![]() ![]() NASA now spends about $3 billion a year to operate and maintain the complex, and the agency wants to keep the station going through 2024 and possibly longer. taxpayers more than $100 billion over three decades, including shuttle assembly flights, making it one of the most expensive engineering and science projects in human history. Credit: NASAĭepending on how one does the math, the International Space Station cost U.S. Expedition 1 commander Bill Shepherd, a former Navy SEAL, is flanked by Russian cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko (left) and Sergei Krikalev (right) aboard the International Space Station in December 2000. The station has a total pressurized volume equal to a 747 jumbo jet and a useable volume roughly equal to a five-bedroom house. More than 350,000 sensors feed data to scores of computers running millions of lines of code. ![]() The NASA-supplied solar arrays have a surface area of 38,400 square feet, enough to cover eight basketball courts, generate 84 kilowatts of power and are tied into more than 8 miles of wiring threaded throughout the complex. The resulting space station, after a final shuttle visit in 2011, has a mass of nearly 925,000 pounds, roughly equivalent to 320 automobiles, a spine of pressurized modules stretching 167 feet and a huge solar array truss mounted at right angles that extends 375 feet, longer than a U.S. The European Space Agency contributed five Automated Transfer Vehicle - ATV - cargo ships before the program was phased out last year. companies, SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corp., have launched 12 supply spacecraft, including two failures. Japan has launched five of its large HTV supply ships and two U.S. To deliver the supplies, equipment and research gear needed to support station operations, Russia has launched 61 robotic Progress supply ships to date, including two launch failures. 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. Another spacewalk, the 190th, is on tap Nov. 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.Ī 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. 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. 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.Įqually 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. 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.īuilding 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. ![]() 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. The International Space Station’s first three-man crew moved in on Nov. STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION The International Space Station, seen here through the window of space shuttle Endeavour in 2011, is the largest spacecraft ever to fly in space. ![]()
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