There have been 53 expeditions to the ISS; 53 long-duration crews have called it home since Expedition 1 floated aboard in 2000. They’ve been mostly from America and Russia, the two principal and unlikely partners in one of the most expensive and challenging construction projects ever completed. (The ISS rose out of the ashes of two previous space stations: Russia’s Mir, last occupied in 1999 before it fell out of the sky in 2001, and Ronald Reagan’s proposed Freedom, which never got past the blueprints.) Its first few residents came and went largely without incident, conducting scientific experiments in everything from fluid dynamics to zero-G botany while studying what month after weightless month can do to the human body.
In November 2002, Expedition 6 arrived on the station’s doorstep. They were two Americans, Ken Bowersox and Don Pettit, and a Russian, Nikolai Budarin. They were supposed to complete a four-month tour in orbit. Then the shuttle Columbia dissolved into a finger of smoke somewhere beneath them in February 2003. The remaining shuttles were grounded, and the men of Expedition 6 were asked to extend their stay. They were told that they might come home in a few months. They might come home in a year. Maybe longer.
In the end, Expedition 6 came home in a Russian Soyuz capsule, only a couple of months after their original return date. Their dramatic descent didn’t make many headlines, and, except for Scott Kelly’s recent year-long stint in space, none of the subsequent 47 expeditions have garnered much attention either. Few of us give a thought to the International Space Station, even though, when the future measures our collective contribution to humanity, the ISS will prove the single best thing we did. Less than a century after the Model T was state of the art, we manufactured a kind of galleon in space and have sent men and women from 10 countries to live in it, along with a host of short-term visitors, without recess or mutiny or fatality, for nearly 20 years. By the time the ISS makes its fiery return to Earth, possibly in the late 2020s, it will have become a stepping stone to lunar colonies and the first human mission to Mars. It will have taught us so much about our ability to adapt to the most hostile of environments. The most beautiful too.
Tonight there are a half-dozen brave people, including three Americans, wrapped up in sleeping bags strapped to the cluttered walls there, dreaming of their families and gravity and everything else they’re missing. They are heroes, but the chances are slim that you could recall any of their names. Maybe it will make you feel better to remember instead, if only for the time it takes for the station to cross your night sky, that while everything can seem so awful and cynical here at home, we are still capable of distant miracles. Right now the International Space Station is hurtling through space, and so is its crew, which means so are we, living in its constant light.