Shuttle's first international space station trek: STS-88

The now-complete International Space Station has been called one of the space shuttle's crowning achievements, because many of its large components were only possible to haul to space inside the shuttle's roomy cargo bay. But in 1998, construction of the space station was just getting under way.

NASA's first shuttle to visit the space station was Endeavour, which launched on the STS-88 mission on Dec. 4, 1998 and carried the first American module, the Unity node to the station. Unity was connected to the first space station segment, the Russian Zarya module, which Russia had launched less than a month earlier on a Russian Proton rocket.