspects of station life have included guitar serenades by floating astronauts a piece of culinary history made by Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, who drank the first espresso made in outer space out of a zero-gravity mug and dealing with a series of broken toilets – “the part of the station which attracts most curiosity back on Earth, I discovered”, says Peake. You suddenly realise that what we put into that layer is really important.” “All of the gas that keeps us alive on Earth is trapped in that tiny, tiny layer. It is not endless,” he recalled in a BBC interview. “You can see the atmosphere, which is only 16km thick. Tim Peake, the only official British astronaut to make it to the ISS, was a particular fan of the Cupola, where, he says, he first looked at our planet and realised how fragile it is. 08:38 Why hasn't space tourism taken off? – video