the International Space Station: Machine That Never Comes Home: How It Was Built, Works, and Why Has Spent a Single Day Empty Since Year 2000

Step outside on a clear evening and wait. Within a few minutes, a bright, steady point of light will cross the sky - faster than any star has a right to move, silent, gone in under nine minutes. That is the International Space Station: over 400,000 kilograms, moving at roughly 28,000 kilometers an hour, 400 kilometers over your head. It has not been empty a single day since November 2, 2000.Other books about the ISS are written by the astronauts who flew on it, for readers who already know what a docking port is. This one starts from zero: how a piece of Cold War hardware called Zarya became the seed of a station that would never come home, why every module had to fit under a roughly 15-ton weight limit, and what actually keeps six or seven people breathing 250 miles from the nearest hospital.Inside, you'll find: - The machine, sized. Over 400,000 kilograms, a pressurized volume close to a Boeing 747's interior, a wingspan of solar arrays longer than an American football field - built in pieces because no rocket has ever launched anything close to its total mass in one flight.- The air, made from water. Two independent systems split water into oxygen by electrolysis; a third layer of backup, solid-fuel oxygen candles, exists for when both fail. The water itself is recycled at better than 98 percent - including, as one longtime commander put it, today's coffee being tomorrow's coffee.- Fifteen nations, one machine. Five space agencies - American, Russian, European, Japanese, Canadian - have kept the station running through a Cold-War-born partnership that has outlasted sanctions, a war in Europe, and repeated threats of withdrawal, without a single day of the crew's operational cooperation actually breaking down.- What it actually cost. Commonly cited between $100 billion and $150 billion - this book gives you both figures, explains why they differ, and does not pretend one tidy number exists.- How it ends. Around 2030 or 2031, a purpose-built vehicle will fire a sequence of engine burns and guide the station down into the most remote patch of ocean on Earth - not a failure, but the plan that was always there, explained in full.There are no NASA photographs in it - every diagram, chart, and scene was built specifically for this book, and every illustration is clearly labeled as a rendering, not a photograph. This is a book about how the machine works and how it has stayed aloft for a quarter-century, and it assumes no background in spaceflight at all.It has been in orbit longer than most of its own crew members have been alive. This book explains what has kept it there.