First permanent ISS crew arrives

On 31 October 2000, a Soyuz rocket left the same Baikonur pad that had launched Yuri Gagarin, carrying an American naval officer and two Russian cosmonauts toward an empty station. Two days later, at 09:21 UTC on 2 November, Soyuz TM-31 docked with the International Space Station's Zvezda module. William Shepherd, Yuri Gidzenko, and Sergei Krikalev floated into a dark, silent outpost of just three modules and began switching it on. Ever since that morning, there has always been someone living off the Earth.

The first days were unglamorous plumbing. The priority list ran from the hot-water dispenser to the toilet to the carbon dioxide scrubbers, bringing the station to life one system at a time. Shepherd, a former Navy SEAL and the expedition's commander, radioed NASA Administrator Dan Goldin to request the call sign Alpha, and kept a ship's log in old naval tradition. Krikalev, famously aloft on Mir when the Soviet Union dissolved beneath him, was already among the most experienced humans in orbit and had helped open the very first ISS module in 1998.

Their four and a half months transformed the outpost. Shuttle Endeavour arrived in December 2000 with the giant P6 solar arrays that multiplied the station's power, and Atlantis followed in February 2001 with Destiny, the American laboratory. By the time Expedition 1 rode Discovery home on 21 March 2001, after 141 days, the ISS had become a working research station with its second crew already aboard.

What began that November has never stopped. Crews have rotated continuously for more than a quarter of a century, through the Columbia grounding, geopolitical ruptures, and the arrival of commercial crew vehicles. More than 270 people from over 20 countries have visited the laboratory the first crew switched on, and the unbroken human presence in orbit that began on 2 November 2000 passed its 25th anniversary in November 2025, still counting.