Zarya

The first piece of the International Space Station was Russian hardware paid for almost entirely by the United States.

Zarya — "sunrise" in Russian — was a 19,323 kg cylinder built by Khrunichev in Moscow under a $220 million NASA contract, its design traced to the TKS Functional Cargo Block developed for the Salyut programme.

A Proton-K carried it to low Earth orbit on 20 November 1998. No crew rode with it. Sixteen days later, the shuttle Endeavour delivered Unity — the first American-built ISS node — and docked it to Zarya. Commander Robert Cabana and cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev entered the combined outpost on 10 December, the first human presence inside what would grow into the longest continuously crewed structure beyond Earth.