The Freedom concept called for a modular space station to be deployed to orbit, where it would serve as the counterpart to the Soviet Salyut and Mir space stations. In the end, the ISS plan that emerged was a culmination of several different plans for a space station – which included NASA’s Freedom and the Soviet’s Mir-2 concepts, as well as Japan’s Kibo laboratory, and the European Space Agency’s Columbus laboratory. In May of 1982, NASA established the Space Station task force, which was charged with creating a conceptual framework for such a space station. The Mir space station hangs above the Earth in 1995 (photo taken by the mission crew of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, STS-71).
This station, it was hoped, would allow for the future utilization of low-Earth Orbit and its resources, and serve as an intermediate base for renewed exploration efforts to the Moon, mission to Mars, and beyond. Planning for the ISS began in the 1980s and was based in part on the successes of Russia’s Mir space station, NASA’s Skylab, and the Space Shuttle Program. Central to its mission is the idea of fostering international cooperation for the sake of advancing science and space exploration. This space station is the largest and most sophisticated orbiting research facility ever built and is so large that it can actually be seen with the naked eye. The latest and greatest of these is the International Space Station (ISS), a scientific facility that resides in Low-Earth Orbit around our planet. In the ensuing decades (from the 1970s to 1990s), both agencies began to build and deploy space stations, each one bigger and more complex than the last. After the historic Apollo Missions, which saw humans set foot on another celestial body for the first time in history, NASA and the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos) began to shift their priorities away from pioneering space exploration and began to focus on developing long-term capabilities in space.