The international space station celebrates 25 years of uninterrupted human presence in orbit

Cape Canaveral – It is an unprecedented space streak: 25 years of people living off the planet without even a pause.

The International Space Station marks a quarter century of continuous occupancy this weekend, with a guest list of nearly 300 people, mostly professional astronauts, but also the occasional space tourist and film director. The first full-time residents opened the hatch on November 2, 2000.

With just five years left in the scientific outpost, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is counting on private companies to launch its own orbiting stations with an even bigger and broader clientele. Here’s a look at what has been and what’s to come:

NASA’s Bill Shepherd and Russia’s Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko blasted off on a Russian Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan on October 31, 2000. They arrived at the dark, dank, three-room station two days later and spent nearly five months on board, making the place not only functional but hospitable.

Shepherd, a former Navy SEAL who retired in 2002, serves on a space station advisory committee with Krikalev, now a senior Russian space official.

While U.S.-Russia relations are “pretty bad” domestically, “people to people and even space agency to space agency, they’re actually pretty good,” Shepherd told The Associated Press.

According to NASA’s count, 290 people from 26 countries have visited the space station. Seven are up there right now, representing the United States, Russia and Japan.

Most visitors have flown in courtesy of their home countries.

The first to pay his own way, Californian businessman Dennis Tito, went with the Russians in 2001 over NASA’s objections. Starving for cash, Russia continued to fly private clients, including a Russian film crew in 2021.

NASA is now embracing space tourism, inviting private crews for two-week stays. A few months ago, the first astronauts in decades from India, Poland and Hungary visited the station, accompanied by the station’s first female commander, Peggy Whitson. “Space brings people together,” he noted.

The operations may seem easy and boring as astronauts come and go, but “there is nothing routine about it,” former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a recent presentation.

Among the most serious missteps: the near-drowning of a spacewalker, a docking that sent the station into a wild spin, persistent cracks and air leaks, and the growing threat of space debris.

Shepherd is surprised that he is still going strong. “The fact that it has more than double its design life on many things is quite remarkable,” he said.

Life on the space station has improved dramatically since Shepherd and his crew resisted it.

“It is now a four-star hotel,” he said. “You couldn’t ask for better accommodations, at least in space.”

Now the size of a football field with multiple laboratories, the station has an internet phone for astronauts’ personal use and a glass dome, or dome, for privileged views and performances of Earth.

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who plays guitar, famously performed David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and other tunes from that perch more than a decade ago.

Experimental greenhouses have also added color and vibrancy, producing chili peppers and zinnias. An espresso machine even got a brief test, as did a cookie oven. But there is still no shower or laundry, just sponge baths, with dirty clothes thrown away instead of washed.

Astronauts have gotten married and welcomed newborn children while serving on the space station. One of the new space dads, Mike Fincke, is there again, more than 20 years after he called from orbit to his wife’s delivery room.

Residents of the station have also dealt with distress. An astronaut’s mother died in a car accident in 2007. And in 2011, Scott Kelly was halfway through a five-month stay when his sister-in-law, U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, was shot in the head and survived.

Others have had to deal with delays in returns, the most recent and extreme case involving stranded astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. Its planned week-long test flight of Boeing’s new Starliner capsule turned into a more than nine-month stay on the station, with NASA switching to SpaceX for the return trip.

Thousands of experiments have been performed, many on astronauts themselves. Medical testing took on added urgency several years ago when an astronaut discovered a blood clot in one of his jugular veins. Doctors supervised the treatment from afar until the patient returned home safely.

NASA also launched a twin study with the Kelly brothers. Scott Kelly participated in NASA’s first year-long expedition in 2015 and 2016, comparing his body to that of identical twin Mark on the ground. Mark Kelly also contributed to astronomy, leading a shuttle mission to deliver and install a cosmic particle detector. Updates are planned for next year.

NASA is paying SpaceX nearly $1 billion to eject the space station from orbit in early 2031. The company will launch a heavy-duty capsule to dock with the station and direct it to a fiery reentry over the Pacific.

Before that happens, Axiom Space will remove the module it plans to send to the station. That free-flying module will form the core of Axiom’s own space station. Other companies are working on their own concepts.

NASA wants to avoid a gap between the International Space Station and its successors, preserving the United States’ continued human presence in orbit.