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International Space Station turns 15 years old today

Happy 15th Birthday to the International Space Station!

On November 20th, 1998, the Russian Space Agency launched Zarya (meaning 'sunrise') into low-Earth orbit. This 12.6-metre-long spacecraft was the very first module of the International Space Station, acting as the station's base for the first two years as it was built.

Now, 15 years and 115 spaceflights later, the station is very different — longer and wider than an American football field, when you count all the solar panels and modules together, and larger than a six-bedroom house. All together, the station has cost somewhere around $150 billion, supposedly making it the most expensive thing ever built. Putting the station together and keeping it running has involved the cooperation of five space agencies and 16 different nations, over a period of 15 years, and currently over 200 people from 15 different countries around the world have visited the station. NASA has a great infographic on their website you can check out (click here) and they also have an excellent interactive tour of the stations various components (click here).

This brief video from NASA shows how the station's components were assembled, organized and reorganized over the years:

The news we hear from the ISS is mostly about crew changes, spacewalks, and if anything strange happens, and we're supplied with a fairly regular stream of images and videos from the station's crew. However, what we don't hear about very often is the science that's being done there. The ISS is primarily a science platform, with roughly 200 different experiments being conducted on the station at any one time. Its three science lab modules — Destiny from NASA, Columbus from the ESA and Kibo from JAXA — study everything from how microgravity affects biology (from microbes up to humans), to how fluids flow, materials behave and crystals grow, and even things like how fire burns in zero-g.

Not all of the science done there is about space or space exploration, though. Plenty of it has very important applications right here on Earth. One of the best examples was Microflow 1, a portable medical 'scanner', developed here in Canada, that can help doctors in very remote parts of the world diagnose illnesses with greater accuracy. Since the ISS is about the most remote place that humans live right now, it was a perfect place to test the device.

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The International Space Station is an incredible achievement for us as a species. We're sure to surpass it in the next decade or two, with all the plans being made to set up a colony on Mars, but with the ISS we already have a permanent inhabited outpost in space. The crews may change every six months or so, but the station has been continuously inhabited for over 13 years now! We're not up to the level of sci-fi just yet, but that's an amazing accomplishment.

So, wish the ISS a happy 15th today, and you can join in on the conversation on Twitter by checking out the hashtag #ISS15.

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