Expedition 1 was the first long-duration expedition to the International Space Station (ISS). The three-person crew stayed aboard the station for 136 days, from 2 November 2000 to 19 March 2001. It was the beginning of an uninterrupted human presence on the station which continues as of 2026.
The official start of the expedition occurred when the crew docked to the station on 2 November 2000, aboard the Russian spacecraft Soyuz TM-31, which had launched on 31 October 2000 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. During their mission, the Expedition 1 crew activated various systems on board the station, unpacked equipment that had been delivered, and hosted three visiting Space Shuttle crews and two uncrewed Russian Progress resupply vehicles. The crew was very busy throughout the mission, which was declared a success.
The three visiting Space Shuttles brought equipment, supplies, and key components of the space station. The first of these, STS-97, docked in early December 2000, and brought the first pair of large U.S. photovoltaic arrays, which increased the station's power capabilities fivefold. The second visiting shuttle mission was STS-98, which was docked in mid-February 2001 and delivered the US$1.4 billion research module Destiny, which increased the mass of the station beyond that of Mir for the first time. Mid-March 2001 saw the final shuttle visit of the expedition, STS-102, whose main purpose was to exchange the Expedition 1 crew with the next three-person long-duration crew, Expedition 2. The expedition ended when Discovery undocked from the station on 18 March 2001.
The Expedition 1 crew consisted of an American commander and two Russians. The commander, Bill Shepherd, had been in space three times before, all on shuttle missions which lasted at most a week. The Russians, Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei K. Krikalev, both had previous long-duration spaceflights on Mir, with Krikalev having spent over a year in space.
The commander, Bill Shepherd, was a former Navy SEAL, whose only spaceflights were on shuttle missions, and at the beginning of the mission his total time in space was about two weeks. Questions had been raised by the Russian space agency about the choice of Shepherd as mission commander due to his lack of experience. Flight engineer Sergei Krikalev had spent over a year in orbit, mostly on Mir, and would become the first person to visit the 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.
The first component of the International Space Station was the Zarya module, which was launched uncrewed on 20 November 1998. Between this launch and the arrival of the first crew, five crewed Space Shuttle missions from the U.S. and two uncrewed Russian flights expanded the station and prepared it for human habitation.
Four of the five Shuttle flights focused primarily on delivering and unpacking substantial cargo for future crews. STS-88 launched on 4 December 1998, delivered the Unity module, the first component of the US Orbital Segment (USOS) during the mission, the crew spent several hours unpacking and setting up both Unity and Zarya. Krikalev, who would be a Flight Engineer on Expedition 1 flew on STS-88 and together with Shuttle Commander Robert D. Cabana became the first two people to jointly enter Unity and later Zarya.
STS-96, in May 1999, delivered 1,618 kilograms (3,567 lb) of pressurized cargo, 320 liters (84 U.S. gal) of water, and 300 kilograms (662 lb) of unpressurized cargo that was attached during a nearly eight hour EVA. Space Shuttle Atlantis visited the station during the STS-101 mission in May 2000. It delivered another 1,500 kilograms (3,300 lb) of pressurized cargo, and performed station maintenance. Near the end of the mission, they used Atlantis's thrusters to boost the ISS by 42 kilometres (26 mi) into a 380 kilometres (236 mi) orbit. Three of STS-101’s crew members — Yury V. Usachev, James S. Voss and Susan J. Helms — would visit the station the following year as the crew of Expedition 2.
The Zvezda module, the crew's living quarters, launched on 12 July 2000 and autonomously docked on the 26th. It was followed by the unmanned Progress M1-3 cargo spacecraft which docked on 8 August. STS-106, in September 2000, connected Zvezda to Zarya, delivered 2,700 kilograms (6,000 lb) of cargo including 140 kilograms (300 lb) of water, a vacuum cleaner, office supplies, and all of the food for the Expedition 1 crew. In total, the crew spent nearly five and a half days inside the station unloading both the Shuttle and the Progress and setting everything up for the Expedition 1 crew.
While not necessary to the mission of Expedition 1, the Space Shuttle did conduct one additional flight before the crew's arrival, STS-92 in October 2000, which delivered and installed the first piece of the Integrated Truss Structure along with an additional Pressurized Mating Adapter. This mission would enable future expansion of the USOS.
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.
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.
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 fly in space, Yuri Gagarin, was launched in 1961. After 33 orbits of the Earth, and a series of rendezvous maneuvers performed by Gidzenko, they docked the Soyuz capsule to the aft port of the Zvezda Service Module on 2 November 2000, at 09:21 UTC. Ninety minutes after docking, Shepherd opened the hatch to Zvezda and the crew members entered the complex.
At the end of the first day on the station, Shepherd requested the use of the radio call sign "Alpha", which he and Krikalev preferred to the more cumbersome "International Space Station". The name "Alpha" had previously been used for the station in the early 1990s, and following the request, its use was authorized for the whole of Expedition 1. Shepherd had been advocating the use of a new name to project managers for some time. Referencing a naval tradition in a pre-launch news conference he had said: "For thousands of years, humans have been going to sea in ships. People have designed and built these vessels, launched them with a good feeling that a name will bring good fortune to the crew and success to their voyage." Yuriy Semenov, the President of Russian Space Corporation Energia at the time, disapproved of the name "Alpha"; he felt that Mir was the first space station, and so he would have preferred the names "Beta" or "Mir 2" for the ISS.