Space travel - Nasa celebrates 25 years of ISS operation with a telephone ceremony
The US space agency Nasa celebrated the 25th anniversary of the start of work on the International Space Station (ISS) with a telephone ceremony. Nasa Deputy Chief Bob Cabana and ISS Program Manager Joel Montalbano spent around half an hour on the phone on Wednesday with the astronauts and cosmonauts currently stationed on the ISS - seven men and women from the USA, Denmark, Japan and Russia.
The first two modules, "Unity" and "Zarya", were connected exactly 25 years ago on Wednesday (December 6). The Russian module "Zarya" had been launched into space around three weeks earlier. The current deputy head of Nasa, Cabana, was the first American to enter the ISS at the time. "I can't believe it was 25 years ago today that we grabbed Zarya and brought it together with Unity. Absolutely fantastic," he said during the telephone ceremony.
Since then, the human outpost has been orbiting the Earth 16 times a day at a distance of around 400 kilometers. The ISS is a joint project of the space agencies of Russia, Canada, Japan, Europe and the USA - created, among other things, as an international understanding project after the end of the Cold War.
Research has been carried out on the ISS without interruption since 2000
After the first two modules were connected, it grew more and more and is now about the size of a soccer pitch, a kind of 450-ton house with six bedrooms, two bathrooms, a gym and a panoramic window.
Space travelers have been conducting research in this space laboratory without interruption since 2000. Matthias Maurer was the last German to be there from 2021 to 2022. The total costs have long been well over 100 billion dollars.
Despite maintenance, renovation and retrofitting, the ISS technology is no longer state of the art. There are constant reports of damage, faults, leaks and other problems. In addition, the current global political situation is not exactly making the operation of the ISS any easier. The ISS is one of the few objects where the Americans and Russians are still working together after the outbreak of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine at the end of February 2022.
There is a broad consensus that the ISS could still be operated jointly until the end of the decade. After that, it could crash into the Pacific in a controlled manner.
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Source: www.stern.de
