The International Space Station, which celebrates its 15th birthday today, has had an interesting year in orbit—and in fiction. Astronaut Chris Hadfield turned it into his recording studio. The first private spacecraft reached the station, signaling the dawn of a new era in orbit. And in the film Gravity, a fictional barrage of space junk tore the ISS apart.
The anniversary of the November 1998 space shuttle mission that carried the first components of ISS into orbit is a good time to hop on the Wayback Machine, as the pages of Popular Mechanics are a window into the station's birth and controversial life. Back in 1994 then-Vice President Al Gore hopefully outlined the future of the American space program, including what was then just an agreement with Russia, Canada, Japan, and Europe on an international space station. With the Cold War recently concluded, it seemed like a new era of cooperation in space was beginning. But soon the challenge of maintaining a human habitat in space became clear.
In 1996, for example, PopMech covered the challenge of protecting the ISS from the threat of space junk. While there has been no Gravity-style onslaught of debris that has debilitated the station, during the ISS life span we have seen multiple instances in which ISS astronauts have taken shelter or NASA moved the station because it knew space junk would be making a close flyby.
By 2002, just a couple of years after the station's first human inhabitants arrived, major scientific groups were already decrying the station's technical glitches and questioning whether it even had much scientific value. The next year, while outlining his vision for space exploration in PM, Buzz Aldrin recommended building a six-person crew-return module so that a crew of a half-dozen could inhabit ISS. His thinking: Since station upkeep requires a lot of man-hours, putting more people in orbit would mean accomplishing more science. It never happened. The space shuttle did resume flying following the Columbia disaster that sparked that article until its 2011 retirement, but the permanent human crew of the station is still three in number.
Still, over the past decade and a half, astronauts have conducted countless experiments in a sustained microgravity environment that just can't be duplicated on Earth. And in a recent interview with me, astronaut Hadfield (admittedly biased as an ISS inhabitant and one-time commander) stressed what a remarkable achievement it is simply to have maintained a human habitat in space for so long. NASA and its partners, he argues, solved myriad little problems with keeping people alive off-Earth for months at a time—problems that couldn't have been anticipated. Their solutions will make future long-term manned missions to the moon, Mars, or an asteroid possible.
And while the ISS was born of a new, post–Cold War era of international cooperation in space, the station is now the focal point of another revolution: the rise of private space. Unmanned vehicles built by SpaceX and Orbital Sciences have now visited the ISS, their first major orbital milestone on the path to replacing the space shuttle for ferrying cargo, and eventually humans, to orbit.
As of now the ISS partners have discussed extending the station's life through 2020 and perhaps even 2028. If so, the ISS would endure to see its 30th birthday. We hope it stays up there as long as possible. After all, we've been there. In 2001 PopMech declared itself the first magazine in space (and "the official magazine of the universe") after we sent a copy up to the ISS.