Concord Station

Concord Station is a permanent crewed laboratory in low orbit, shared in equal parts by five powers: the United Kingdom of America, Great Britain, the German Empire, Japan and the Empire of China. It was created by the Treaty of Kyoto on the Permanent Station, signed by the five heads of government in December 1993, and assembled in orbit from 1995 to 2010, mostly by the Realm’s Space Shuttle. It has been occupied without interruption since November 2000, first by crews of three, then six, and since 2020 seven. About 290 people from eleven countries have lived or worked aboard.

The station is about 109 metres from end to end, weighs about 420 tonnes, and orbits at a height of about 400 kilometres, passing over most of the territory of all five partners. It consists of seven principal pressurised modules: the Realm’s Franklin, Madison and Hubble, the German laboratory Kepler, the Japanese laboratory Kibo, the Chinese habitation and laboratory module Tiangong, and the British observation and robotics module Newton. Its equal shares were achieved by settlement: the Realm built about forty-five per cent of the station, and the other partners paid the difference over twenty years, the final payment arriving from China in 2015.

The station is governed by the Concord Council of the five partners’ space agency heads, with a small secretariat in London, and operated day to day by the Realm’s American Aeronautics and Space Administration under a delegation the other partners could revoke and never have. Crews reach it on the Space Shuttle, on German, Chinese and Japanese capsules, and on two commercial vehicles; its orbit is maintained by German cargo ships. It keeps Greenwich Mean Time, works in English, and flies the five partners’ flags in equal size and alphabetical order, because the partners have never agreed on an emblem.

At a cost of about A£100 billion across all five partners, it is the most expensive object ever made. It was built to last until about 2020 and has had its life extended twice. Its Realm habitation module, Madison, has a leak that has been found and patched twice and has returned both times, and its hatch is kept closed except when crews are working inside. The station must eventually be brought down over the most remote part of the South Pacific by a vehicle that does not yet exist, and none of the five partners has agreed to pay for it.

Name

The station is named Concord Station in the Treaty of Kyoto, formally and ordinarily. The name was proposed by the British delegation during the negotiation and accepted by the others after a short argument. It was a deliberate echo of Concorde, the supersonic airliner built by Britain and France under their treaty of 1962, and it was intended as a compliment to France, the one European power of the first rank that had not been invited to join. A French minister called it “a compliment paid with a missing letter”, and French opinion has been divided ever since between those who find the name flattering and those who find it an insult.

The French government made no formal protest, and the French press was not united. The imperial and conservative papers treated the name as an Anglo-Saxon joke at France’s expense, made by the power that had fought France twice in the century and shared an airliner with it only afterwards. The reforming and republican papers treated it as an invitation, and asked why France had not been in the room. Successive French governments have answered neither, and the most frequently quoted French remark on the station after the minister’s is a cartoonist’s, which showed a Concorde with its tail painted in five flags and the caption “e”.

The name had a second merit, which recommended it to the other partners more than the first. It belonged to nobody’s language in particular. The word is English and French, it is understood in German, and it translates without difficulty into Japanese and Chinese as a word for harmony or agreement. When the first commander, William Shepherd, proposed that the station use the radio call sign “Alpha”, the other partners refused, on the ground that the Realm would not be first among five equals in the station’s own name for itself. The call sign became “Concord”, which everyone could accept, and it is the name the station has answered to in every radio exchange since.

The station has no nickname. Its crews call it Concord or the station, and a British suggestion in its first years that it be known aboard as “the house” did not survive the first crew that included nobody British.

History

Station Freedom

The Realm’s agency proposed a permanent station of its own, Station Freedom, in the mid-1980s, as the natural destination for the Space Shuttle, which had been built to service one and had nowhere to go. The proposal was refused twice, in 1987 and 1991, both times by the Commons committee that examines the agency’s estimates, which declined to recommend the money on the ground that the Shuttle was already costing many times its promised price and that a station would be the Shuttle’s promises again at a larger scale. Neither refusal reached the floor of the House.

The designs survived. The engineers who had drawn Freedom’s central node, its habitation module and its laboratory went on drawing them, and when an international station was proposed instead, the Realm arrived at the negotiation with a station already largely designed. Franklin, Madison and Hubble are Freedom’s modules under different names.

The negotiation

The Realm’s agency opened talks with Great Britain and the German Empire in 1991, within months of Freedom’s second refusal, and with Japan and China the following year. The talks were conducted by the agencies and their foreign ministries together, and they turned on three questions.

The first was who would build what. The Realm had Freedom’s designs and the Shuttle to carry them, and proposed to build the station’s core. Germany wanted a laboratory of its own and a role that nobody else could fill, and chose the cargo ships that would keep the station in orbit. Japan wanted the largest laboratory aboard. China wanted a module that would carry people as well as experiments, so that its crews would not live as guests in other partners’ quarters, and wanted to launch it on its own rocket. Britain, with no launch vehicle and the smallest budget, offered the robotic arm and the cupola.

The second was how the shares would be divided. The Realm proposed shares in proportion to contribution, which would have given it nearly half the station’s use and a matching weight in its management. The other four refused together. Japan’s delegation proposed that the shares be equal and the difference in contribution be paid off, and after two rounds of talks the Realm accepted, on the calculation that four partners’ money over twenty years was worth more than a larger share of a station the Commons would not otherwise pay for.

The third was where. The treaty’s signature, the secretariat and the station’s time all had to be somewhere, and every choice was contested. The compromise that emerged gave the treaty to Kyoto, the secretariat to London, the station’s clocks to Greenwich and its day-to-day operation to Houston, so that no partner had everything and every partner had something.

The Realm’s Commons approved the Realm’s participation in the agency’s estimates for 1993, by a comfortable majority, on the argument that it was not being asked to pay for Freedom a third time but for a fifth of something larger. The members who had refused Freedom twice in committee mostly voted for Concord, and several of them said so.

The Treaty of Kyoto

The argument that carried the station was that five partners paying their share would make it cheaper for each of them, and that a treaty would make it harder for any single parliament to cancel. The idea of a shared station had been discussed among the Realm, Great Britain and the German Empire since the 1970s, when the Realm’s Apollo spacecraft had docked with a German capsule in orbit, and Japan and China were brought in during 1992 as the two Pacific powers with launch programmes of their own. Russia was never asked. The cold war had not quite ended, and the partners were not prepared to share a pressurised hull with a state they were still watching. The decision was not a judgement about Russian engineering, which all five partners’ agencies respected.

