ISS twice. He had felt excitement to have been one of the first people to enter the Zarya module (the first component of the space station) in 1998, during STS-88, and was looking forward to returning. Yuri Gidzenko was designated commander and pilot of the two-day Soyuz mission to the station, had one previous spaceflight, which was a 180-day stay aboard Mir. Shepherd was only the second U.S. astronaut to be launched in a Russian spacecraft, the first being Norman Thagard, who launched on Soyuz TM-21 to visit Mir in 1995. Shepherd expected one of the biggest challenges for the ISS would be the compatibility of technologies between Russian and U.S. Background The first component of the space station was the Zarya module, which was launched uncrewed in November 1998. Following this launch, and prior to Expedition 1, there were five crewed Space Shuttle flights and two uncrewed Russian flights to the ISS. Some of these flights delivered large modules, such as the pressurized Unity and Zvezda modules, and the first piece of the Integrated Truss Structure. The crewed flights were used for partial assembly of the ISS, as well as to start unpacking the supplies and equipment that were being delivered. Prior to Expedition 1, Krikalev expected the ISS to be very similar to his experience on Mir ten years previous, due to the physical similarities of the stations' components. The launch of the Expedition 1 crew occurred a week before the United States presidential election, so it got little attention in the United States. At the time of the mission, the station was expected to be completed in 2006, and be continuously inhabited until at least 2015. Due to several delays, including the fallout from the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, the station was not completed until 2021, with the arrival of the Nauka laboratory. Mission highlights The crew of three were on board the International Space Station for four and a half months, from early November 2000 to mid-March 2001. Major events during this time include the three-week-long Space Shuttle visits, which occurred in early December, mid-February, and at the end of the expedition in March. Launch and docking The three-member Expedition 1 crew successfully launched on 31 October 2000, at 07:52 UTC, atop a Soyuz-U rocket on Soyuz TM-31 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan; they used launch pad Gagarin's Start, from which the first human to