ISS marks 10 years in orbit
21 November, 2008, 03:44
The world’s most ambitious space project is 10 years old. A decade ago the first segment of the International Space Station (ISS) was successfully launched into orbit. The station is due to be completed by 2011. RT spoke exclusively to the ISS crew via satellite link.
The operating life of the International Space Station (ISS) may be extended till 2020, the head of Russia’s Federal space agency Roscosmos said.
Ten years ago on November 20, 1998 a Russian Proton rocket blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Its mission was to put the first piece of the International Space Station (ISS) into orbit: a 12.5 metre, 19.3 tonne Zarya module. It was the first step of mankind’s most daring space project.
Roscosmos head Anatoly Perminov said the necessity to extend the shelf life of the ISS is due to the delay of scientific module production by other countries participating in the project.
The European space agency has recently launched its module Columbus, while Japan has sent its Kibo module into orbit. Russia will send three more modules to the space station between 2009 and 2011.
Mir-Freedom
The ISS represents our best effort at piloted space exploration. The Apollo programme was indeed 'one giant leap for mankind' but it became a political move in the Cold War game of chess. No person has walked on the Moon since astronaut Eugene Cernan’s visit in 1972. All subsequent missions into deep space have been unmanned.
The ISS is where Man can test himself and find out whether he can survive an alien environment far away from home.
The idea of an orbital space station is an old one. Both the United States and the Soviet Union successfully launched manned space installations as early as the 1970s. The U.S. Skylab remained in orbit for eight years and hosted crews three times.
Mir was world’s longest-serving space station
The Soviet version was called Salyut – a series of orbital stations launched over the course of eleven years starting in 1971. The Salyut programme was followed up by the Mir station – the design of its core module was derived from Salyut-6 and Salyut-7.
With almost 15 years of unbroken service, Mir holds the longevity record for an orbital station. It was designed as a multi-modular installation with additional elements sent from Earth and assembled in orbit. At its peak the station had seven attached modules.
The project marked the beginning of international cooperation in space. Foreign crew members had been flying to Mir since 1995, and the Mir-Shuttle programme saw U.S. astronauts admitted on board the Russian station which helped foster a spirit of friendship between the two countries. NASA's money helped keep Mir in orbit when the Russian space agency Roskosmos ran out of funding in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse.
The outpost’s failing hardware eventually forced the termination of the project. In 2001, Mir re-entered Earth’s atmosphere, its debris landing in the Pacific Ocean.
Space Station Freedom would have been U.S. outpost in space
Meanwhile, the U.S. had been developing its answer to Mir with Space Station Freedom. First announced in 1984, the ambitious plan had been scrutinised and revised for a decade. NASA tried to reduce spiralling costs and improve safety following the Space Shuttle Challenger accident in 1986.
The project was finally deemed too expensive. In 1993 U.S. Vice President Al Gore and Russian Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin announced that Space Station Freedom would be merged with the Mir-2 project – the successor to Mir – to become what we now know as the ISS.
Sixteen-strong space club
From the very beginning, Space Station Freedom was supposed to be an international project, with Canada, Europe and Japan building some modules and hardware for it. The addition of Russian experience derived from Mir ensured that all the major space players were involved. To date 16 countries and four national space agencies contribute to the ISS.
One noticeable absentee is China – the third nation to independently launch a manned space mission. However, Chinese officials say the communist country wants to join in.
The United States and Russia are the two major parties in the ISS project. They build station sectors, provide payload deliveries and host mission control centres.
Canadarm-2 robotic system in action
Canada's contribution is the Canadarm2, a mobile robotic arm system used for maintenance and assembly.
Japan and Europe have each created lab modules – Kibo and Columbus respectively, which dramatically increased the ISS’s experimental capability when they were added in 2008.
The European space agency has developed a re-supply freighter called the Automated Transfer Vehicle. The ATV delivers food, water, fuel and other payloads to the station and takes away the station’s waste. Before the first ATV (the Jules Verne) was launched in March 2008, only the Russian Progress and American Space Shuttles could deliver supplies to the ISS. A Japanese freighter is still in development.
Per aspera ad astra*
The delivery of supplies and fresh crew members became extremely urgent after the Columbia disaster in 2003. When NASA was reviewing its safety policy and upgrading the remaining shuttles, the ISS relied for two-and-half years on Russian Soyuz spacecraft to deliver crews – or rather three-and-half years, if you take into account the extra pause after Space Shuttle Discovery's “Return to Flight” mission in 2005. The station was manned by two people at that period of time to compensate for the hampered supply.