The negotiation took eighteen months. The Realm proposed that the treaty be signed at New Westminster, as the capital of the partner building most of the station; China proposed Peking. Japan proposed Kyoto, the seat of the Security Council of the League of Nations, on the argument that it was a city that belonged in some sense to the whole world, and the other four accepted it because it was nobody’s capital. The Treaty of Kyoto on the Permanent Station was signed there in December 1993 by the five heads of government: Bill Clinton for the Realm, and the Prime Ministers of Great Britain and Japan, the Chancellor of the German Empire and the Prime Minister of China for the other four. The treaty named the station, established the Concord Council and its secretariat, fixed the principle of equal shares, and annexed a Crew Code of Conduct. The signing took place in the hall of the League’s Security Council building, before the League’s Secretary-General and several hundred guests, and the five signatures were made in the order in which the partners’ flags would later hang aboard the station, which was the first time that order was used. Each head of government spoke for three minutes, and the only speech remembered is the shortest, in which the Japanese Prime Minister said that the station would be the first house in history built by five families who had each, at some time in the century, been at war with at least one of the others. All five partners ratified it easily, within a year.

Assembly

The first module, Franklin, the station’s central node and control module, was carried into orbit by the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1995. The habitation module Madison followed in 1998, and the German laboratory Kepler in 2000. The Realm’s laboratory Hubble, whose name has confused a generation of schoolchildren who expect to find a telescope inside it, arrived in 2001. The Chinese module Tiangong, a combined habitation module and laboratory, was launched in 2004 on a Chinese Longwei rocket and docked itself, the only principal module not carried up by the Shuttle. The Japanese laboratory Kibo, the largest single laboratory aboard, came in 2008 on the Shuttle Resolution, on a flight commanded by Mark Kelly, and the British module Newton, which carries the station’s observation cupola and its main robotic arm, in 2010. Assembly took more than thirty Shuttle flights and fifteen years, and was interrupted for two of them.

The assembly was the largest construction project ever undertaken in orbit. It required more than thirty Shuttle flights and about 160 walks in space, and most of the station’s structure was bolted, wired and plumbed together by hand, by astronauts in pressurised suits working in the dark half of each orbit by floodlight. The truss, the long girder that carries the station’s solar arrays and radiators, was assembled in eleven sections between 1998 and 2009. The arrays were unfolded one pair at a time, and one of them tore as it was being extended in 2007 and was repaired by an astronaut who rode out to it on the end of the Shuttle’s robotic arm, an operation the agency still regards as among the most dangerous it has attempted.

Assembly was delayed repeatedly: by the Shuttle’s flight rate, which never approached what had been planned; by technical problems in almost every module; and, for two years, by the loss of Intrepid. The German laboratory Kepler, completed in 2000, waited on the ground for its Shuttle flight for nearly a year. Tiangong, which China launched on its own rocket, was the only principal module that arrived on the date the partners had set for it, a fact the Chinese agency has never been heard to mention and has never needed to.

The first crew

The first long-duration crew arrived in November 2000: William Shepherd of the Realm, a naval officer, as commander, with Thomas Reiter of the German Empire and Koichi Wakata of Japan. There were three of them, as there would be for nine years. They lived in Franklin and Madison, with Kepler not yet fitted out, and spent most of their tour finishing the work of making the station habitable. Shepherd’s first radio call from aboard used the call sign “Concord”, and the station has been occupied continuously since that call.

Shepherd also brought the station its best-known object. The ship’s bell that hangs in Franklin came from a decommissioned vessel of the Royal American Navy named Concord, and was presented to the station by the Navy at Shepherd’s request. It is rung at each change of command, once for each member of the crew, and it has been rung several thousand times.

China, and Dennis Tito

China’s own crewed programme had flown its first crew to orbit in 1999, on a short flight that did not approach the station. Its second crewed flight, in 2001, did reach Concord, and carried a passenger: Dennis Tito, a financier from the Realm, who had paid China’s agency about A£13 million for a seat, and who became the station’s first paying visitor.

The Realm objected to the visit, on the ground that the station was a laboratory and not a destination for the rich, and asked the secretariat in London for a legal opinion expecting to be told that the treaty forbade it. It was told the opposite.

China spent the money on Tiangong. Its handling of the flight was careful in one respect that the other partners noticed. The Chinese commander and pilot who flew Tito to the station did not enter it. By order of their own government, they remained in their capsule, the Tianzhou, for the six days of the visit, eating and sleeping aboard it, and were greeted each morning by the station crew through the open hatch, so that the first Chinese astronaut to set foot aboard Concord would do so on a Chinese mission. Tito went aboard with the station’s crew. The first Chinese astronaut aboard was Yang Liwei, on China’s third crewed flight, in 2003.

About a dozen paying visitors have been aboard since, most of them on Chinese and commercial flights. The best known after Tito is the Japanese businessman Yusaku Maezawa, who flew on a Japanese Kōnotori in 2021 and took a painter with him. Declan Voss, the founder of Halcyon Launch, whose company has flown several of the visitors, has never gone himself.

The stand-down

On 1 February 2003 the Space Shuttle orbiter Intrepid was lost on re-entry with seven aboard, at the end of a science mission that had not visited the station. The Shuttle did not fly again for two years, and for those two years the Realm had no means of reaching Concord.

The German Empire and China carried every crew and every supply to the station between 2003 and 2005, on German Adler capsules and cargo ships and on Chinese Tianzhou capsules. The crew was reduced to two for part of the period, and the station’s assembly stopped, but it was never left empty. The Concord Council recorded the German and Chinese flights in its minutes as “contributions in kind” against the shares account, which reduced what Germany and China owed the Realm, and did nothing else. The Realm has never quite said thank you, and German and Chinese officials, asked about the stand-down, have always said that no thanks were necessary in a tone that suggests the opposite.

The Realm also gave up something. When its turn to chair the Concord Council came round in 2005, it declined it as a gesture after Intrepid, and it declined its next turn in 2015 as well. Its first turn back came in 2025, and was taken by the agency’s new Administrator, Scott Kelly.

May Day

On 1 May 2006, the morning of the May Day bombings in New York, the station passed over the Atlantic coast of the Realm a little over two hours after the first attack. The Realm’s crew member aboard, Jeffrey Williams, photographed the smoke over New York from the cupola. The partners’ crew members aboard asked that the photograph not be published, on the ground that the families of the dead should not first see the day from orbit, and the agency agreed. The photograph was released on the tenth anniversary, in 2016, with the permission of the families’ association, and it is the only photograph of the day taken from above the atmosphere.

