A 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. It lacks major propulsion or landing systems. An orbital station or an orbital space station is an artificial satellite (i.e., a type of orbital spaceflight). Stations must have docking ports to allow other spacecraft to dock to transfer crew and supplies. The purpose of maintaining an orbital outpost varies depending on the program. Space stations have most often been launched for scientific purposes, but military launches have also occurred.
Space stations have harboured so far the only long-duration direct human presence in space. After the first station, Salyut 1 (1971), and the deaths of its Soyuz 11 crew, space stations have been operated consecutively since Skylab (1973), having allowed a progression of long-duration direct human presence in space. Stations have been occupied by consecutive crews since 1987 with the Salyut successor Mir. Uninterrupted occupation of stations has been achieved since the operational transition from the Mir to the ISS, with its first occupation in 2000.
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. On May 30, 2023 there were 11 people on the ISS and 6 on the China's Tiangong, making 17 people in orbit, record number as of 2023.
As of , there are two fully operational space stations in low Earth orbit (LEO) – the International Space Station (ISS) and China's Tiangong Space Station (TSS). The ISS has been permanently inhabited since October 2000 with the Expedition 1 crews and the TSS began continuous inhabitation with the Shenzhou 14 crews in June 2022. These stations are 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.
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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ˈnæsə) is an independent agency of the U.S. federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. Established in 1958, NASA succeeded the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) to give the U.S. space development effort a distinctly civilian orientation, emphasizing peaceful applications in space science.
Skylab was the first United States space station, launched by NASA, occupied for about 24 weeks between May 1973 and February 1974. It was operated by three separate three-astronaut crews: Skylab 2, Skylab 3, and Skylab 4. Major operations included an orbital workshop, a solar observatory, Earth observation, and hundreds of experiments. Unable to be re-boosted by the Space Shuttle, which was not ready until 1981, Skylab's orbit eventually decayed, and it disintegrated in the atmosphere on July 11, 1979, scattering debris across the Indian Ocean and Western Australia.
Mir (Мир, ˈmjir; peace) was a space station that operated in low Earth orbit from 1986 to 2001, operated by the Soviet Union and later by Russia. Mir was the first modular space station and was assembled in orbit from 1986 to 1996. It had a greater mass than any previous spacecraft. At the time it was the largest artificial satellite in orbit, succeeded by the International Space Station (ISS) after Mir's orbit decayed.
This course is a "concepts" course. It introduces a variety of concepts in use in the design of a space mission, manned or unmanned, and in space operations. it is partly based on the practical space
The objective of the course is to present with different viewpoints, the lessons learned which lead to the decisions in the space exploration and their consequences today and for the decades to come.
The New Space Economy is a fast-growing market, driven by the commercialization of the historical institutional space sector. This course contains more than 30 videos-lectures from space experts from
The New Space Economy is a fast-growing market, driven by the commercialization of the historical institutional space sector. This course contains more than 30 videos-lectures from space experts from
Delves into the history of space conquest, exploring the Soviet and American space programs, the Moon race, and the Soviet & Russian space stations programs.
Data-driven approaches have been applied to reduce the cost of accurate computational studies on materials, by using only a small number of expensive reference electronic structure calculations for a representative subset of the materials space, and using ...
EPFL2024
The High Energy cosmic-Radiation Detection facility (HERD) is a calorimetric experiment planned to be launched in 2027. It will be operational for at least 10 years on board the China Space Station. With HERD we will measure the energy flux of cosmic proto ...
In recent years a strong effort has been made to investigate disruption avoidance schemes in order to aid the development of integrated operational scenarios for ITER. Within the EUROfusion programme the disruptive H-mode density limit (HDL) has been studi ...