Spacestation

A space station is a spacecraft capable of supporting a human crew in orbit for an extended period of time. It is essentially a habitable artificial satellite designed for long-term human habitation in outer space. The term is distinct from other human spacecraft, which are used for shorter missions, such as spaceflights that carry people to and from a planet's surface or on shorter voyages of exploration. Space stations are typically used for research, commercial, and sometimes military purposes. The first space station was Salyut 1, launched by the Soviet Union in 1971. In Hebrew: תחנת חלל (Tah'nat Halal). In Russian: космическая станция (kosmicheskaya stantsiya). In Chinese: 空间站 (kōngjiān zhàn). Key contextual information includes the fact that space stations often serve as laboratories for experiments in fields such as biology, physics, astronomy, meteorology, and more. They also facilitate the study of the long-term effects of microgravity on the human body. Notable examples include the Soviet and later Russian Salyut, Almaz, and Mir stations, as well as the American Skylab, and the current International Space Station (ISS), a collaborative program involving NASA, Roscosmos, JAXA, ESA, and CSA.