Astronauts on the International Space Station will rejoice 25 years of their vehicle in orbit on Wednesday (Dec. 6), and you’ll be able to watch the event live.
The six astronauts of the International Space Station (ISS) Expedition 70 crew will mark the twenty fifth anniversary of the Russian Zarya and U.S. Unity modules meeting up Dec. 6, 1998. You’ll be able to watch the event live here at Space.com, via NASA Television, at 12:25 p.m. EST (1725 GMT).
The Expedition 70 astronauts include commander Andreas Mogensen (European Space Agency), Jasmin Moghbeli (NASA), Satoshi Furukawa (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), Loral O’Hara (NASA) and Russian cosmonauts Konstantin Borisov, Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub. The crew, by coincidence, represents all the most important ISS partners on the orbiting complex.
The Zarya module blasted to space by itself on Nov. 20 1998, using a Russian Proton rocket launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Unity got here to space on board the STS-88 space shuttle Endeavour mission that launched on Dec. 4, 1998.
The commander of STS-88, Bob Cabana, may also join the event in his current role as NASA’s associate administrator alongside Joel Montalbano, ISS program manager. Cabana was also the primary American to enter the ISS, NASA officials said in a release in regards to the anniversary event.
Related: Track the ISS: How and where to see it
The ISS has greatly expanded from its two-room origins right into a six-bedroom complex that has hosted 273 individuals from 21 countries, in response to NASA statistics. The complex has had nearly 270 spacewalks servicing or assembling the space station, including 198 on the U.S. side and 71 on the Russian side. Crews typically complete a whole lot of experiments during missions that may last between six months and 12 months at a time.
Along with the station itself, the vehicles serving the ISS have modified loads within the last quarter-century. The early days used the space shuttle and Russian Soyuz for crews, alongside government cargo vehicles from Russia, Japan and Europe. The space shuttle retired in 2011, and for nearly a decade, Soyuz was the exclusive ride to the space station. Soyuz continues to launch all Russian crews today, alongside some U.S. astronauts under an agreement with NASA.
Today, private SpaceX Dragon and Northrop Grumman cargo ships resupply the space station. U.S. firms even have two vehicles on offer for astronauts: SpaceX’s Crew Dragon (in service since 2020) and Boeing‘s Starliner (expected to run its first mission with astronauts in 2024.) Meanwhile, Axiom Space is running independent private missions to the space station for industrial purposes, using paying customers to pay for seats.
The ISS also goals to fly a various set of people in space, and has celebrated quite a few societal milestones within the last five years. A number of include the first all-woman spacewalk in 2019, the primary long-duration missions by a Black man (NASA astronaut Victor Glover) and Black woman (NASA’s Jessica Watkins) and the primary long-duration mission by a Native American woman (NASA’s Nicole Mann).
Also, this yr Hispanic-American Frank Rubio unintentionally set the record for longest NASA mission in space, 371 days, following a difficulty together with his Soyuz spacecraft that doubled his stay in orbit. Astronauts from several countries outside the U.S. have set their very own records for spacewalking, space station commands, long-duration missions and similar milestones, too.
Most partners of the ISS have committed to extending the partnership until no less than 2030, and NASA has committed to funding several private space stations to maintain a presence in low Earth orbit in the following decade. Russia will remain with the ISS until no less than 2028, even though it could also be longer. (The ISS is one in every of Russia’s few remaining space partnerships internationally after its unsanctioned invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which is ongoing.)
The moon is the brand new focus of the ISS partners. NASA has formed the Artemis Accords, a coalition of greater than 30 countries which are aiming for peaceful space exploration together; a couple of of those partners are also working on moon missions with the NASA-led Artemis program. Russia has allied with China, and a couple of other countries, by itself moon-facing alliance in the approaching years.