![]() However, it soon became clear that the cost of using expendable rockets to boost people and supplies to orbit would dwarf the cost of building the station itself. The original plan was to put a 100-person station called Space Base in low Earth orbit. But it wasn’t until it had boot prints on the moon that the idea was really taken seriously. NASA had wanted a space station ever since it started sending people to space in the late 50s. Even so, the station is more than a technical marvel it is a triumph of diplomacy and an unprecedented experiment in the use of science and technology as instruments of soft power. The geopolitical tensions of the last century are baked into the very architecture of the station, which is arguably best described as two stations - one Russian, one American - that are attached at the hip. The ISS was shaped by the politics of the Cold War, and the difficult decisions made by statesmen, soldiers, and NASA officials, when there were still astronauts bouncing around on the moon. The station is a paragon of space-age cosmopolitanism, but this enduring international cooperation was hard-won. Over the past two decades, 240 people from 19 countries have stayed in the world’s premiere orbital laboratory. The moment began a permanent human presence in space. On November 2, 2000, astronaut Bill Shepherd and cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev arrived at the International Space Station. This article was originally published on Supercluster, a website dedicated to telling humanity's greatest outer space stories.
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