The International Space Station Begins: Zarya, 1998
1998 · event
On 20 November 1998 a Proton rocket lifted off from Baikonur in Kazakhstan carrying a module named Zarya, which means sunrise. It was the first piece of the International Space Station. Two weeks later the space shuttle Endeavour delivered the American module Unity and the two were joined in orbit. Assembly continued for more than a decade, module by module, until the station reached the size of a football pitch and a mass of around four hundred tonnes.
The project brought together the United States, Russia, Japan, Canada and the member states of the European Space Agency, five agencies and fifteen countries whose engineers had to agree on standards, docking rings, languages and safety rules. It grew out of two separate national plans that had run out of money, and out of a political decision after the Cold War to build one station rather than two.
The first resident crew arrived in November 2000, and there have been people living aboard ever since, in a continuous human presence off the Earth that has now lasted longer than a quarter of a century. More than two hundred and seventy people from over twenty countries have visited. Thousands of experiments have been run in weightlessness, in medicine, materials, biology and physics, and the station has served as the practical school for long duration spaceflight.
The station is scheduled to be retired around 2030 and brought down safely over an empty stretch of ocean. Its most quoted achievement is not scientific. For more than two decades, through disputes and crises on the ground, the countries that built it have kept a laboratory running together in orbit, which is the plainest evidence available that large scale international cooperation can be sustained.