Sleepy History - The International Space Station: How Humans Live in Outer Space

Episode Date: August 16, 2026

✨Sleepy History is written and narrated by humans. ✨ Narrated By: Simon Mattacks Written By: Laila Weir Explore the cooperative global efforts to build and crew the International Space Station and the dreams that inspired its creation. Includes mentions of: Space Travel, Cold War, Science and Nature, Scientific Experiments, Animals, Flying, Outer Space #History #Sleep #Space #Station #science #nature #experiments About Sleepy History Explore history's most intriguing stories, people, places, events, and mysteries, delivered in a supremely calming atmosphere. If you struggle to fall asleep and you have a curious mind, Sleepy History is the perfect bedtime companion. Our stories will gently grasp your attention, pulling your mind away from any racing thoughts, making room for the soothing music and calming narration to guide you into a peaceful sleep. Want to enjoy Sleepy History ad-free? Start your 7-day free trial of Sleepy History Premium: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://sleepyhistory.supercast.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Have feedback or an episode request? Let us know at: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠slumberstudios.com/contact⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Sleepy History is a production of Slumber Studios. To learn more, visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.slumberstudios.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The first ever all-electric 2026 Subaru Trail Seeker is the EV for the trail obsessed. With up to 444 kilometers on a full charge and DC fast charging from 10 to 80% in about 30 minutes in ideal conditions. Plus, ample ground clearance and symmetrical all-wheel drive make the 2026 Trail Seeker the most capable EV Subaru has ever built. Test drive it at your local Subaru dealer or visit Subaru.ca. Hear that? It's your money calling. It wants a promotion. Elevate your savings with the Scotia high-interest savings account.

Always earn high regular interest rates that grow the more you save and invest. Conditions apply. Visit scotiabank.com slash h-I-SA to learn more. Scotia Bank. You're richer than you think. Hey, y'all. It's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder, what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up?

That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what-it-fair. Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit wayfair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home. As most of us go about our daily lives, with our feet firmly on the ground,

a handful of astronauts living and working in orbit more than 200 miles overhead. The space station crew members work hard, but they don't spend much time on their feet. That's because they're weightless inside the state. without gravity to hold them down. Instead, they float around, pushing and pulling, to manoeuvre in their artificial habitat,

where up and down are entirely relative. It's a futuristic place that came into existence thanks to remarkable scientific innovation and political investment, fueled first by epic rivalry and then by exceptional cooperation between nations. So, just relax and let your mind drift as we explore the sleepy history of the International Space Station. Larger than a six-bedroom house,

the International Space Station is a self-contained living and working environment that orbits around the Earth. To the crew who live there, for an average of six months or so, it serves as their whole world during their stay. The daily life of these crew members in space is very different from life here at home. Imagine living in weightlessness and experiencing 16 sunrises and sunsets every day as you hurtle around the planet at five miles. per second, circumnavigating the globe about once every hour and a half. Since the space station

first launched, close to 300 people from more than two dozen countries have spent time there. Most of them went to the station to work, to conduct research, and to maintain the futuristic structure. But a few people have just popped in to visit. Crew members may typically spend about six months in this artificial world, but some have spent just over a year. There's been a crew staying on the space station at all times since the start of this millennium, or at least since the station first got up and running a few months into this millennium. That's when three astronauts took up residence on the station for the very first time. on the 2nd of November in the year 2000, to be precise.

The operating space station has been a phenomenon of the 21st century, but its creation was very much a 20th century project. It was the result of big dreams, hard work and innovation funded by world powers locked in a searing rivalry. The story has roots, reaching back to the dreamers and discoverers who first imagined traveling and living in space, of course. But the actual planning and construction of the space station took place in the final years of the 20th century. The ISS, as the International Space Station is called for short,

was built drawing on the lessons learned from earlier space stations developed by the Soviet Union. as well as one earlier prototype made by the United States. During the second half of the 20th century, these two superpowers were locked in the Cold War. Each was trying to beat out the other in influence and clout on the world stage. Besides competition and proxy wars on many fronts here on Earth, the two nations even took their rivalry, Humans had yet to travel into space, but that was about to change.

