"Living on Mir: An Interview with Dr. Shannon Lucid"

Conducted in March 1998; available at Marshall Space Flight Center, NASA (Web site)

By the turn of the twenty-first century, space exploration was being conducted aboard space stations. A space station has often been described as a hotel in space. Once a station is launched, it remains in orbit and is visited by crews of astronauts who travel from and to Earth aboard a space shuttle. Astronauts stay for long periods of time on a space station, which provides living accommodations and research laboratories where the astronauts conduct scientific studies and experiments. A space station is built, inhabited, and maintained through collaboration of space agencies in several countries. The most ambitious endeavor has been...