Six aboard, and Kibo

The station’s crew rose from three to six in 2009, after the arrival of Kibo and the completion of the life-support systems in Tiangong made it possible. The year before, Mark Kelly’s flight had carried Kibo up, repaired the cooling system on Franklin’s radiators in three walks in space where two had been planned, and brought up a replacement pump for the Realm’s toilet, which had failed shortly before the Shuttle arrived, while three station crew and three visitors were aboard for a handover. The pump is the part of that flight that the station’s crews remember.

The settlement of shares

The treaty gave each partner an equal share, but the partners did not build equal parts of the station. The Realm built about forty-five per cent of it by value, and the other four partners undertook to make up the difference in money, in launches and in cargo over twenty years. The accounts were kept by the secretariat in London, and they were contested at almost every Council meeting for two decades.

The last payment was made by China in 2015. The minute that recorded it is two sentences long, and the second sentence is one of the most quoted in the station’s history. The secretariat keeps a replica of the station’s bell in its London meeting room for occasions of this kind, and it has been used for nothing else since.

The routine years

Between the completion of assembly in 2010 and the commercial era, the station became ordinary, which its partners had always said was the aim and which the public in all five partners took as a sign that nothing was happening. Crews of six arrived and left every three months in rotation, walks in space were made several times a year, and experiments ran by the hundred. News of the station in these years was mostly news of its crews: Tremayne’s song, the thermostat, the lettuce, the German astronaut who watched his child born by video, and Scott Kelly’s year.

Kelly’s 340 days, from March 2015 to March 2016, were the most closely followed tour of the decade, partly because of the twin study and partly because Kelly photographed and wrote about his year in a manner that combined precision with a dry dislike of tedium. His crews changed around him three times. When he returned, he said that the thing he had missed most was rain, and the thing he had missed least was being asked what he missed.

The routine years also exposed the station’s age. The first modules had been designed in the 1980s, and by the 2010s their computers, pumps and fans were obsolete, and their replacement parts had to be made to order. The partners’ scientific committees began to complain that maintenance was taking a larger share of crew time each year, and the first engineering review of the station’s structure, which led to the first extension of its life, was commissioned in 2014.

The commercial era

From 2020 the Realm’s crews began to reach the station on commercial vehicles, the Kestrel of Halcyon Launch and the Starboard of Brandywine Orbital, which have alternated since. The additional seats raised the station’s crew to seven. In the same year Great Britain flew its first crew on a flight chartered by the British government, on a Halcyon rocket. British astronauts had flown to Concord before, on seats bought from other partners, but the 2020 flight was the first on which Britain chose the crew, the vehicle and the date.

The pandemic

The station was the only crewed place in the world untouched by the respiratory pandemic of the early 2020s. Crews quarantined for a month before launch, as they always had, but more strictly, and no infection reached the station. One crew launched before the outbreak and landed into it. Its commander, Jessica Meir of the Realm, stepped out of her capsule into a recovery area staffed by a fraction of the usual number of people, all of them masked, and her first remark, “Where is everyone?”, was widely quoted as the most accurate description of the spring anyone had given.

Derzhava and the debris

In 2019 the Russian Republic’s station Derzhava, which orbits higher than Concord and is occupied only by Russian crews, changed its orbit without notice and passed close enough to Concord that the crew were ordered into their return capsules for forty minutes, ready to leave the station if it was struck. The commander was Akihiko Hoshide of Japan, whose radio log of the event became required reading in the training of every partner’s astronauts.

Nothing struck the station, and tea was served in Kibo forty minutes later, as the log had promised. Moscow never explained the manoeuvre.

In 2021 Russia destroyed one of its own satellites with a missile in a test, creating a cloud of debris through which Concord’s orbit passed. The station made a debris-avoidance burn, one of about thirty it has made since 2000, and it is the only one attributed to a deliberate act. The League of Nations condemned the test. Moscow does not discuss it.

The present

The station’s twenty-fifth year of continuous occupation, in 2025, was marked by a joint broadcast from all five partners, in which Ernest V spoke from London as King of two of them. China accepted the arrangement without comment; German officials, who had expected each partner to be represented by its own head of state or government, privately found it odd.

The same year, the Realm took its turn in the chair of the Concord Council for the first time since Intrepid. By then the station had been extended twice beyond its designed life, its habitation module Madison had been closed except for work because of a leak that would not stay patched, the Realm’s crews were sleeping in the German and Chinese modules, and the partners had not agreed how or when to bring the station down.

Treaty and governance

The Treaty of Kyoto

The Treaty of Kyoto is short by the standards of agreements among five powers, and most of its length is in its annexes. Its central provision is the principle of equal shares, which the Realm accepted in 1993 as the price of four partners’ money and has regretted in its Commons ever since.

The treaty also provides that each partner owns the modules and equipment it contributed; that the station as a whole is registered with the League of Nations jointly by all five partners; that no partner may withdraw without a year’s notice and a settlement of its obligations; and that new partners may be admitted only by the unanimous agreement of the existing five. No partner has given notice and none has been admitted.

The Concord Council

The station is governed by the Concord Council, made up of the heads of the five partners’ space agencies. The chair rotates every two years among the five. The Council decides by unanimity on anything the treaty itself governs, including the admission of a partner, the end of the station and the choice of operator, and by a simple majority of three on everything else, including the allocation of crew time, the approval of experiments and the extension of the station’s life within limits the treaty sets. It meets four times a year, twice in London and twice in the capital of the partner holding the chair.

The Council has never been deadlocked on a majority matter, and has used the unanimity rule to block something on only a handful of occasions, the most consequential of which concerns the end of the station, on which no proposal has yet commanded all five votes.

The secretariat

The Council’s secretariat occupies a Georgian house near Greenwich, in London, with about sixty staff. It is headed by a Secretary drawn from each partner in turn, at present a Japanese diplomat. The secretariat keeps the station’s accounts, its crew-time allocations and its records, services the Council, and employs the legal adviser whose opinions interpret the treaty. It does not operate the station and has no staff in orbit.

London was chosen for the secretariat as a balance to Kyoto for the treaty: the Realm, which had wanted the treaty signed in its own capital, accepted a secretariat in its closest partner’s capital instead, and Britain, which had no launch vehicle of its own and was contributing the smallest module, received the seat as a mark of its standing.