Both megastates started projects to develop rockets that could travel to space and eventually carry people. Each tried to outperform the other in a high-tech contest known as the Space Race. The space race really got off the ground in October 1957. That's when the Soviet Union sent the first ever satellite into space. Sputnik won. From there, things happened fast, leading within a dozen years to the first walk on the moon. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

It took a lot of accomplishments, dispersed with many failures, to get humankind off the earth. Let's look at some of the mild. stone successes. The very month after the Soviet Union successfully launched the first satellite in 1957, the communist state sent the first ever living creature into space. It was a dog named Lyca, who lifted off to a one-way mission, as the nascent Soviet space program sadly didn't have the technology to bring the animal home alive. After those early

triumphs by the Soviet state, the United States achieved some first of its own. To begin with, the US Space Program launched its own satellite and then used it to broadcast the first message from space. It was a recorded Christmas greeting from President Dwight Eisenhower. By the end of the 1950s, the US also got the first pictures of Earth from space, although the Soviet Union soon afterward took the lead again by capturing the first pictures of the far side of the moon. The next decade, the 1960s, would see humans reach space for the first time, a feat that was to culminate by the end of the decade with men walking on the moon.

It started with the Soviet Union sending the very first person, Yuri Gagarin, into space in 1961, beating out the United States to this achievement by less than a month. Over the coming years, the communist state accomplished the first spacewalk, in which an astronaut goes outside their spacecraft, and sent the first woman into space. Meanwhile, the American program got the first spacecraft to Mars, or at least very near it, as it didn't land, and the first close-up photos of the red planet. It was the final year of the decade, 1969, however, that brought the defining moment of the space race. That was when American astronauts, Neil Armstrong, and Buzz Aldrin stepped foot on the surface of the moon.

Humanity had definitively reached space. The next frontier, perhaps, was living there. And, sure enough, the dawn of the next decade, the 1970s, also brought the dawning age of the space station. Just over one year into the decade, on the 9th century. 19th of April, 1971, the Soviet Union launched the first space station from Kazakhstan. Nine minutes after launch, the station successfully reached orbit, although some of its instruments for scientific observations failed. Named solute, meaning salute, the station weighed some 40,620 pounds, and had a living area about the size of a large swimming pool, 3,500 cubic feet,

far from roomy, perhaps, but it was a breakthrough of colossal proportions in people's trajectory towards living in space. The first crew met with disappointment when their rocket failed to dock with the space station. But just over a month later, the second second. The second crew made the trip and docked successfully. That crew spent 24 days living aboard the station and conducting various scientific research, including observing the Earth from afar. Sadly, these first ever space station inhabitants perished in an accident during their return home.

After that, the Soviets brought their pioneering space station back for a a planned destruction on reentry into the Earth's atmosphere. It had spent 175 days in orbit, albeit most of the time uncrewed. Humanity's first experiment in maintaining a livable station in space was complete. And the stage was set for the efforts that would lead to the International Space Station by the end of the century. Two years, our after the first Saluet experiment, the Soviet Union tried to set up a second space station. But it failed during early orbit and was abandoned.

Just three days after this doomed Soviet attempt, however, the United States launched its first space station. The American space station was called Skylab. It was much larger than the Soviet one had been, hosting 12,417 cubic feet of livable space, more than three times that of Salued. Still, no six-bedroom house size, like the ISS, but surely a lot less cramped than that first Soviet station. Skylab made it into orbit, but it was badly damaged during liftoff. Nevertheless, the US successfully sent a crew of three astronauts to repair.

care and live on the station. The crew spent 28 days living and researching aboard Skylab before coming home to Earth, beating out the cosmonauts record by several days. Two more crews went to Skylab, each staying successively longer, 59 days and then 84 days respectively, and testing the limits for how long humans could survive in space. The Soviet Union then picked up the baton of space station development again, launching another Salute Space Station at the end of 1974 that would host crews up to 63 days in space.

The competitive space race had launched the Space Age, but relations between the two Cold War rivals were finally thawing a bit, to the point that the countries cooperated in a joint space project in 1975. Both nations launched spaceships and then guided them to a rendezvous in space. The American and Soviet ships connected in orbit and their crews met to share meals and work together for a few days before separating again. It was a successful cooperation, but it was not to be repeated. The Soviets kept up their efforts in building and testing ever better space stations, sending additional stations into orbit in 1977 and 1982.

