Piece-by-piece assembly of the ISS in orbit was completed in 2011, although it was expected that additional elements might be added later.
At end of assembly, the station – at 357 feet by 240 feet by 45 feet – was bigger than a football field, comprising 159 components and weighing about 1 million pounds (including visiting vehicles). It had the volume of a five-bedroom house (32,400 cubic feet), solar arrays the size of eight basketball courts, and 52 operations computers. Provision of ISS elements was global, with major components coming from the United States, Russia, Germany, Italy, Canada, and Japan.
Designing, building and operating the International Space Station involved 21 separate terrestrial installations. Seven Mission Control Centers managed flight operations in the beginning – NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston for the shuttle and payloads, NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, JEM (Japan), Columbia (Germany), MSS (Canada), Roscosmos (Russia), and ATM (France).
During the STS-119 mission’s first spacewalk, astronauts Richard Arnold and Steve Swanson (out of frame) connected bolts to permanently attach the S6 truss segment of the International Space Station to S5. The spacewalkers plugged in power and data connectors to the truss, prepared a radiator to cool it, opened boxes containing the new solar arrays, and deployed the Beta Gimbal Assemblies, containing masts that support the solar arrays. NASA photo
The retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011 made it impossible to launch or recover any further large components. That required a complete overhaul of the way the space station had been designed and built, which included large elements intended to be returned to Earth for repair, then taken back to the ISS by the shuttle. Without that vehicle, however, many parts of the station had to be redesigned to be both smaller and either repairable on-site or disposable in orbit, to be replaced by the new, smaller versions.
“It’s one thing to be able to take a 20-year-old airplane into a hangar and upgrade the cockpit, change out the seats, replace the galley, etc., and keep flying it. We don’t have that access to the ISS, so we rely on a lot of on-orbit sensing data to understand what is going on.”
Prior to the end of shuttle missions, Boeing worked to ensure both U.S. and international partner components not only would connect properly to the ISS, but also would work properly with the station software.
An example of that was the March 11, 2008, launch, aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour (STS-123), of two major partner components: Canada’s Dextre robotic device and a segment of Japan’s Kibo laboratory. Contributed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Kibo was designed to increase the station’s research capability in a variety of disciplines. Dextre, from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), works with the station’s Canadarm2 robotic arm to perform delicate tasks.
“Our job is to verify that software from various organizations can talk to one another and, if they can’t, to suggest and implement corrective actions,” said John Royal, Boeing’s Space Exploration Software integration manager at the time. “In regard to Dextre, we designed and built a test platform that represented a segment of the space station and provided commands to the robot to see if it would respond correctly.