The civilian stations Salyut 6 and Salyut 7 were built with two docking ports, which allowed a second crew to visit, bringing a new spacecraft with them the Soyuz ferry could spend 90 days in space, at which point it needed to be replaced by a fresh Soyuz spacecraft. The military stations, Salyut 2, Salyut 3, and Salyut 5, were also known as Almaz stations. The early Soviet stations were all designated 'Salyut', but among these there were two distinct types: civilian and military. The first space station was Salyut 1, which was launched by the Soviet Union on April 19, 1971. After the supplies had been used up, the station was abandoned. A crew would then be launched to join the station and perform research. Salyut, Almaz and Skylab Įarly stations were monolithic designs that were constructed and launched in one piece, generally containing all their supplies and experimental equipment. However, development of a rotating station was never begun in the 20th century. In 1951, Wernher von Braun published a concept for a rotating wheel space station in Collier's Weekly, referencing Potočnik's idea. Conceptualized during the Second World War, the ' sun gun' was a theoretical orbital weapon orbiting Earth at a height of 8,200 kilometres (5,100 mi). In 1929 Herman Potočnik's The Problem of Space Travel was published, the first to envision a 'rotating wheel' space station to create artificial gravity. The first to give serious, scientifically grounded consideration to space stations were Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Hermann Oberth about two decades apart in the early 20th century. The first mention of anything resembling a space station occurred in Edward Everett Hale's 1869 ' The Brick Moon'. The last military-use space station was the Soviet Salyut 5, which was launched under the Almaz program and orbited between 19. As of 2021, four cosmonauts have completed single missions of over a year, all aboard Mir.

The duration record for a single spaceflight is 437.75 days, set by Valeri Polyakov aboard Mir from 1994 to 1995. Starting with the ill-fated flight of the Soyuz 11 crew to Salyut 1, all recent human spaceflight duration records have been set aboard space stations. There have been numerous decommissioned space stations, including USSR's Salyuts, Russia's Mir, NASA's Skylab, and China's Tiangong 1 and 2. India has also proposed to build a space station in the coming decades. China's Tiangong Space Station is scheduled to finish its phase 1 construction by the end of 2022 with the addition of two lab modules. The ISS is used to study the effects of spaceflight on the human body, as well as to provide a location to conduct a greater number and longer length of scientific studies than is possible on other space vehicles. While the ISS has been permanently inhabited since October 2000 with the Expedition 1 crews, the TSS will do so with the Shenzhou 14 crews in June 2022. The ISS has hosted the highest number of people in orbit at the same time, reaching 13 for the first time during the eleven day docking of STS-127 in 2009.Īs of 2022, there are two fully operational space stations in low Earth orbit (LEO) – the International Space Station (ISS) and China's Tiangong Space Station (TSS). Uninterrupted occupation of stations has been achieved since the operational transition from the Mir to the ISS, with its first occupation in 2000. Stations have been occupied by consecutive crews since 1987 with the Salyut successor Mir. After the first station Salyut 1 (1971) and its tragic Soyuz 11 crew, space stations have been operated consecutively since Skylab (1973), having allowed a progression of long-duration direct human presence in space.

Space stations have harboured so far the only long-duration direct human presence in space. Space stations have most often been launched for scientific purposes, but military launches have also occurred. The purpose of maintaining an orbital outpost varies depending on the program. Stations must have docking ports to allow other spacecraft to dock to transfer crew and supplies. An orbital station or an orbital space station is an artificial satellite (i.e. It lacks major propulsion or landing systems. Note that stations have different depths not shown by silhouettes.Ī space station is a spacecraft capable of supporting a human crew in orbit for an extended period of time, and is therefore a type of space habitat. Solar panels in blue, heat radiators in red. Size comparisons between current and past space stations as they appeared most recently.

A day in space station