First Element: Zarya, launched November 20, 1998
The Station completes an orbit around the Earth every 90 minutes
The Station orbits at an altitude of 250 miles above Earth
The last shuttle mission to ISS was STS-135; it returned to Earth on July 21, 2011
Check out NASA's Latest Statics Page. More information can be found by investigating the pages below:
International Space Station Pages
Human Spaceflight and Exploration
Life on ISS - from the Astronauts
Station Science - Laboratory in Space
Online Videos for ISS
Interactive Learning for ISS
ISS Expedition XXX - 30th Crew aboard the International Space Station
Launched Wednesday, December 21, 2011
The image of the International Space Station above was taken
from the Space Shuttle on mission STS-113, the appearence of the station
from December 2002 until September 2006. The image at the top of this page was taken by the crew of Discovery on STS-133
when it departed the station in March 2011. These and other images of the space station are available at NASA, and can be reached by clicking on this link:
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/assembly/ndxpage1.html this
will take you to the page that contains the NASA image gallery showing the
progress of ISS as it was and is being built.