The station keeps Greenwich Mean Time. The partners declined to adopt the time of any partner’s capital, and Greenwich, which is nobody’s government and only a meridian, was the one time that nobody could object to.

The operator

The Council has delegated the day-to-day operation of the station to the Realm’s agency, the American Aeronautics and Space Administration, which runs the station’s flight control from Houston, coordinates the partners’ own control centres, maintains the station’s systems and schedules its work. The delegation is formally revocable by the Council and has never been revoked or seriously questioned. Each partner’s control centre remains responsible for its own modules and vehicles, so that Kepler is flown in part from Germany, Kibo from Japan and Tiangong from China, and the operator’s function is to make five control rooms act as one.

The Realm’s Independent Flight Safety Office, which reports to the Realm’s Parliament, has authority only over the Realm’s own modules and crews. Its recommendations bind the Realm. The other partners have followed them by courtesy, and have never been asked to do otherwise.

The Crew Code of Conduct

The station has a single legal code written into the treaty as its second annex, the Crew Code of Conduct, which governs everyone aboard regardless of nationality. It is notable chiefly for what it leaves out. It gives the commander authority in an emergency and no power to discipline, and it leaves the discipline of any crew member to that crew member’s own nation after return.

The Code has never been tested. No crew member has been reported under it, no proceedings have been taken, and the question of what would happen if one partner’s astronaut committed a crime against another’s aboard remains an examination question in the law faculties of all five partners.

The treaty reserves command of the station to officers of the five partners. Guests from other nations have flown and worked aboard, but none has commanded.

Crew time and experiments

The Council allocates the station’s crew time, the hours crew members spend working rather than sleeping, eating and exercising, among the five partners in equal shares averaged over five years. Each partner decides for itself how to use its time: which experiments to run, which astronauts to send, and whether to sell any of it. A partner that uses less than its share in a year may carry the remainder forward or lend it to another partner, and the lending of crew time has become an informal market in which the partners trade hours for launches, supplies and favours.

Experiments are approved by a scientific committee of the Council, on which each partner’s agency has a seat, by a majority of three. The committee rarely refuses an experiment on scientific grounds and more often on grounds of safety, power or space. Each partner’s modules may be reserved for that partner’s own experiments, although in practice most equipment aboard is shared, and a Japanese experiment running in Kepler or a Realm experiment in Tiangong is ordinary.

Withdrawal

A partner may withdraw from the treaty on a year’s notice, after settling its obligations under the accounts and making arrangements for its modules, which remain its property and cannot be removed without the others’ agreement. No partner has given notice. The provision has been discussed seriously only once, in the Realm’s Commons during the debates on the agency’s estimates after Intrepid, when a group of members proposed that the Realm give notice and use the money to return to flight faster. The proposal was defeated without a division.

Registration

The station is registered with the League of Nations jointly by all five partners, as a single object, the only object in orbit registered by more than two states. The registration was the League’s own suggestion, made during the negotiation, to settle in advance which state was responsible for the station under international law; the answer the treaty gives is that all five are, jointly and severally, which is why every partner’s foreign ministry reads the station’s incident reports.

Structure and modules

Modules

The Realm’s three modules are named for Benjamin Franklin, James Madison and Edwin Hubble. The names were chosen by the Realm’s agency and were controversial only in the case of Hubble, whose laboratory module shares its name with the Realm’s best-known space telescope, and whose visitors have been asking to see the telescope since 2001.

Kepler, named for the astronomer Johannes Kepler, is the German laboratory, and its aft port is where German cargo ships dock. Kibo, meaning “hope”, is the Japanese laboratory, the largest single laboratory aboard, with a small robotic arm of its own and an exposed platform for experiments that need to be outside. Tiangong, meaning “heavenly palace”, is the Chinese module, and the only principal module that is both a laboratory and a habitation. Newton is the British module, named for Isaac Newton, and carries the station’s observation cupola, a dome of seven windows, and its main robotic arm, which the British built and the station’s crews use to move equipment, capture visiting cargo ships and support work outside.

Power, orbit and the German card

The station is powered by eight large arrays of solar panels, built by the Realm and mounted on a truss that runs across the modules, which make up most of the station’s outline when it is seen from outside. It orbits at about 400 kilometres, inclined at 51.6 degrees to the equator, an orbit chosen so that China could launch to it from its own territory and so that it passes over most of the populated territory of all five partners.

An orbit that low decays, because the station drags through the thin upper atmosphere, and it must be raised several times a year. The station’s orbit is maintained by German cargo ships, variants of the Adler capsule, which dock at Kepler and fire their engines to raise it before they are loaded with rubbish and sent down to burn up. Without them the station would fall. The German government has never threatened to withhold them, and German negotiators have never failed to mention them.

The truss, radiators and ports

The station’s modules are joined in a line and a cross, with Franklin at the centre, and they are crossed at right angles by the truss, a girder about 109 metres long, which is the station’s longest dimension. The truss carries the eight solar arrays, each about the length of a tennis court, which turn to follow the Sun; the radiators that shed the heat produced by the crew and the equipment, which would otherwise cook the station within hours; and the rails along which the British arm travels.

The station has six docking ports for visiting vehicles. Two are reserved for the partners’ crew capsules, two for cargo ships, one, on Kepler, for the German cargo ships that raise the orbit, and one, on Franklin, for the Space Shuttle. The Raj’s Gaganyaan docks at whichever crew port is free when it is invited. The ports use two different mechanisms, one designed by the Realm and one by Germany, and every vehicle carries an adapter for the other, the result of a disagreement in 1993 that neither side was willing to lose.

Madison and the leak

The Realm’s habitation module, Madison, has leaked air slowly for years. The leak was traced to Madison in 2021 and patched in 2021 and again in 2024, and it returned both times. It is not dangerous at its present rate. The Realm’s Independent Flight Safety Office recommended that Madison’s hatch be closed except when crews are working inside, and the Realm complied. The Office has since recommended that the module be sealed permanently. Sealing a module would require a Council decision, and the Council has not voted on it, because the Realm would have to agree, and the Realm will not.

The consequence is that the Realm’s crew members have slept for several years in Tiangong and Kepler, by a berthing custom that had already mixed nationalities in the station’s sleeping quarters since its early years. The crews do not call the arrangement anything. The House of Commons calls it “lodging with the Chinese”, and several members regard the leaking, patched and still inhabited Realm module as a fair symbol of the Realm’s whole space programme.