They eventually succeeded in supporting crews in space for as long as eight months. U.S. investment in and enthusiasm for space exploration had dwindled following the moon landing, however. American space station efforts stalled, and NASA focused what resources it had into developing the space shuttle program instead. Finally, though, in 1985,

President Ronald Reagan at last announced funding for a more permanent, American Space Station project. NASA set out to form partnerships with space programs in other countries in order to build an international space station. The US was back in the space station game after the Soviet Union had dominated it for so long. Still, the Soviet program had a year's long head start on the US by this point.

Soon after Reagan's announcement, in early 1986, the communist state launched a new kind of space station, one that would serve as a prototype for the eventual design of the ISS. Called MIR, this new station had a modular design. It had different docking ports, where additional modules could be added to the base module. MIR could host residents for much longer than the earlier salute stations. Indeed, some MIR crew members stayed aboard for longer than a year, further pushing the boundary of how long humans had lived in space. Over the years, the Soviets joined more and more segments to the initial station. These included science labs and observatories, like a module for astrophysics work and another

for studying the Earth from space. Ultimately, the MIR space station would orbit our planet for 15 years. In fact, the station outlived the Soviet Union, which dissolved in 1991. Over its decade and a half in orbit, Mier's served in orbit. served as a temporary home to 104 space travelers, who came from some dozen different countries. Cosmonauts and astronauts of different nationalities arrived on rockets from the Soviet Union and, after its dissolution, from Russia.

Besides Soviet cosmonauts, Assyrian joined a Soviet mission to the MIR station in 1987, followed by a by a by Bulgarian and an Afghan in 1988. And then Japanese, British, and Austrian citizens in 1990 and 1991. After the Soviet Union was no more, and the MIR station became a project of the newly reconstituted Russian state, the American and Russian space programs began to cooperate. Meanwhile, the US had been pushing forward with the Space Station project announced by Reagan.

Canada, Japan, and various member states of the European Space Agency had all joined the American-led effort. The different countries began manufacturing various parts of the Plan Station in the late 1980s. Then, in 1993, the coalition invited Russia, which joined the International Space Station project. Initially, the cooperation meant the US would fly missions to the MIA Space Station, which came to Howe's various international research projects, even as construction continued on the parts for the ISS. During the late 1990s, both the US and the US.

and Russia sent spacecraft to MIR, carrying Americans and Russians, as well as visitors from even more nations, including German, French, and Slovak astronauts. Then, as the last decade of the 20th century drew towards its close, the new International Space Station was finally ready for liftoff, and to take over from MIR as humanity's base in orbit.

the first pieces of the station launched into orbit in late 1998, followed by further flights to carry up additional elements. Overall, more than 40 assembly flights carried the various parts into space. Fifteen countries participated in building the station. The US, Russia, Canada, Japan, and 11 member states of the European Space Agency, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. These were the signatories to the International Space Station Intergovernmental Agreement.

Although more European countries would sign on later, the first part of the the space station put into orbit was the Russian-made control module called Zaria, launched on the 20th of November 1998. The next month, a US-made connecting node called Unity joined it in space. When these first two parts were in orbit, two astronauts flew up to connect them. To do this, the astronauts had to leave. the comparative safety of their spacecraft and go outside for a spacewalk to connect the cables linking the modules together. Over the next year and a half, more astronauts conducted many

more spacewalks to attach further pieces of the station. The next module added was a Russian-built habitat and control center in mid-2000. And with that, the station was ready for for its first human inhabitants. They arrived on the 2nd November 2000, carried aboard a Russian Sawyer's rocket. Those first three crew members were an American named William Shepherd and two Russians named Sergei Kricholev and Yuri Gizenko. Once the basics of the station were in place,

the crew could get to work conducting scientific research. They kept a rocket docked at the station all the time, just in case of any urgent need to return to Earth. In the years that followed, the space agencies added more modules to the station, including a microgravity laboratory christened Destiny and another segment called Harmony. These were followed by European and Japanese laboratory modules in 2008. That year also saw the arrival of a powerful Canadian robot that could take over tasks that previously required astronauts to conduct spacewalks. The International Space Station reached its full planned operating capacity in 2009.

