How to live in space: what we’ve learned from 20 years of the International Space Station

21.08.2023 - 11:43 / theunconventionalgardener.com / guest

Header image: NASA / Tracy Caldwell Dyson

Words by Alice Gorman, Flinders University and Justin St. P. Walsh, Chapman University

November 2 marked 20 years since the first residents arrived on the International Space Station (ISS). The orbiting habitat has been continuously occupied ever since.

Twenty straight years of life in space makes the ISS the ideal “natural laboratory” to understand how societies function beyond Earth.

The ISS is a collaboration between 25 space agencies and organisations. It has hosted 241 crew and a few tourists from 19 countries. This is 43% of all the people who have ever travelled in space.

Read more: Explainer: the International Space Station

As future missions to the Moon and Mars are planned, it’s important to know what people need to thrive in remote, dangerous and enclosed environments, where there is no easy way back home.

The first fictional space station was Edward Everett Hale’s 1869 “Brick Moon”. Inside were 13 spherical living chambers.

In 1929, Hermann Noordung theorised a wheel-shaped space station that would spin to create “artificial” gravity. The spinning wheel was championed by rocket scientist Wernher von Braun in the 1950s and featured in the classic 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Instead of spheres or wheels, real space stations turned out to be cylinders.

The first space station was the USSR’s Salyut 1 in 1971, followed by another six stations in the Salyut programme over the next decade. The USA launched its first space station, Skylab, in 1973. All of these were tube-shaped structures.

The Soviet station Mir, launched in 1986, was the first to be built with a core to which other modules were added later. Mir was still in orbit when the first modules of the International Space