ISS@25: Unique Laboratory

It took a lot of creative energy and careful engineering to create a spacecraft that is now the brightest human-made object in the sky. Although they never met on Earth, the modules of the space station fit perfectly together when they met in space.

What is said in the film

It's the only place in the world that we can do microgravity research. Think about that. One place in the whole world. There are no chambers on earth where we can replicate microgravity. Just the space station.

So we have to use that in order to figure out what we need to do for exploration. The first thing we learned is what we didn't know, right. The questions we needed to ask. Moving from shuttle to space station, going from short duration to long duration, we discovered many, many things that we didn't even know were risks of spaceflight. But we can use the space station as a space analog for other space destinations.

So that's really where we're going to focus is how do we get to the moon safely? How do we get to Mars safely? Space Station will allow us to do that. International partnering. International cooperation, engaging research.

Those three things to me are one of the most important things that the ISS has provided. You know, when we embarked in processing the elements of the ISS, nobody knew how to do it. We kind of figured that out as we were going through it. One thing that everyone should know about the ISS is that it's is a great platform to do research and that we need that platform and future platforms to help us understand how we are ever going to be able to go, even farther out into deep space. Happy 25th anniversary, ISS.

Looking forward to the future. We can't wait to see what's next for the space station.

Where this page came from

This page was imported from NASA. NASA material is generally not copyrighted and is in the public domain.

Nobody has written it yet — it is the source material at a new address, which is why search engines are asked to skip it and why no one earns from it. It is up for grabs: take it on, and it is yours to rewrite and to earn from.