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Washington, November 1 (IANS) As astronauts celebrate Monday the 20th anniversary of continued human presence aboard the International Space Station (ISS), NASA said the orbiting laboratory has grown into a world-class research facility that has conducted thousands of investigations from over 100 different countries.
A Russian Soyuz rocket launched the Expedition One crew on October 31, 2000 and docked at the space station two days later.
When NASA Commander William Shepherd Expedition 1 crew, Soyuz flight engineer and commander Yuri Gidzenko of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, and Roscosmos flight engineer Sergei Krikalev reached the space station on 2 November 2020, it was a small orbiting complex of just three modules.
It has evolved into a vast research complex over the years and is now the size of a five-bedroom house.
The main parts of the space station were delivered on 42 assembly flights: 37 on US space shuttles and five on Russian Proton / Soyuz rockets.
The elements were built independently of each other around the world and assembled for the first time in space, NASA said, adding that the space station took 11 years to fully build.
The main space agencies are the US NASA, the Russian Roscomos, the ESA (European Space Agency), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).
NASA said about 250 scientific investigations are being conducted on the station at any given time and that an expedition astronaut’s usual stay aboard the orbiting laboratory is six months.
The space station serves as a test bed for innovative technologies such as waste plastic recycling and carbon dioxide filtration that are critical to the long-duration missions to the lunar surface in the Artemis program.
November 2 marks two decades of continuous human presence on the orbiting laboratory which includes 241 people in 64 crews.
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