But for real astronauts, spaceflight is not quite so, well, spacious. Take the International Space Station (ISS), which is the largest spacefaring vessel ever built, as well as the most expensive single construction project in human history, costing the US alone around $100 billion. Its first module was launched in November 1998, and its first long-duration crew, consisting of three people, arrived onboard two years later.
With an internal pressurized volume of 32,898 cubic feet, roughly equal to the interior of a Boeing 747, the ISS is a far cry from the cavernous starships we’re used to seeing in science fiction and fantasy. That said, the station and its predecessors are enormously helpful testbeds in the quest to develop even more massive spaceships down the line. Like the Mir space station, which flew from 1986 to 2001, the modules of the ISS were launched separately and assembled in space, like some high-stakes orbital LEGO kit. [...]
The ability to reuse spacecraft in this way would drastically reduce the cost of robotic deep space exploration, while also spurring the kind of infrastructures crucial for human exploration to more distant worlds like Mars. It will take an enormous amount of money, time, and effort to build these orbital truck-stops, but the back-end payoff of paving a super-roadway in space would be well worth it, according to author and spaceflight advocate Howard Bloom.
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