Humans have lived in space without a break since November 2000
On a single day in 2000, a three-man crew floated into the ISS and began an unbroken streak of off-world living that still runs today.
Since November 2, 2000, there has not been a single moment when no human was living in space.
That is the day the first resident crew, Expedition 1, docked with the International Space Station: NASA astronaut Bill Shepherd and Russian cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev, who had launched two days earlier from Kazakhstan aboard a Soyuz. They arrived to a station that was little more than a few connected modules, and their job was to switch it on — activating life support, communications, and the systems that would make it habitable for everyone who followed.
They stayed 136 days. Crews have rotated continuously ever since, handing the orbiting laboratory off from one team to the next without ever leaving it empty.
The arrangement is also a quiet feat of diplomacy, with American, Russian, and many partner-nation astronauts sharing one cramped outpost circling Earth roughly every 90 minutes. By late 2025, that uninterrupted human presence had passed the quarter-century mark, the longest continuous habitation of space in history.
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