WIKIARCHIVES.SPACE

Technicians at the Boeing clean room in Huntington Beach, California, assemble a test article for the first truss segment for the International Space Station in October 1997. The first segment, called the S0 truss, will be launched aboard a Space Shuttle in early 2000. The S0 truss test article assembly was completed in November, and assembly of the flight article is now under way. The first truss segment is 43 feet long. Eventually, nine such segments will be assembled in orbit to make up the 360-foot backbone of the station, holding the four giant sets of U.S. solar arrays to power the station's seven laboratories.