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This article was initially revealed at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.
The International Space Station is without doubt one of the most exceptional achievements of the fashionable age. It is the biggest, most complicated, most costly and most sturdy spacecraft ever constructed.
Its first modules were launched in 1998. The first crew to reside on the International Space Station – an American and two Russians – entered it in 2000. Nov. 2, 2025, marks 25 years of steady habitation by no less than two individuals, and as many as 13 at one time. It is a singular instance of worldwide cooperation that has stood the check of time.
Two hundred and ninety people from 26 countries have now visited the area station, a number of of them staying for a 12 months or extra. More than 40% of all of the people who’ve ever been to area have been International Space Station guests.
The station has been the locus of thousands of scientific and engineering studies utilizing nearly 200 distinct scientific services, investigating every little thing from astronomical phenomena and fundamental physics to crew health and plant growth. The phenomenon of space tourism was born on the space station. Altogether, astronauts have amassed nearly 127 person-years of expertise on the station, and a deep understanding of what it takes to reside in low Earth orbit.
If you’ve got ever seen photos of the inside of the International Space Station, you’ve got in all probability observed the litter. There are cables in all places. Equipment stands proud into corridors. It doesn’t appear like Star Trek’s Enterprise or different science fiction spacecraft. There’s no bathe for the crew, or a kitchen for cooking a meal from scratch. It doesn’t have an space designed for the crew to collect of their downtime. But even with out these niceties, it clearly represents a imaginative and prescient of the longer term from the previous, one the place humanity would reside completely in area for the primary time.
Space archaeology
November 2025, by coincidence, also marks the 10th anniversary of my team’s research on the space station, the International Space Station Archaeological Project. The lengthy historical past of habitation on the area station makes it good for the type of research that archaeologists like my colleagues and me perform.
We acknowledged that there had been hardly any analysis on the social and cultural features of life in area. We needed to point out area companies that have been already planning three-year missions to Mars what they have been overlooking.
We needed to transcend simply speaking to the crew about their experiences, although we’ve additionally carried out that. But as previous studies of contemporary societies have shown, individuals typically do not wish to focus on all their lives with researchers, or they’re unable to articulate all their experiences.
Astronauts on Earth are often making an attempt to get their subsequent experience again to area, they usually understandably do not wish to rock the boat. Our analysis gives a further window onto life on an area station by utilizing archaeological proof: the traces of human interactions with the objects and constructed areas of the positioning.
The downside, in fact, is that we won’t go to the station and observe it instantly. So we needed to give you different methods to seize information. In November 2015, I spotted that we may use the thousands of photos taken by the crew and published by NASA as a place to begin. These would enable us to trace the motion of individuals and issues across the web site over time, and to map the behaviors and associations between them.
In 2022, the International Space Station Archaeological Project additionally carried out the first archaeological fieldwork off the Earth, an experiment designed by my collaborator, Alice Gorman. We requested the crew to doc six pattern places in numerous modules by taking pictures of every one day by day for 2 months.
Lessons from photos
We learned that the crew of the International Space Station is a lot like those of us on Earth – perhaps unsurprising, since they live 95% or more of their lives here with the rest of us. They decorate the walls of the station with photos, memorabilia and, on the Russian facet, spiritual objects, the best way you may put pictures and souvenirs in your fridge door to say one thing about your self and your loved ones. They make birthday cakes for their colleagues. They like to snack on sweet or different particular meals that they chose to be despatched.
Unlike the remainder of us, nonetheless, they reside without much freedom to make choices about their lives. Their days are ruled by prolonged procedures overseen by Mission Control, and by lists of things and their places.
Crew members do present some indicators of autonomy, although. They generally create new uses for different areas. They used a upkeep work station for the storage of every kind of unrelated issues, simply because it has plenty of Velcro for holding objects in place. They should give you options for storing their toiletry kits as a result of that type of affordance wasn’t thought-about vital by the station’s designers 30 or 40 years in the past.
We found that regardless of the worldwide nature of the station, most areas of it are highly nationalized, with every area company controlling its personal modules and, typically, the actions happening in each. This is sensible, since every company is accountable to their very own taxpayers and desires to point out how their cash is being spent. But it in all probability is not probably the most environment friendly technique to run what’s the most costly constructing undertaking within the historical past of humanity.
In our newest analysis, we tracked changes in scientific activity, which we discovered has develop into more and more various, by documenting the usage of specialised experimental tools. This work was the results of questions from one of many corporations competing to construct a commercial successor to the International Space Station in low Earth orbit.
The firm needed to know if we may inform them what services their prospects have been possible going to wish. Of course, understanding how individuals have used totally different elements of a web site over time is a typical archaeological downside. They are utilizing our outcomes to enhance the experiences of their crews.
The archaeology of the contemporary world
Similar archaeological studies of contemporary issues here on Earth can also make future lives better, whether by studying phenomena such as migration, ethnonationalism or ecological issues.
In this manner, we and different up to date archaeologists are charting a brand new future for finding out the previous, a path for our self-discipline that lies alongside our conventional work of investigating historical societies and managing heritage assets. Our International Space Station work additionally demonstrates the relevance of social science analysis for fixing every kind of issues – even ones that appear to be purely technical, like residing in area.
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This page was created programmatically, to read the article in its original location you can go to the link bellow:
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/international-space-station/25-years-of-the-international-space-station-what-archaeology-tells-us-about-living-and-working-in-space
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