48 to 8 Hours.

Getting up to the Space Station.

Twenty years ago it took just over two days to get up to the Russian MIR Space station, this week we saw the three way Russian, ESA, U.S. mission do it in less than eight hours even with a technical fault. What amazing achievements with the tried and tested second generation MM Soyuz-Progress vehicles over that of the flamboyant yet very dangerous U.S. Space shuttle.

Timings into space are speeding up, while duration flights of just over one year at the moment cuts a possible manned trip to Mars in the next 30 years. The joint Moon base, will perhaps prepare us for that giant return trip to Mars, in say 50 years from now. 

There remains so many dangers in space travel, after nearly 58 years from Sputnik, that the next 50 will give us enough time to develop better space ships perhaps between the ISS and the Moon base. Familiarity with living their will be the key to any future Mars mission and then further out?

ISS.

(International Space Station).

Today the world has the ISS a space station with many space partners. Predominately the U.S., Europe (ESA), Russia, Japan. We can observe this object very easily from earth and millions of people look at it each night as it flies over some part of our planet.

The craft is the largest object yet put into space by humanity, but its roots came out of the cold war period space race between the former Soviet Union and the United states of America. Leaving aside that race we just want to concentrate on the history of space stations and it was the Russians who first launched a series of Soyuz ships. They were small and cramped, but the Russians started to build up manned flight hours from them. Even after they did not achieve the moon landings, they continued on with this plan.

The U.S. launched their Space Lab, but the U.S. did not seem to move on from there for some time. Eventually they had a link up between a Soyuz and the Skylab. The Russians moved on to develop a much bigger Soyuz, known as the Mir. This was technically the end for the Russians in space station building.

The ISS now replaces both previous systems, which were probably used for spying on each other. This new platform has improved on both countries technologies and has become a laboratory for various scientific experimentation and discovery.