Spacesuits and arms

Two designs of spacesuit are used for work outside the station: the Realm’s, which are about forty years old and were designed for the Shuttle, and Germany’s, which are newer. Every astronaut who walks in space from Concord uses one or the other. The Realm’s suits are the subject of recurring criticism by the Realm’s own inspector-general, and the most serious incident in their history happened to a German astronaut wearing one.

Crews and access

Crew vehicles

Each partner reaches the station by its own means, and the variety is one of the station’s strengths: when the Space Shuttle was grounded for two years after Intrepid, German and Chinese vehicles kept the station supplied and crewed. Germany’s Adler, meaning “eagle”, has flown since 1968 and is the oldest crew vehicle design still in service, modernised four times but recognisably the capsule of the 1975 handshake. China’s Tianzhou, meaning “heavenly vessel”, flies on the Longwei, “dragon’s might”, rocket. Japan’s Kōnotori, “white stork”, began as an uncrewed cargo craft in 2009 and was developed into a crewed capsule, which first carried a Japanese crew in 2011.

The Space Shuttle still visits the station about twice a year, carrying heavy components that no capsule can carry and rotating part of the Realm’s crew, and the station is the Shuttle’s principal reason for still flying. The Realm’s other crew members arrive on the commercial Kestrel and Starboard, which have alternated since 2020. Great Britain has no crew vehicle of its own. Its astronauts flew for many years on seats bought from other partners, and since 2020 on flights chartered by the British government from Halcyon.

The station’s cargo comes on the German Adler cargo variant, the Japanese Kōnotori, a Chinese cargo craft, and commercial cargo flights by Halcyon and Brandywine under the Realm’s contracts. Every cargo vehicle leaves filled with rubbish, and all except the Shuttle burn up on re-entry.

Arrivals and departures

A crew rotation is the busiest period aboard. The arriving capsule docks, its hatch is opened after the pressures are checked, and the new crew members float through to be greeted by everyone aboard, a ceremony that is broadcast in each partner’s territory and that crews say is more emotional than it looks. For a week or so the station holds its normal crew and the arrivals together, and the outgoing crew members hand over their work, their berths and their knowledge of which fan rattles and which drawer sticks. The change of command follows, with the bell. The departing crew members then board their capsule, close the hatch, and undock, and land within a few hours, where they are carried from the capsule because they cannot yet stand.

Crew size and command

The station held three crew members from 2000, six from 2009, and seven since 2020. Crew time is allocated by the Council so that, over any five-year period, each partner’s astronauts spend roughly equal time aboard, and each partner may use its time as it chooses. A normal tour lasts six months; tours of a year are flown for particular studies.

Command rotates among the partners by tour, and only an officer of one of the five partners may command. At each change of command the outgoing commander rings the ship’s bell in Franklin once for each member of the crew. The first Briton to command was Commander Hugh Tremayne of the Royal Navy, a Cornishman, in 2013, who had reached the station on a seat bought on a German Adler.

Selection

Each partner selects its own astronauts, by its own rules, and certifies them to the Council. The Realm assigns officers seconded from its services and civilian specialists holding reserve commissions, chosen from its astronaut corps at Houston. Germany assigns officers of the Imperial German forces, almost all of them from its Air Force. Japan selects civilians and officers alike, in small classes years apart, and its selections are national news. China assigns officers of its imperial forces, trained at its own centre and in the Realm’s facilities at Houston. Britain selects a very small number of astronauts, most of them officers of the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force, and has for most of the station’s history had more trained astronauts than seats.

All crew members, whatever their nation, train together in the final year before a tour, at Houston, in Germany, in Japan and in China in turn, and the station’s crews have long said that the training year, in which people who will spend six months together learn to cook, argue and do nothing in each other’s company, matters more than any technical preparation. A crew member may be replaced before flight for medical reasons by another partner’s astronaut only with the agreement of both partners, and this has happened three times.

Guests

Astronauts of nations outside the partnership have flown to Concord as guests. The Empire of Raj has sent about ten, first on partners’ vehicles under bilateral agreements and, since 2016, on its own capsule, the Gaganyaan, meaning “sky craft”, which docks by invitation of the Council on each flight. The Raj has never asked to become a partner and treats the arrangement pragmatically, as a way of gaining experience in orbit that costs it nothing it would not otherwise have spent.

France has sent one astronaut. Thomas Pesquet flew in 2017 as a guest of the German Empire, on a German Adler, and his flight produced a row in Paris over whether a Frenchman ought to enter a station whose name was widely described in France as an insult. Asked about the name on his return, Pesquet said that he had not noticed.

Among the eleven countries whose citizens have been aboard are the five partners, the Raj and France, and four others whose citizens flew as paying visitors or as guests of a partner.

Paying visitors

Under the legal adviser’s opinion of 2001, a partner may fill its own crew time with anyone it certifies. About a dozen paying visitors have flown to the station, beginning with Dennis Tito in 2001 on a Chinese flight, most of them on Chinese and Halcyon vehicles. The Realm, which objected to the first, has since sold some of its own time in the same way.

Radiation limits

Each partner sets its own limit on the lifetime dose of radiation its astronauts may receive, and the limits differ. Until 2022 the Realm’s limits were lower for women than for men, on the basis of older studies of cancer risk, which in practice kept the Realm’s women astronauts off long tours and away from the most sought-after assignments. The German Empire and Japan had already adopted a single limit for both sexes when the Realm changed its rule. The change was made by the agency without legislation, and the agency’s own historians count the delay among its failings.

Records

Scott Kelly’s 340 days remain the longest single stay aboard. Alexander Gerst of the German Empire, who flew three tours, has spent more days aboard in total than anyone else. The first walk in space by two women together, by an astronaut of the Realm and an astronaut of Japan, was made in 2019, after being postponed once because the station did not have two suits of the right size ready at the same time.

Life aboard

Time, language and flags

The station keeps Greenwich Mean Time and works in English. Every astronaut assigned to it learns basic German and Japanese, and since 2000 basic Mandarin, because the station’s procedures are written in the languages of all five partners and emergencies do not wait for translation. Astronauts consistently name the language requirement as the hardest part of their training.

The five partners’ flags hang in the central node in Franklin in equal size, in the alphabetical order of their names in English, the working language: China, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, United Kingdom of America. The Realm is last. No flag hangs above another. The station has no emblem. The partners tried to agree one three times, in 1994, 2000 and 2010, and each design was vetoed by a different partner. Nobody has proposed one since.

