The International Space Station
A space station in low Earth orbit, run by five space agencies: NASA, Roscosmos, ESA, JAXA and CSA.
People have lived aboard without a break since November 2, 2000.
date in BaseKGdate sourced by us, not yet in BaseKG
Scroll, or use the timeline. Pictures open what the graph holds about them.
The first stations
The Soviet Union launched the first space station, Salyut 1, in 1971. Skylab, the first American station, followed in 1973.
The order of the chapters from here to the ISS is ours: nothing in BaseKG links these stations to one another or to it.
In the sample each is linked only as a space station.
Mir
Mir was the first modular station, assembled in orbit one piece at a time from 1986 to 1996.
It stayed in use until it was brought down in 2001.
Mir, too, is linked only as a space station.
Shuttles at Mir
From 1995 to 1998, American shuttles docked with Mir nine times.
The station that came next merged two plans: the American Space Station Freedom and the Soviet Mir-2.
The Shuttle and Space Station Freedom reach the station only through facts read from Wikipedia text.
The first two modules
The Russian-built Zarya module launched on November 20, 1998.
Two weeks later a shuttle brought up Unity, the first American module, and joined the two in orbit.
Built by partners
The partners added their own pieces: the American Destiny laboratory and Canada’s Canadarm2 in 2001, Europe’s Columbus and the first parts of Japan’s Kibō in 2008.
The Cupola, a room of seven windows, arrived in 2010.
A planned end
The station is expected to operate until the end of 2030.
NASA then plans to bring it down with a deorbit vehicle built by SpaceX.
BaseKG records nothing about the station’s planned end.
What the graph holds
Everything above rests on one small neighborhood of BaseKG: the International Space Station and what it links to, one hop.
The sample this story sits in holds 899 of BaseKG's 1,063,614 entities, and 1,507 of its 6,905,330 facts.
The grid is the whole graph, one dot for every 899 entities. The lit dot is the size of this sample.
Lines are the facts in the sample. A date in a solid outline is BaseKG's; a dashed one is ours, from the sources below, because the graph does not carry it.
Events and dates: Wikipedia articles on the International Space Station, Salyut 1, Skylab, Mir, the Shuttle–Mir program and the station’s modules
Images via Wikimedia Commons, public domain unless marked: