Houston, we have a podcast.

Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center,

episode 168, Expedition 1.

I'm Gary Jordan and I'll be your host today.

On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, astronauts all to let you know what's going on in the world of human spaceflight.

20 years ago, on November 2, 2000, a crew of three spacefarers arrived at the International Space Station with the mission to bring the new

orbital complex to life. We call these missions expeditions, and the crew was expedition one.

The trio was NASA's William Shepard, commander. crew was The Expedition 1.

NASA's William Shepard, commander of Expedition 1

and Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikelev and Yuri Gidzenko,

both seasoned veterans of long-duration missions

aboard the Russian space station Mir that was in orbit.

These three spent 136 days aboard the Space Station and set the course for what would be

an unbroken streak of human presence in space.

We like to tout often that if you're, I guess at this point,

younger than 20, you've never lived in a world where there haven't been humans in space at any given point in your life.

To get to that point where humans started inhabiting the space station was not an easy thing.

So to tell the full story of Expedition 1, we have William Shepard, goes by Shep.

He was a manager of the Space Station program, a seasoned veteran in space, and the commander

of Expedition 1 to the station.

We talk about what it took to get to Expedition 1,

the mission itself,

...