The crew was expanded to six people at that time. Usually three Russians, two Americans, and one crew member from another partner country. Another section called Tranquility was added in 2010 and brought with it a very popular addition. This was a windowed cupola, a round dome of huge windows providing 360-degree views. The cupola led the crew overseas robotic. work outside the station, an important feature to be sure. But most spectacularly, it also revealed remarkable views of the blue Earth floating in space. Next, in 2021, Russia added a new science module named Naoka.

All the time, astronauts have been living on the space station, maintaining it and working on various research projects. Doctors and scientists carefully study the crew members to learn more about the effects that living in space has on the human body. Besides the many working astronauts who've spent time there, the space station has also hosted paying visitors who wanted to travel into space. The first paying traveler went to the ISS in April of 2001,

just months after the first crew arrived. In the two decades that followed, another eight people brought passage to the station as visitors, and adventure travel to space is only likely to increase in the future. But before we look to what lies ahead, let's take a moment to look back. Although the operating space station is a phenomenon of the 21st, century and its creation was a project of the 20th, it first lived as a dream of the century before.

Fascination with the idea of living or traveling in space has existed for centuries, stretching back at least as long ago as the concept of space itself. Ancient stories often dealt more with tales of gods or heroes moving in the heavens or among the stars. though, than with the concept of human space travel in the modern sense. Still, long before people had our modern knowledge of space, the moon in particular captured the wandering eye of adventurous and fanciful dreamers. After all, the moon is the only celestial object that looks at all planet-like to the naked eye. For ages, people wondered about it, inventing stories, imagining what it was like on the moon,

and what it would be like to travel there. As early as the second century CE, a writer in the Roman Empire crafted a story recounting the fictional adventures of a group of voyages carried to the moon on a water spout. centuries later, at the start of the 1600s, the development of telescopes in Europe allowed people to see into the heavens as never before. Astronomers used these new tools to advance their celestial knowledge by leaps and bounds. With more scientific facts available, scientific imaginations had more to work with, and some again turned their. thoughts to moon travel and even to the technical side of achieving it. It was not easy to imagine how to get to the moon at a time when people didn't have engines of any kind and could only

travel under their own power or in vehicles pulled by animals. The famous astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote about what a visitor to the moon would see, including how the earth would look from the lunar surface. Kepler simply avoided the issue of how to get to the moon by casting the story in the framework of a dream trip. Not long afterwards, a fictional writer invented a tale of a traveller carried to the moon by large birds. Around the same time, a young man in England named John Wilkins was writing about the same topics from a more factual basis. though highly speculative and futuristic. Wilkins wrote about the moon observations of his day,

and he predicted that people would one day travel there. He speculated about how humanity would eventually achieve space flight, suggesting people might invent a flying chariot. And that once they did, they would soon use it to go to the moon. A couple of centuries later, later, by the mid to late 1800s, great technological and scientific breakthroughs allowed the

dreamers of a new age to envision concrete ideas for how humans could set up habitats in space. It was in the later part of the 1800s that an American writer, abolitionist, and clergyman, named Edward Everett Hale, wrote a science fiction story about a science fiction story about a satellite-turned space station he called the Brick Moon. Hale's characters made a satellite out of bricks. They intended to launch it into orbit, only to have it accidentally launch early with them aboard. The story ends with the characters learning to live and farm quite happily in the artificial habitat, a kind of self-sustaining fictional space station. Hale's story presaged the eventual development of satellites and orbiting space stations,

and also speculated about the technological challenges involved. Across the ocean in France, around the same time, the prophetic science fiction writer Jules Verne was also dreaming of space travel. Vern is probably best remembered for his books Around the World in 80 Days and 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas. Vern also wrote a novel called From the Earth to the Moon, which imagined a group of adventurers traveling to space in a rocket shot from a cannon. A couple of decades later, in Russia, a pioneering rocket scientist named

