Space stations went from one-shot cans to orbiting building sets
Someone has been living in orbit without a break since October 2000. That streak rests on an idea the Soviets proved in the 1970s and 1980s: instead of launching a sealed can and abandoning it when supplies run out, build a station from docking modules and keep ferrying up crews and cargo.
The notion began as fiction, with Edward Everett Hale's 1869 story The Brick Moon. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Hermann Oberth later gave it scientific footing, and in 1929 Herman Potočnik pictured a spinning wheel whose rotation would supply artificial gravity, an image Wernher von Braun popularised in 1951. No rotating station has ever been built. Before any station could work, crews had to learn to meet in orbit: Gemini 6 and 7 held a rendezvous in 1965, Neil Armstrong made the first docking on Gemini 8 in 1966, and Apollo 9 first moved astronauts between joined craft through an internal hatch in 1969.
The Soviet Union launched Salyut 1, the first station, on 19 April 1971; some later Salyuts were secretly military Almaz stations. These early stations were monolithic, carried up whole with all their supplies. Salyut 6 and 7 changed the game by adding a second docking port, so fresh Soyuz ferries and uncrewed Progress freighters could arrive while a crew stayed aboard. America's Skylab, in orbit from 1973 to 1979, had a second port too but never used it.
Mir took the next step, launching a core and adding specialised modules over time, which avoided the need for one giant rocket. The International Space Station follows that pattern. Its first module, Zarya, went up in 1998. Russian modules can fly to it and dock by themselves, while American ones rode the Space Shuttle and were bolted on by spacewalking crews, so that half must eventually be brought down as one mass. An inflatable room, delivered folded in 2016 and blown up to 16 cubic metres, was still in use years after its planned two-year life.
China now runs the second active station, Tiangong, whose name means heavenly palace. Completed in November 2022, it holds up to six people. On 30 May 2023 a record 17 people were aboard stations at the same time, 11 on the ISS and six on Tiangong.
Source: Space station
