"Together with our international partners we have learned how to build, operate and maintain a very complex spacecraft, through the good times and the bad," Bill Gerstenmaier, head of NASA's ISS program, said in a NASA statement.

"The station is still growing. More than 80 tons of equipment and hardware are in the Space Station Processions Facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC), Florida, being prepared for launch," Gerstenmaier said.

The first part of the ISS, the Russian module Zarya, was launched from Baikonur in Kazakhstan on November 20, 1998. The US module Unity was launched two weeks later by the US Space Shuttle Endeavour.

The ISS, orbiting the Earth at 400 kilometers (240 miles) altitude, has had astronauts in residence since November 2000. Eight successive teams -- a total of 22 astronauts - have worked in the ISS, which is the size of an average three-room house.

ISS crews have conducted experiments in bioastronautics, space biology and physical science.

The Columbia disaster on February 1, in which seven astronauts died as the shuttle disintegrated on re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere, disrupted the ISS program because all shuttle flights, which supply the ISS, were suspended pending conclusion of the official investigation into the disaster.

The shuttle flights are not scheduled to resume before September 2004 at the earliest.

SPACE.WIRE