posted 09-19-2015 10:37 AM               

Although the partner space agencies — in the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada — work hard to portray the station as a harmonious home without borders, where astronauts and cosmonauts seamlessly cooperate on a common goal, Westerners really only see the activities on the U.S. side. The daily life of cosmonauts has stayed mostly hidden. Even architecturally, it is a divided station: On one side of the long, segmented truss is the U.S. segment with the European and Japanese laboratories attached; on the other side, at the far end of the Russian-built, U.S.-bought storage and propulsion module Zarya (Sunrise), is the Russian module Zvezda (Star).