Human beings have now lived continuously aboard the International Space Station since November 2, 2000 — more than 25 consecutive years without a single day when no human was orbiting above the planet — in the longest sustained off-world human presence in the history of the species

Human beings have now lived continuously aboard the International Space Station since November 2, 2000 — more than 25 consecutive years without a single day when no human was orbiting above the planet — in the longest sustained off-world human presence in the history of the species

The threshold quietly crossed on 2 November 2000 was, in retrospect, one of the more consequential moments in the history of human spaceflight. For 39 years prior — beginning with Yuri Gagarin’s single-orbit flight in April 1961 — every human being who had ever travelled to space had eventually come home. The Soviet space stations, the American Skylab missions, the Space Shuttle flights, the various Soyuz long-duration missions to Mir, all of th…