Twenty-five years ago, Bob Cabana was at the aft flight deck controls of the space shuttle Endeavour when he fired the orbiter's thrusters to connect a U.S.-built node with a Russian module in Earth orbit.
The burst closed the short distance between "Unity" and "Zarya," giving birth to the International Space Station (ISS).
"I cannot believe it was 25 years ago today that we grappled Zarya and joined it with the Unity node," said Cabana, now NASA's outgoing associate administrator, in a call to the space station's 70th expedition crew from the agency's headquarters in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday (Dec. 6). "Absolutely amazing."
Cabana marked the 25th anniversary of his and his STS-88 crew's success by joining Joel Montalbano, NASA's space station program manager, in asking questions of the orbital outpost's crew, including commander Andreas Mogensen of the European Space Agency (ESA) and flight engineers Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O'Hara of NASA, Satoshi Furukawa of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko, Nikolai Chub and Konstantin Borisov of the Russian federal space corporation Roscosmos.
Related: International Space Station — Everything you need to know