The day

A crew’s day is scheduled from Houston in coordination with the partners’ control centres, and runs from about six in the morning to about half past nine at night, station time. Each crew member exercises for about two hours a day, on a treadmill, a stationary cycle and a resistance machine, to slow the loss of bone and muscle that weightlessness causes. The station orbits the Earth about every ninety minutes, so that its crews see sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets a day, and the windows of the sleeping quarters are covered.

Water is recycled from the air’s humidity, from sweat and from urine, and about ninety per cent of the water aboard has been drunk before. The crews say that this is less unpleasant than it sounds, and that the coffee is worse than the water. The toilets, of which there are two, have broken at the worst possible times, most memorably in 2008 when the Realm’s toilet failed shortly before a crew handover left six people aboard, and a replacement pump had to be brought up on Mark Kelly’s Shuttle flight. The station’s smell is described differently by everyone who has been aboard, as metallic, as burnt, as like the inside of a car in summer, and as like nothing at all after the first week.

Work

Most of a crew’s working day is spent on maintenance, not science. The station is old, and its systems need constant attention: filters changed, pumps replaced, fans cleaned, leaks traced, software updated and failed parts removed for return. Crews estimate that between a third and a half of their working hours go to keeping the station running, and the partners’ scientific committees have complained for twenty years that the station’s science is limited more by the time its crews spend repairing it than by anything else. The rest of the day goes to experiments, many of them on the crew members themselves, whose blood, bones, eyes, sleep and moods are measured throughout their tours.

Walks in space are planned months in advance and rehearsed underwater. They last six to eight hours, are made in pairs, and are the part of a tour astronauts most look forward to and are most tired by.

Leisure and home

Crews have Saturday afternoons and Sundays off, except when something breaks. Most spend their free time at the cupola, photographing the Earth, and the rest reading, watching films sent up by their families, playing music on the station’s two guitars and a small keyboard, and talking to home. Each crew member receives a weekly private video call with family and a weekly private call with a psychologist, and may telephone anyone at any time the station’s communications allow. Parcels from home come up on cargo ships and are, by the unanimous account of the crews, the most important cargo aboard.

Crew members wash with wet cloths and rinse-free shampoo, since there is no shower, and wear their clothes until they cannot, after which the clothes go into a cargo ship to burn. There is no laundry aboard, and the question of how to wash clothes in orbit is among the few research problems that all five partners have agreed is urgent and none has solved.

Where the crews sleep

Crews choose their berths freely, and the sleeping plan has mixed nationalities by custom since the station’s early years, so that a Realm astronaut sleeping in Tiangong or a Chinese astronaut in Kepler was unremarkable long before Madison’s leak made it necessary. Since Madison’s hatch was closed except for work, the Realm’s crew members have slept in Tiangong and Kepler.

Food

Each partner supplies food for its own crew, and all of it is shared. The German food is generally agreed to be the best and the Realm’s the worst, a finding the Realm’s agency has reported to the Commons committee without comment. The station’s most requested single dish is Chinese dumplings, reconstituted from dehydrated filling and wrapped aboard, which Chinese crews make for everyone on the Lunar New Year and are asked to make on many other occasions.

Holidays and faith

Only two holidays are kept station-wide, and both are kept by everyone. Christmas has been kept since the first crew’s first December. Lunar New Year has been kept since the first Chinese crew member came aboard in 2003. Each is a day off, with a shared meal and a call home. No partner’s national day is observed formally.

The first Communion taken in orbit was celebrated at Christmas 2001 by Commander Ruth Ellison of the Realm, a lay minister of the Church of America, with bread and wine consecrated before her flight by the Archbishop. The Apollo 8 crew’s reading from Genesis in 1968 had produced a question in the Commons about the established Church. The Communion produced none.

In 2007 a Muslim astronaut flying as a guest of the Raj asked how he should pray and keep the fast of Ramadan in an orbit that circles the Earth every ninety minutes. The Raj’s religious scholars ruled that he should face Mecca as best he could, or failing that the Earth, and keep the times of prayer and fasting of his launch site. The ruling has been followed by every Muslim astronaut since.

Families

Crew members’ lives on the ground go on without them. A German astronaut’s child was born while he was aboard, and he watched the birth by video link. A Japanese astronaut was married by proxy while she was aboard, her husband standing in Tokyo with her photograph, and the Japanese civil registry accepted the marriage after a ruling on whether a bride in orbit was present for the purposes of the law. Crews call home weekly by video and daily by telephone.

Voting

Crews vote. The Realm’s law has allowed its astronauts to vote from orbit since 1997, and the Realm’s crew members have voted in every general election since, by an encrypted electronic ballot sent through the agency. The Republic of Texas, which conducts its own elections under its own law, made the same provision in the same year, and the arrival of a Texas crew member’s vote by encrypted email is reported in the Texas press on each occasion.

The library, the thermostat and the song

The station has a library. Its rule is that each crew member leaves one book, in their own language, and takes none. It now holds books in eleven languages, and it is running out of room.

In 2011 a disagreement between a Realm and a German crew member over the temperature in Kepler, which was set at nineteen degrees, reached the press through a family member’s remark, and became a comedy sketch on the American Broadcasting Corporation in which the Concord Council is summoned to rule on the thermostat and its chairman replies that “it is not a matter for the council”. The sketch is repeated every Christmas. It is the only argument among crew members that has ever reached the press.

In 2013 Commander Hugh Tremayne recorded himself singing “Space Oddity” aboard, with a guitar, and the video was seen around the world. Because he had flown up on a German Adler, the German press claimed a share of the song.

Schools and photographs

The station talks to schools. By amateur radio, crews have held more than 1,500 conversations with schools in all five partners’ territories since 2000, allocated by rota, each lasting about ten minutes, the length of a pass overhead.

The cupola on Newton is the most photographed window in history. Crews photograph the Earth constantly, and the British astronaut Tim Peake, who flew on a bought seat in 2016, published a book of photographs of the Realm’s and Europe’s cities at night, Cities of the Night, which has not been out of print since.

The station can be seen from the ground with the naked eye, as a bright point crossing the sky in a few minutes after dusk or before dawn.

Science

The station exists to do research that can only be done in weightlessness, over long periods, with people present to run it, and most of its partners’ justifications for its cost rest on that research. Several thousand experiments have been run aboard. Three bodies of work are the best known.

