Page 42 - Curriculum Visions Dynamic Book

The International Space Station was the culmination of
a century of speculation, hope, and experience. Early ideas
for spAce stAtions focused on how to make a space station resemble conditions on the surface of the Earth. Science
fiction magazines published pictures of giant wheels rotating in orbit above the Earth. The idea was that the wheel would spin continually, and the centrifugAl force would simulate grAvity. People would therefore be able to walk and live normally. In 1952 rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun produced a concept of a space station with just such a configuration.
But this was imagining giant leaps in technology that could not yet be achieved. The world’s first space station, Salyut 1 (see pages 30–32), and its successors, Mir (pages 36–41) and Skylab (pages 33–35), were essentially long tubes in space, with the crews living in a weightless environment.
 An astronaut looks at the International Space Station from a window of the Space Shuttle.
 The first parts of the International Space Station are joined in 1999. The near part is the Unity node module; the part with the Solar paNelS is the Zarya control module.
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