The blue of the ocean seen from space and the chaos of the laboratories, where the badges of the missions and the photos of friends appear among the materials and scientific instruments: these are the symbols, captured by the shots of the astronaut Paolo Nespoli, of the presence of the man aboard the International Space Station, which for 20 years has now become a large house-laboratory.
In fact, on November 2, 2000, its first tenants arrived on the Space Station: the American William Shepherd and the Russians Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev and opened a new page in the history of space exploration that would have made the orbital station a place of research open to all and a springboard for the new space economy, the new economy that is increasingly linking industrial activities conducted on the planet's surface to processes and data provided by research in orbit.
The first crew of the Space Station in December 2000. From left Yuri Gidzenko, Commander Bill Shepherd and Sergei Krikalev (source: NASA)
Weighing over 400 tons, 73 meters long, more than 108 meters wide and 20 meters high, the Space Station has a habitable volume of over 400 cubic meters.
It whizzes around the Earth at an average speed of 27,600 kilometers per hour from an altitude of about 400 kilometers, it is the largest object ever built in orbit and the most expensive ever built (estimates range between 35 and 160 billions of dollars) and above all it is a unique example of international collaboration, managed as it is by the United States, Russia, Europe, Canada and Japan.
Now the presence of man on board is palpable and has led to what Nespoli defines as "the humanization of a technological laboratory".
His photos, exhibited in an exhibition in Rome organized by Leonardo, tell well this story in which the most advanced technology is intertwined with the many stories of the men who first worked on the construction of the structure and then on the maintenance and management of hundreds of experiments, from the giant antimatter hunter AMS (Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer) that captures cosmic rays outside the Space Station, to the first salad grown on board.
64 crews have followed one another on the orbital station, for a total of 242 astronauts.
Among these five Italians, including AstroSam, the first Italian woman to go into space.
In general, the International Space Station has been "an extraordinary training ground" for Italy, said the president of the Italian Space Agency (ASI), Giorgio Saccoccia.
Our country, he added, has been present since the beginning of that project with the construction of the first modules: the first bricks that made it possible to create this extraordinary structure and which represents what is possible to do when we join forces on a level International ".
For Leonardo's CEO, Alessandro Profumo, the Space Station is a formidable example of human, industrial and technological ingenuity. The countless experiments carried out within it have represented compelling challenges for man and industry of the sector that will lead us, in the near future, to the construction of new orbiting structures that are ever more distant, starting from that for the Moon ".
