Chapter 2

The International Space Station, an extraordinary feat of the cooperation of nations and advancement of space technology, was the ninth habitable artificial satellite to be blasted into Earth’s orbit by mankind. Like Mir, a Russian space station whose fifteen-year life ended so the ISS’s could begin, it was built as a modular, modifiable unit, originally as a joint effort between the Russian Federal Space Agency, NASA and the European Space Agency. Since the first components were launched bac...