Questions about the ISS (International Space Station), a habitable man-made low Earth orbit satellite whose first component was launched in 1998 and used to conduct experiments for a wide variety of research fields in a microgravity environment.
The ISS (International Space Station) is a combination of the Soviet/Russian plans for a successor to the Mir space station, and the US Freedom space station model. The merging of the two programs was meant to save money and generate political good will.
The ISS now consists of many modules, delivered over a decade in dozens of launches on many different launch vehicles).
