International Space Station

Countries involved

The ISS is a joint project of the US space agency NASA, the Russian space agency Roskosmos, the European space agency ESA and the space agencies of Canada CSA and Japan JAXA. In Europe, the countries involved are Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. In 1998, an agreement was signed for the construction of the space station.

Brazil has a separate agreement with the USA on the use of the ISS. The People's Republic of China expressed its desire to participate in the ISS, but failed due to the veto of the US and has since operated two space stations of its own (a third is under construction).

Agreement among the Participating States in the International Space Station Program, signed January 28, 1998.

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The first initiatives for a permanently inhabited station in space came up at NASA very early on. At the beginning of the 1960s, long before the first moon landing, a space station was envisaged that would be inhabited by around ten to twenty people. After the completion of the Apollo program, the construction of space stations became more concrete in order not to lose touch with the Soviet Union, which had launched its first space station, Salyut 1, in 1971. So in 1973 the US-American station Skylab was launched, which was inhabited for a total of 171 days. After that, however, the Americans turned their attention to the development of the Space Shuttle, while the Soviet Union launched six more Salyut stations and, above all, the modular Mir space station, gaining extensive experience with long-term stays in space.

After the first flight of the Space Shuttle in 1981, the concept of a space station came back into focus because, according to NASA strategists, it was the next logical step in space travel. In May 1982, the Space Station Task Force was created at NASA headquarters. In January 1984, then U.S. President Ronald Reagan, echoing Kennedy's call for a moon landing, announced it was the national goal to build a permanently manned space station within a decade. The cost of such a station was estimated at eight billion US dollars at the time. A year later, it was decided to build the station together with international partners. ESA, Canada and Japan then joined the project. In 1988, the planned station was named Freedom by Reagan.

After the end of the Cold War, closer cooperation between NASA and Russia became possible. The original Freedom project was shortened because the costs of the planned space station exploded and renamed Space Station Alpha. In 1993, Russia and the U.S. signed an agreement for ten shuttle flights to the Russian space station Mir, as well as long-term stays for some U.S. astronauts on Mir, later known as the Shuttle-Mir program. NASA paid $400 million for this. This marked the first cooperation between the two space powers since the Apollo-Soyuz test project in 1975.

Under US President Bill Clinton, the project of a large space station was then relaunched in November 1993 together with Russia; Russia contributed the plans of the planned Mir-2 station. On the US side, the name Alpha was proposed, but Russia rejected it because the Mir station was the first modular space station - Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. By 1998, 13 other countries had joined the project: eleven of the ESA countries (the UK was a co-signatory to the contract but later dropped out), Japan and Canada. In addition, in October 1997, Brazil signed a separate agreement with the United States for the use of the space station, which is now called the International Space Station (ISS). The following year, construction of the station began with the launch of the Russian cargo and propulsion module Sarja (Sunrise).