New photos of the International Space Station – Quartz

Americans aged 18 who will vote for the first time on November 6 will not have spent a day of their lives without humans circling the Earth in space.

The first crew of the International Space Station arrived in November 2000 and people have stayed there ever since. "I do not think the public realizes how cool ISS is," said Elon Musk in 2017, whose company SpaceX has generated billions of construction and operating vehicles for the maintenance of the station.

"We have a huge space station, it's huge," he said. "It's really gigantic. A pretty incredible structure that we have in orbit around the Earth. We should do something to educate the public about the awesomeness of the station. "

NASA and Roscosmos, the US and Russian space agencies operating the $ 150 billion station, contributed to this educational effort by sending a Soyuz spacecraft on an unusual overflight around the station . Consider the awesomeness:

The crew aboard the Soyuz has made the first detailed exterior photos of the station since 2011, year of the maneuver of the last mission of the space shuttle. The photos also anticipate the 20th anniversary of the station, marked by the launch of the Zarya module on November 20, 1998.

Zarya is the module located in the central node of the station and whose solar panels are folded into an irregular shape.

To be fair, little has changed since 2011, when most of the station's planned structure was completed. For comparison, this photo comes from a 2010 shuttle mission:

BEAM, the evolutive business module Bigelow, was built in 2016 by a commercial company specializing in space housing. It is visible at the top left of the photo:

Close-up photos of the space station give it an aged look, perfect for a vehicle that travels the world at 28,163 km / h (17,500 miles an hour) over the last two decades .

To keep it in good condition, his team of astronauts and cosmonauts must perform many jobs, during walks in the space and in the maze of wiring and plumbing inside the station , as shown by the flight engineer Serena Auñón-Chancellor during his operations of maintenance of the survival systems.

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