After the end of the Cold War, the only human habitat floating in space was the Mir station. That too was soon to end its design life, and funding difficulties made its continuuing operation an increasingly tenuous task, and Mir-2 seemed doomed. Plans for the NASA space station Freedom had begun in 1984 and developed into a nightmare, with the proposed design requiring 30 billion USD in funds and weighing almost 300 tons. With the warmed up relations between the US and the Russians, a cooperation for an international space station was sought, and also involved Europe, Japan and Canada.
On January
29, 1998, the agreement for the construction of the International Space Station (ISS) was signed in Washington, and a few months later in November 20, the first module of the ISS, Zarya, was launched from Baikonur. Zarya provided electricity, storage, propulsion and guidance to the ISS for the initial construction stages. Two weeks later, the US-built module Unity was deployed using the Space Shuttle Endeavour, and it is one of three connecting nodes for the ISS, linking other modules together.
The ISS project started gaining momentum and in July 12, 2000, the Zvezda module, the main habitat for astonauts was added, and on November 2, the first crew of the ISS became a reality, with Yuri Gidzenko, Sergei Krikalev, and William Sheperd spending four months aboard. In 2001, three more modules were added, the Destiny, Quest and Pirs, respectively a US laboratory, a joint airlock and a Russian docking compartment, and three trusses were added next year,as well as Canadarm2, a robotic arm similar to the one used in the Space Shuttle.
However, the year 2003 was marked by the catastrophic Space Shuttle Columbia accident, severely hampering the ISS assembly program, as well as putting additional strain and workload on crews aboard the station, with two-man crews in order to cut down on needed logistics flights and the Soyuz craft being the only one capable of servicing the ISS while NASA tried to get the Shuttle up and flying again.
After quite some time and in spite of hardships, in 2006 trusses were launched and assembled and in October 2007 the Harmony module, the second interconnecting node after Unity, was placed into orbit and assembled, marking the completion of the US core of the station, and a return to the normal assembly schedule of the ISS.
The year 2008 has provided the ISS with two modules that are really starting to show the Space Station's true potential: the European Space Agency's Columbus laboratory, and the Japanese Kibo module, the 