Space Station program status and research capabilities

Space Station will be a permanent orbiting laboratory in space which will provide researchers with unprecedented opportunities for access to the space environment. Space Station is designed to provide essential resources of volume, crew, power, data handling and communications to accommodate experiments for long-duration studies in technology, materials and the life sciences. Materials and coatings for exposure research will be supported by Space Station, providing new knowledge for applications in Earthbased technology and future space missions. Space Station has been redesigned at the direction of the President. The redesign was performed to significantly reduce development, operations and utilization costs while achieving many of the original goals for long duration scientific research. An overview of the Space Station Program and capabilities for research following the redesign is presented below. Accommodations for pressurized and external payloads are described.