NASA celebrates 25 years of ISS operation with a 24-hour telephone ceremony at Deutsche Bahn starting Thursday evening

The American space agency NASA celebrated the 25th anniversary of the start of work on the International Space Station (ISS) with a telephone ceremony. NASA’s deputy chief Bob Cabana and ISS program chief Joel Montalbano spoke for about half an hour on the phone Wednesday with the astronauts and cosmonauts currently stationed on the ISS: seven men and women from the U.S., Denmark, Japan and Russia.

Exactly 25 years ago on Wednesday (December 6), the first two modules, “Unity” and “Sarja” (Dawn), were connected. The Russian module “Zarya” had been launched into space about three weeks earlier. The current deputy head of NASA, Cabana, was the first American to enter the ISS. “I can’t believe it’s been 25 years today since we picked up ‘Sarja’ and merged it with ‘Unity’. Absolutely fantastic,” he said during the telephone ceremony.

Since then, humanity’s outpost has orbited the Earth sixteen times a day, at a distance of about 400 kilometers. The ISS is a joint project of the space agencies of Russia, Canada, Japan, Europe and the US – launched, among other things, as an international understanding project after the end of the Cold War.

After connecting the first two modules, it continued to grow and is now about the size of a football field, a kind of 450-ton house with six bedrooms, two bathrooms, a gym and a panoramic window.

Astronauts have been continuously conducting research in this space laboratory since 2000. Matthias Maurer was the last German to be there from 2021 to 2022. The total costs have been well over $100 billion for some time now.

Despite maintenance, renovation and adjustments, the ISS technology is no longer state-of-the-art and there are always reports of damage, errors, leaks and other problems. Moreover, the current global political situation does not make piloting the ISS any easier. The ISS is one of the few objects on which Americans and Russians are still working together after the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine broke out at the end of February 2022.

The ISS could continue to operate together until about the end of this decade; there is broad agreement on this. She could then dive into the Pacific Ocean in a controlled manner. (sda/dpa)