International Space Station

The **International Space Station** (**ISS**) is a space station, a very large satellite that people can live in for several months at a time. It was put together in Low Earth orbit up until 2011, but other bits have been added since then. The last part, Nauka was added in 2021. The station is a joint project among several areas of the world: the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada. Other nations such as Brazil, Italy, and China also work with the ISS through cooperation with other countries.

The building of the ISS began in 1998, when Russian and American space modules were joined together.

## Origin 
In the early 1980s, NASA planned Space Station Freedom as a  to the Soviet Salyut and Mir space stations. It was only planned and never built. With the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, it was cancelled. The end of the Space Race prompted the U.S. administration officials to start negotiations with international partners Europe, Russia, Japan and Canada in the early 1990s in order to build a truly international space station. This project was first announced in 1993 and was called Space Station Alpha. It was planned to combine the proposed space stations of all participating space agencies: NASA's Space Station Freedom, Russia's Mir-2 (the successor to the Mir Space Station, the core of which is now Zvezda) and ESA's Columbus that was planned to be a stand-alone space laboratory.

## Manufacturing 
The ISS components was manufactured in various factories all over the world, and were all shipped into the Space Station Processing Facility at Kennedy Space Center for last stages of manufacturing, machine assembly and launch processing. The components are made from stainless steel, titanium, aluminum and copper.

## Assembly
The assembly of the International Space Station is a great event in space architecture. Russian modules launched and docked by their rockets. All other pieces were delivered by the Space Shuttle. The Bigelow Module was delivered with a Falcon 9. , they had added 159 components during more than 1,000 hours of EVA. Many of the modules that launched on the Space Shuttle were tested on the ground at the Space Station Processing Facility to find and correct problems before launch.

The first section, the Zarya Functional Cargo Block, was put in orbit in November 1998 on a Russian Proton rocket. Two further pieces (the Unity Module and Zvezda service module) were added before the first crew, Expedition 1, was sent. Expedition 1 docked to the ISS on 1 November  2000, and consisted of U.S. astronaut William Shepherd and two Russian cosmonauts, Yuri Gidzenko and Sergey Krikalev. Since then, it has continuously been home to astronauts and cosmonauts to the present day.

## Life in space 
### Bedtime 
People living in the space station have to get used to all kinds of changes from life on Earth. It takes them only 90 minutes to orbit (go around) the earth, so the sun looks as if it is rising and setting 16 times an earth day. This can be confusing, especially when one is trying to decide when they should go to bed. The astronauts try to keep a 24-hour-schedule anyway. At bedtime, they have to sleep in sleeping bags that are stuck to the wall. They have to  themselves inside so they will not float away while sleeping.

### Bathroom 
In space, the *bathroom* should probably be called the *restroom* instead, because one really can not take baths there. Instead, astronauts use squirt guns to take a shower. One person squirts himself with a gun while other people stand outside with a water vacuum to get rid of all the water that floats out of the shower. This is quite hard, so astronauts usually just take a "sponge bath" with a wet cloth.Toilets can be another problem. Toilets are supposed to use gravity to work. When one flushes a toilet, gravity makes the water go down. Since the astronauts on the ISS do not feel any gravity, the toilet must be attached to the astronauts and gently suck away all their waste.

## References 
## Other websites 
* International Space Station -Citizendium