The people who keep the International Space Station from falling: inside the invisible ground teams running a 25-year-old machine they can never visit

Most people assume the International Space Station is kept alive by the astronauts who live inside it. That assumption is wrong in a way that reveals something important about how we think about spaceflight. The crew members orbiting above the Earth are the visible tip of a support structure that stretches across multiple continents, multiple time zones, and thousands of people who will never experience a single second of weightlessness. The station has been continuously occupied since November 2000, when Expedition 1 began.