Twenty years living in the International Space Station
Expedition 1 began sending permanent human missions to the International Space Station in the year 2000
This November 2 marks 20 years of uninterrupted human presence on the International Space Station, with the arrival in 2000 of Expedition 1, the first long-term in the complex.
The expedition crew consisted of an American commander and two Russian crew members. Commander William Shepherd had been in space three times before on shuttle missions lasting up to a week. The Russians Yuri Guidzenko and Sergei Krikaliov had long-term spaceflight experience in Mir; Krikaliov spent about a full year in space.
The start of the expedition came when the crew docked at the station on November 2, 2000 aboard the Russian Soyuz TM-31 spacecraft, which had departed two days earlier. During the 136 days of the mission, the Expedition 1 crew activated various systems at the station, unpacked equipment that had been shipped, and accommodated three STS shuttle crews and two Russian Progress unmanned refueling vehicles. The astronauts were very busy during the mission, which was declared a success, according to Wikipedia.
The three visiting shuttles brought equipment, supplies and key components to the space station. The first of them, STS-97, was docked in early December 2000 and brought the first pair of large US-made photovoltaic panels, increasing the power capacity of the cells five times.
Source: dpa