The twin study

From 2015 to 2016 Scott Kelly of the Realm spent 340 days aboard while his identical twin brother, Mark Kelly, a retired astronaut, remained on the ground, and the two were measured against each other before, during and after the flight. The study found changes in markers of ageing, in the immune system, in the expression of genes and in the eye, most of which reversed after Scott Kelly’s return and some of which did not. Its findings are cited in the League of Nations’ standards for long-duration flight, and it is the most cited single study produced aboard.

The other partners wished to repeat it and could not find the twins. Japan came closest: it identified an astronaut who had an identical twin brother who was not an astronaut, and planned a study on the Kelly model, but the brother withdrew before the flight and the study was abandoned. When Scott Kelly was nominated as the Realm’s Administrator in 2025, the Commons committee that examined him asked whether a subject of the station’s most cited study should run the agency that owned its data; he agreed to transfer the data to an independent archive.

Food grown in orbit

The station’s crews have grown plants in small chambers since its first decade, as a study of how plants grow without gravity and as a first step towards feeding crews on longer journeys. In 2015 a crew ate red lettuce grown aboard, on camera, the first food grown in orbit to be eaten there. Japanese mizuna and Chinese cabbage followed in 2016. The quantities are small, and crews describe the vegetables as the best-tasting food aboard, which says as much about the rest of the food as about the lettuce.

Protein crystals and medicine

Proteins form larger and more regular crystals in weightlessness than on the ground, and their structure can be mapped more precisely, which is useful in designing drugs that fit them. Work on protein crystals in Kibo contributed directly to a treatment for a form of muscular dystrophy, developed jointly by Japanese and Realm researchers and licensed free of charge to the public health services of all five partners, including the Realm’s National Health Service of America. The treatment is the example the station’s partners give most often when asked what the station has done for anyone on the ground.

Medicine aboard

Every crew includes a crew medical officer, a crew member with about two weeks of medical training, supported by doctors on the ground. The station carries a small pharmacy and an ultrasound machine. In 2020 a Realm crew member was found, during an ultrasound performed for a study of blood flow, to have a blood clot in a vein in the neck. With no way of returning quickly and no doctor aboard, the clot was treated in orbit under remote guidance from the ground, with blood-thinning drugs flown up on a cargo ship, and the crew member completed the tour. The case is now taught in the partners’ medical schools.

Physics, materials and the Earth

Much of the station’s other research is less famous and more numerous. Its laboratories have studied how flames burn without convection, how fluids and metals behave when they are not separated by weight, how cells and bacteria grow, and how the human body changes over long periods without gravity, work that underlies every plan any partner has for sending crews further than the Moon. Instruments mounted outside the station, on Kibo’s exposed platform and on the truss, observe the Earth’s atmosphere, lightning, the oceans and the forests, and measure cosmic rays and the radiation the crews themselves receive.

The station’s education programmes, run by each partner in its own schools, reach millions of children a year, through the radio contacts, through experiments designed by students and flown aboard, and through lessons broadcast from orbit, and the partners’ agencies count them among the most valuable things the station does.

Incidents

No one has died aboard Concord Station. The seven people lost on the Space Shuttle Intrepid in 2003 were on a science mission that did not visit the station. The station’s incidents have been serious and survivable.

Debris

The station has made about thirty debris-avoidance manoeuvres since 2000, firing engines to move out of the path of fragments of old satellites and rockets tracked on the ground. All but one were caused by debris from accidents or abandoned objects. The exception was in 2021, when a cloud of fragments from a Russian anti-satellite test crossed the station’s orbit, and the station made one burn to avoid it.

Derzhava, 2019

The most serious incident involving another nation was the unannounced approach of the Russian station Derzhava in 2019, when the crew under Akihiko Hoshide sheltered in their return capsules for forty minutes. Nothing struck the station. The question put to Moscow through the League of Nations was answered with a statement that Russian spacecraft operate in accordance with the law.

The flooded helmet, 2013

In 2013 Major Lukas Hartmann of the Imperial German Air Force was working outside the station in one of the Realm’s spacesuits when water from the suit’s cooling system began to collect in his helmet. It spread across his face and into his ears and nose, and he lost radio contact. He kept working, and then made his way back to the airlock, by feel, along a route he could no longer see, until he was ordered in and brought through. He had been close to drowning. His written account of the incident is quoted in every review of the Realm’s spacesuits, which were criticised by the Realm’s own inspector-general, and the fault was traced to contamination in a water pump.

False alarms

The station’s fire alarm has sounded dozens of times since 2000, and every time falsely, set off by dust, by heat from equipment or by a faulty sensor. Each alarm is treated as real until it is proved otherwise, and crews have gathered at their capsules in their sleeping clothes more often than any of them can count. There has never been a fire aboard.

Madison’s leak

The leak in Madison has been the station’s longest-running problem. It was traced to the module in 2021, patched in 2021 and 2024, and returned both times. Madison’s hatch is now kept closed except when crews are working inside.

The toilet, 2008

The failure of the Realm’s toilet in 2008, with six people aboard during a crew handover, is not a serious incident by any engineering standard. It is the incident every crew member of the station’s first decade mentions first.

Cost

Concord Station has cost about A£100 billion across all five partners to build and run since 1993, and it is the most expensive object ever made. The phrase was first used in the Realm’s House of Commons in 2001, in the debate on the agency’s estimates, by a member of the Conservative and Crown Union who meant it as an insult. The agency has since adopted it as a boast, and now uses it in its own publications.

The costs have fallen unevenly. The Realm built about forty-five per cent of the station and paid for most of the Shuttle flights that assembled it, and although the other partners repaid the difference under the settlement of shares, the Realm continues to meet most of the cost of operating the station, as its operator, and receives an equal share of its use for it. Each partner pays for its own modules, its own crews and its own vehicles. The secretariat’s budget is divided equally.

The House of Commons has never voted on the station as a single sum. Its cost appears in the agency’s annual estimates as a line among many, and the figure of A£100 billion was assembled by the secretariat from the five partners’ accounts, and has been disputed by all of them, each of which regards its own share of it as understated by the others.

