The last time no representative of the human race was in space Bill Clinton was in his final year in the White House, Vladimir Putin was in the first year of his quarter-century reign, the New England Patriots had yet to win any of their six eventual Super Bowl titles, and Taylor Swift was turning 11. It was the fall of 2000 and the American space shuttle was between missions, as was the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, meaning every member of the human species was on the planet. On Oct. 31, however, all that changed when American astronaut William Shepherd and Russian cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev blasted off aboard a Soyuz rocket, arrived in orbit, and began a two-day chase of the unoccupied International Space Station (ISS), at last arriving and climbing aboard on Nov. 2.

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