(The 10-year anniversary was last week but an attack of man-flu left me so weakened that even the simple act of blinking required two hours of sleep to recover from)
Its first pieces were put into space in 1998 and its first crew arrived in 2000. Since then the International Space Station has housed a permanent human presence in space for a full decade. It is, by far, the most complex object ever put into space and – at a cost so far of £62bn – it is the most expensive object ever built by man.
Ever since those first sections were placed into orbit, critics have been asking what the point of it is and how the international community is ever going to see a return on its colossal investment? In short, it isn’t.
What nature's own Superheroes can tell us about alien life
We humans are pretty feeble creatures. Take away our clothing, central-heated homes and Bear Grylls, and chances are we’d be dead within a few months from exposure or disease. Toss our fragile spongy bodies into the freezing vacuum of space and, even if we don’t actually explode in a cloud of boiling blood (as the myth goes), without air to breathe and cosmic radiation bombarding our tender flesh, we’d be dead quicker than Katie Price can get married.
But this isn’t true of all Earthlings. As scientists have come to discover, many life-forms have evolved to be extremely hardy and others have evolved to become near-indestrucible. From superheated, deep-sea thermal vents, to pools of flesh-melting acid and even deep within the bowels of the Earth, all over the planet we have found life, not clinging on, but actually thriving in some the most inhospitable environments.
We humans are pretty feeble creatures. Take away our clothing, central-heated homes and Bear Grylls, and chances are we’d be dead within a few months from exposure or disease. Toss our fragile spongy bodies into the freezing vacuum of space and, even if we don’t actually explode in a cloud of boiling blood (as the myth goes), without air to breathe and cosmic radiation bombarding our tender flesh, we’d be dead quicker than Katie Price can get married.
