A Brief History of the International Space Station (ISS)
It all started on January 25th 1984. President Ronald Reagan gave permission to NASA to build the first International Space Station over the course of the following 10 years. Later on, on the 4th of December 1998, the parts of the Space Station (separately launched) were assembled in space and on the 2nd of November 2000 the first astronauts were sent up to the station where they stayed for a few months. During the course of the next several years ( 2001 - 2013) numerous labs and countries were added to the support of the Space station as well as many agreements and new finds and technologies, such as proteins able to be grown in space to better understand and create new drugs (medicine). Since then, it has housed many astronauts such as Sergei Krikalev a Russian man who stayed in space for a total of 803 days. Also there was another man, Valery Polyakov who lived in another space station, Mir, for 437 days. A woman who stayed in space for a record time was and American woman named Peggy Whitson who lived in space for 376 days.
The Astronauts that have lived in space.
There have been a lot of astronauts that have lived in the ISS including Suni Williams (a former commander of the ISS), Peggy Whitson, and Sergei Krikalev (who I mentioned in the previous paragraphs). There have also been many more astronauts that have traveled to space and there will be many more to come. In the ISS at the moment, the 'team' that is occupying the ISS was sent up into the ISS on October 25 2012. They are planning to return to Earth in March 2013. the astronauts were sent up in trios so the first three were commander Kevin Ford and flight engineers Oleg Novitiskiy and Evgeny Tarelkin. After a couple of months another three were sent up to complete the crew of six people. The other three were Tom Marshburn, Chris Hadfield and Roman Romanenko. Hadfield was the first Canadian to command the ISS after the rest of the flight engineers complete their mission.