Space Shuttle Columbia disaster was a major blow to the ISS
The lack of transportation options was again highlighted after the war in South Ossetia in August 2008. Washington backed Georgia in the conflict, and there were serious concerns that U.S. Congressmen would vote down a waiver allowing NASA to buy ferry services from Russia. With Space Shuttles due to be grounded in 2010 and no replacement available until at least 2014, American astronauts would have been effectively barred from visiting the ISS. Fortunately, this scenario appears to have been avoided.
Politics aside, the station has suffered plenty of technical problems. In April 2001, all three command and control computers in the American segment failed. Houston mission control was forced to re-establish links through the Endeavour spacecraft that was docked with the ISS at the time.
In June 2007 a similar problem, but on a larger scale, hit the Russian segment. Recurring glitches plagued the six computers for several days, interfering with the station's attitude control and climate control systems.
In May 2008, the ISS crew had to do their own plumbing after their only toilet malfunctioned. Until a replacement pump was hastily delivered, Expedition 14 members had to find relief at the docked Soyuz spacecraft. The emergency may sound ridiculous, but at one point mission control considered evacuating the crew because of it.
Dennis Tito, first private space traveller
The legal framework surrounding the station sometimes gives contributing members a headache. In 2001, Dennis Tito bought a ticket to the ISS and became what media dubbed the first ‘space tourist’. NASA cautiously refers to such passengers as ‘spaceflight participants’. At the time there were no rules to regulate private travel to the ISS, and Tito had to overcome significant resistance from the American side to make his dream come true. Expedition 7 member, Yuri Malenchenko, had to deal with a similar legal vacuum in 2003 to marry via a video link while onboard the ISS.
But despite these difficulties, design changes and delays, the multi-billion dollar project is close to completion. Five modules of the ISS and some truss elements are still to be sent – including Russia's primary research module, scheduled to be launched in 2011. That will be the final piece. After that the station will be operational at least until 2016, eventually surpassing Mir's longevity record and serving as a microgravity laboratory, an observatory and possibly a space foothold for future missions to the Moon and Mars.
World's highest workshop
Strictly speaking, the ISS is not a 'space' station. Its altitude varies between 278 km and 460 km so it actually drifts through the upper atmosphere. Thin as it is, the air there is constantly slowing the station down as it brushes against it. This atmospheric drag is compensated several times a year with thrusters that boost the ISS to a higher orbit. The drag is strong enough to make it advantageous to ralign the solar panel arrays parallel to the orbit in order to reduce the effect. This is done when the station enters Earth's shade and there's no need for the panels to track the sun – the so-called “Night Glider mode”.
European Cupola module will have the biggest window in space, beating American Destiny lab
The station is kept at such a low altitude to cut the cost of deliveries and allow for heavier payloads. But when the construction is complete, it will be moved permanently to a higher orbit that will make maintaining the ISS easier and cheaper.
The International Space Station has a unique microgravity environment. Contrary to popular belief, the gravitational force on low Earth orbit is not that much weaker then on the planet surface itself – it's roughly 90 per cent of what we're used to. But essentially the orbiting ISS is constantly falling free and thus everything onboard is weightless, which is indistinguishable from being in “true” zero-g. Not surprisingly, biological and material science experiments that rely on microgravity account for a major part of the lab work done on the ISS.
The task of assembling the station is a major engineering challenge in itself, which brings invaluable experience for future projects. Any spacecraft capable of supporting a long mission into deep space is expected to be too big to be boosted from Earth in one piece. It will have to be delivered in several steps and assembled in orbit – the ISS may eventually become word's first space shipyard.
Permanent base on Moon may be the next big space challenge
However, the ISS's greatest role is that of a symbol. It's a symbol of friendship, of different nations throwing away differences and grudges in pursuit of a common goal that they could not reach separately. It's a symbol of dreams coming true, a destination for yesterday's kids inspired by Yury Gagarin, Niel Armstrong or Arthur Clarke. And it's a symbol of hope that humanity will one day claim space as its own.
Happy birthday, ISS!
Alexandre Antonov, RT
*Lat. Through hardships to the stars