Constantine Zyalkovsky began dreaming up realistic plans for rocket travel and space stations. He envisioned space stations that could run on solar power and serve as self-sufficient habitats, complete with plants growing inside. Zilkovsky, who is remembered now as one of the fathers of rocket science, published sketches in 1883 of a spaceship orbiting the Earth. He even showed people floating weightlessly on board. Several decades later, in 1928 to 29, an Austro-Hungarian army officer and engineer,

writing under the name Herman Nordung, published a book that pushed these ideas even further. It was called The Prongarian Army Officer and Engineer, the problem of space travel, the rocket motor. Nordung's book dealt extensively with the technical details of creating a space station. He foresaw that a station could be launched in parts and then assembled in orbit. Then, in the middle of the 1900s, rocket scientists in Germany, including one named Werner von Braun, picked up the mantle

and started to work on specific designs for functioning space stations. von Braun had worked for the German army, which soon became the Nazi army, starting in the 1930s, and then throughout World War II. After the war's end, the US government brought him to work in the United States, along with other German engineers and scientists. von Braun became a leading pioneer of the US space program. In the early 1950s, the idea of a space station, as promoted by von Braun, entered U.S. popular culture in a serious way. That's when a German-American science writer named Willie Lay authored a book called The Conquest of Space.

It described von Braun's vision for an orbiting space station. Life will be cramped and complicated, Lay wrote. describing the concept. It will be a self-contained community in which all man's needs, from air conditioning to artificial gravity, have been supplied. Von Braun's vision for a space station even made it onto Walt Disney's TV show, the epitome of popular culture. Disney produced three self-designated science factual episodes about the idea of space travel. The episodes promoted the Tomorrowland space attractions at Disneyland, which was brand new at the time. Von Braun and Lay both consulted with Disney on the building

of the Disneyland attractions and also contributed to the science factual television episodes. The Disney TV episodes advance the idea of space travel and an eventual space station among the general population. Space fever was taking hold in the United States. And this support was crucial, as the US government began its space program in earnest, fighting to catch up with the Soviet Union's early lead in sending the first satellite and living beings into space. Early ideas included the concept of building a moon station plus an orbiting station, which where rockets could refuel on their way to the moon. In the 1960s, these early ideas pivoted instead

towards the simpler Skylab concept. We've already seen what happened from there, as those early dreams and designs catapulted through successes and failures into a functioning long-term station. So now, let us turn towards the future. Where does the story go from here? What will the future bring for human habitation in space? As we've seen, the dawn of the space age was very much fueled by government investment and direction.

These days, a change is happening, as commercial companies increasingly become important players in the continuation of space exploration. For many years, U.S. space shuttles and Soviet rockets carried crew members back and forth to the International Space Station, and various countries' space programs provided vehicles to transport gear. Starting in 2012, however, the private company Space X began to carry cargo between Earth and the station, And then, in 2020, SpaceX started providing ships to carry crew back and forth as well. Then the airplane company Boeing got in the game too, sending a spacecraft called the CST 100 Starliner to the ISS in 2024 with two astronauts aboard.

The craft notoriously had problems during its trip to the space station, however, and the astronauts wound up extending their mission on the ISS before finally going home on a space X-ship instead. These and other commercial companies are poised to play a key role in space exploration and space habitats going forward. The Biden administration committed US support for the International Space Station through 2030. After that, the partner agencies that operate the aging station intend to decommission it,

crashing it into the ocean in a controlled destruction. Then, NASA envisions that commercial companies will build and operate future stations that the U.S. Space Agency and others will pay to use. To that end, NASA has been giving funds and information to various commercial partners. Russia, meanwhile, has said it will end its support for the International Space Station sooner, and then turn to creating its own independent station. Meanwhile, even as private and public partners work to maintain a human presence in low Earth orbit, dreamers and planners have already set their sights on the next frontiers for human outposts in space,

be it on Mars, the moon, or elsewhere. It remains to be seen whether humanity's future in space will unfold as a cooperative effort, like the International Space Station, a partisan one like the Cold Wars space race, or a fragmented affair driven by individual companies, investors, and lone acting states. One way or another, though, one thing seems likely. That the same forces of imagination and innovation that took us from the first human airplane flight to the first human space flight in less than 60 years will continue to drive us upward and outward. That the urge to explore the cosmos will lead us to ever more breakthroughs, firsts, and new horizons.