Serving the Orbital Outposts: Cargo, Crew and a Window

Progress, a Soviet and later Russian cargo ship derived from Soyuz, first flew on 20 January 1978 to resupply the Salyut 6 station. It later served Mir and the International Space Station and burns up in the atmosphere at the end of each mission with the station's waste.

Shenzhou is the crewed vehicle of the Chinese space program, first launched on 19 November 1999. Shenzhou 5 carried Yang Liwei in October 2003, making China the third nation to launch a human independently, and later missions ferry crews to the Tiangong station.

The European Automated Transfer Vehicle first launched on 9 March 2008 aboard Ariane 5. It resupplied the International Space Station until 2015, could boost the station's orbit with its own engines, and flew five times, each named for a figure from European history or science, beginning with Jules Verne.

Japan's H-II Transfer Vehicle, nicknamed Kounotori, first launched on 10 September 2009. It could carry both pressurized and unpressurized cargo, including large exposed payloads that other resupply vehicles could not hold, and nine flew before the program ended in 2020.

Not a ferry but a vantage point, the European-built Cupola launched on Space Shuttle Endeavour on STS-130 on 8 February 2010. Its seven windows let the crew monitor dockings and observe Earth, and its attachment to the Tranquility module brought station assembly to about 85 percent completion.

SpaceX's Dragon is a family of spacecraft. The original Dragon 1 flew 23 cargo missions to the International Space Station between 2010 and 2020, and Dragon 2, introduced in 2019, carries both crew and cargo.

Cygnus is an expendable American cargo spacecraft first launched on 18 September 2013. It was built by Orbital Sciences Corporation with NASA support under the COTS program, and is now made by Northrop Grumman, pairing a pressurized cargo module with a service module derived from a satellite bus.

Tianzhou, China's uncrewed cargo spacecraft, first launched on 20 April 2017 on a Long March 7 from Wenchang and docked with the Tiangong 2 space laboratory. It has since resupplied the larger Tiangong station, filling a role comparable to Progress and Cygnus.