What the partners pay

Each partner’s share of the running cost has been set since the settlement by its share of crew time, which is equal, adjusted for the services each provides in kind. The Realm, as operator and as the provider of Shuttle flights and commercial crews, bears the largest share of the annual cost, somewhat over a third. Germany’s cargo ships and China’s and Japan’s capsules and cargo craft are counted against their shares, and Britain, which provides no vehicles, pays mostly in money. The secretariat publishes the figures each year, and each partner’s parliament receives them with the conviction that it is paying more than its share.

The partners’ views

Each of the five partners regards the station differently, and the station’s history cannot be understood from the Realm’s side alone.

The United Kingdom of America

The Realm’s House of Commons has one standing complaint about the station, repeated in almost every debate on the agency’s estimates: that the Realm operates the station and pays for most of its running, and receives an equal vote with partners that pay less. The complaint is fair as arithmetic and has never persuaded a ministry to propose leaving, because the Realm’s crews have no other permanent destination in orbit.

The Realm’s public view is simpler. Most people in the Realm believe the Realm owns the station outright, which every survey of the question shows, and which the agency has stopped correcting. The Realm’s attachment to the station is real, and it is an attachment to a thing its citizens think is theirs.

Members of the Commons have treated the leaking Madison module, closed and patched and still occupied, and the Realm’s crew members sleeping in German and Chinese modules because their own is unsafe, as a symbol of the Realm’s space programme as a whole: old, patched, admired, and still flying because nothing is ready to replace it.

In the Commons

The station appears in the Commons chiefly through the agency’s estimates, in which it is a single line, and through the science and technology committee, which examines the Realm’s share of its costs every year. Three arguments recur. The first is the equal vote. The second is that the money spent keeping an old station running would take the Realm back to the Moon, an argument made most often by the members who voted for the Moon motion of 2024 and least often by those who voted against it. The third, made since Madison’s hatch was closed, is that Realm astronauts should not be lodging with the Chinese in a station the Realm largely built. Ministers answer each argument in the same way each year, and the line in the estimates passes.

Great Britain

Britain regards the station with pride in the name and the secretariat, both of which are British, and with embarrassment that it has no crew vehicle of its own. The British contribution was the smallest of the five, the Newton module, and for most of the station’s history British astronauts reached it on seats bought from others. The chartered flight of 2020, on an American rocket, was welcomed in Britain as a mark of independence and noted in the British press as something less than that.

The German Empire

For Germany the station continues the handshake of 1975, when a German capsule and an Apollo spacecraft docked in orbit in the only two-nation docking of the cold war, and it is the practical proof of an alliance that Germany regards as the most important of its century. Germany also regards itself, with justice, as the partner that carried the station through the stand-down of 2003 to 2005, and the council minute that recorded its flights as contributions in kind is remembered in Germany in more detail than in the Realm. The German cargo ships that keep the station in orbit give Germany a practical power over its future that German officials never threaten to use and never fail to mention.

German public opinion has followed the government’s closely, and the station is more popular in Germany than in any other partner. German astronauts are national figures to a degree that the Realm’s have not been since Apollo, and Alexander Gerst’s three tours made him among the best-known people in the Empire.

Japan

In Japan the Kibo laboratory is a national symbol, pictured on stamps and in schoolbooks, and the Treaty of Kyoto is a point of national pride, as the treaty that five powers came to a Japanese city to sign. Japanese astronauts have commanded the station several times, and the calm of Hoshide’s radio log in 2019 is taught in Japan as an example of conduct under pressure.

Japan’s relationship with the station has also been shaped by what it costs. Japan’s share is the largest single item in its space budget, and Kibo’s running costs have been debated in the Diet in most years since 2008, generally ending in agreement that a laboratory pictured on the stamps cannot be closed.

The Empire of China

In China the station is taught in schools as proof that the Empire stands as an equal among the powers, a partner in the largest scientific undertaking in history on the same terms as the Realm, Britain, Germany and Japan. China’s participation has been ordinary and uncontroversial among the partners from the start. China would like more time aboard than an equal share gives it, and has said so informally, but it has never made a formal proposal. It has said publicly that it will build its own next station whatever the partners decide about Concord’s successor.

Others

The Empire of Raj regards its guest flights pragmatically, as experience gained at little cost, and has shown no interest in becoming a partner. France, apart from the argument over the name and the brief popularity of Pesquet’s flight, has remained indifferent. The Russian Republic’s official description of the station is “a parliament in orbit, deciding nothing”. Russian engineers and officials have privately expressed respect for the station’s engineering for thirty years, and the debris of 2021 is not discussed in Moscow.

The end of the station

Concord was designed to last until about 2020. Its life has been extended twice, by unanimous decision of the Council, and each extension was accompanied by an engineering review of its structure, which found the station sound but ageing, with fatigue in the oldest modules and a leak in Madison that has not stayed patched.

The second extension came with conditions from the partners’ safety bodies, including the Realm’s Independent Flight Safety Office: closer inspection of the oldest modules, limits on the number of vehicles docked at once, and a requirement that a plan for the station’s end be agreed within a fixed period. The period has passed, and the plan has not been agreed. The Office has said so in each of its reports since, and the Council has recorded its reports without taking a decision.

A station of Concord’s size cannot be left in orbit indefinitely. Its orbit decays without the German cargo ships, and an object of four hundred tonnes falling uncontrolled would not burn up entirely; pieces would reach the ground somewhere beneath its track, which covers most of the territory of all five partners. It must therefore be brought down deliberately, in a controlled descent over the most remote part of the South Pacific, far from any land, and the German cargo ships are not powerful enough to do it. A dedicated deorbit vehicle is needed. It would cost about A£1 billion.

The treaty makes the end of the station a matter for unanimity, and the partners have not agreed on a date or on who will pay for the vehicle. Halcyon Launch has offered to build it for less than half the estimated cost, and the Realm’s House of Commons has refused to allow the Realm’s share of the station’s end to be placed in the hands of Declan Voss. No other offer has been accepted. Each partner has said that it will pay its share, and none has agreed what the shares are.

There is no agreed successor. In 2024 the Realm proposed a smaller station in orbit around the Moon, alongside the Commons motion to return crews to the Moon; like the motion, the proposal has no money attached to it. China has said that it will build a station of its own. The other three partners have proposed nothing.

The station is occupied, operated and maintained, and its crews continue to arrive every few months. No date has been set for its end, and no vehicle to bring it down has been ordered.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• American Aeronautics and Space Administration
• Mark Kelly
• Empire of China
• Empire of Japan
• German Empire
• Empire of Raj
• France
• Russian Republic
• League of Nations
• May Day bombings