In his 1984 State of the Union Address, former U.S. President Ronald Reagan announced that the U.S. would build a space station, a permanently inhabited base in orbit. It’s a safe bet that Reagan would have been shocked and disbelieving had you told him that it would be 14 years before the first component of that space station made it into space–and that that first component would be built and launched by the Russians.
But that’s how it turned out. On Friday, Zarya (Russian for “Sunrise”), the first module of the new International Space Station, soared into orbit from the Baikonur Comsmodrome in Kazakhstan atop a Russian Proton rocket. The second module, the U.S.-built Unity, will join it in a couple of weeks.
More and more pieces will join those two over the next few year’s as the most complex and expensive construction project in Earth’s history shifts into high gear. (Total cost to the U.S. alone for planning, construction and 10 years of operation is expected to be at least $96 billion U.S.) In all, 16 nations–the U.S., Canada, Japan, Russia, Brazil, Belgium, Denmark France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom–are contributing to the International Space Station, which will offer unprecedented opportunity to study the effects of the space environment on everything from pharmaceuticals to metals to, most importantly, humans. Knowledge gained on the space station will point the way to humanity’s further exploration of Mars and beyond.
The idea of building a space station certainly didn’t originated with President Reagan. In fact, you could argue it goes back more than 100 years, to a short story in Atlantic Monthly by Edward Everett Hale. Published in 1870, “The Brick Moon” tells of the construction and launching of the first space station–an artificial moon, made of brick and lobbed into space by giant flywheels. It had a 37-man crew who, fortunately (brick not being particularly airtight) did not need any special equipment to survive in space.
More scientific consideration of the idea had to wait a few years, until 1923, when Hermann Oberth, the father of modern astronautics explored the possibility and problems of the notion and coined the term “space station.” Six years later Herman Noordung of Austria postulated a doughnut-shaped station, which he called a “habitat wheel,” that would rotate to provide artificial gravity. The rotating, doughnut-shaped space station is still what many people think of, not least because that’s what the space station looked like in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
When NASA was formed in 1958, it was generally believed that space exploration would proceed in logical fashion from short sub-orbital and orbital flights to construction of a space station, from which ships could then be more easily launched (since they wouldn’t have to overcome Earth’s surface gravity) to the moon and planets. In some more logical, well-ordered parallel universe, that’s probably what happened. Here, however, space exploration was wrapped up in the politics of the Cold War and President Kennedy decided sending a man to the moon before the Russians did was more important than a space station.
The U.S.’s first space station, in fact, Skylab, was really the result of an engineering exercise to come up with some uses for surplus Apollo technology after the moon missions ceased. Skylab was manned in 1973 and 1974 for a total of 172 days by three three-man crews. (It later fell out of the sky and landed on Australia, killing a very unlucky cow.)
NASA shifted priority to the space shuttle. But in 1984, President Ronald Reagan announcement put the space station back on the front burner. There have been a lot of ups and downs since then. The project has been on the verge of cancellation by Congress on 19 occasions, but has always squeaked through. It’s been redesigned more than once, as costs mushroomed, to make it cheaper and easier to assemble. Even so, building it will be a hugely complex undertaking.
The launching of Zarya on Friday was only the first of 45 launches by both the U.S. and Russia to haul bits of the station into orbit. Hundreds of hours of spacewalks will be necessary to assemble the pieces in orbit.
The Zarya control module, although built by the Russians, was funded by the U.S. Weighing 20 tonnes on Earth, the module will provide propulsion and electrical power, computers and communication for the station during the early stages of its construction–although by the time the entire station is built, the Zarya will be little more than a passageway. Its launch went smoothly and it unfolded its solar panels and boosted its orbit from 125 miles to 242 miles above the Earth right on schedule.
The second module, Unity, will be launched on December 3. It’s a six-sided unit with a berthing port on each side to which future modules will be attached. The Endeavor astronauts will use the Canada-built robotic arm to hook Unity and Zarya together initially, then two astronauts will make several spacewalks to hook up cables between the two modules, install handrails, and generally get the site ready for the next construction crew, due in May.
The other major component to go up in 1999 will be the Russian-built service module, living quarters for the first three-man crew, an American and two Russians, who will be launched aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in January, 2000. From the moment they arrive, the station will be permanently manned for the rest of its lifespan of at least 15 years.
Canada’s primary contribution to the project is a new, improved robot arm that will help build and maintain the station. It will be launched in April, 2000, and in January, 2002, the “Canada Hand” (a.k.a. the “Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator”), will arrive.
Eventually, the station will be able to support a seven-person crew. By that time, it will be the brightest object in the sky except for Venus and Jupiter. It will mass more than 450 tonnes and will be as long as a football field, with the same amount of livable space inside as a 747 jumbo jet. Its solar arrays, which draw power from the sun, will have a surface area of more than 2,500 square metres.
The space station will provide a laboratory for scientific research that cannot be carried out during the short duration or cramped conditions of a shuttle flight. The main focus will be on the life sciences, especially the long-term effects of space travel, knowledge that will have impact on future travel to other planets.
Material sciences will also be an important area of research. It may be possible to manufacture exotic substances in space that would not be possible in Earth gravity, ranging from revolutionary metal alloys to ultra-pure and ultra-effective pharmaceuticals. Many other kinds of previously impossible scientific research will also be undertaken.
The International Space Station is not without its critics, who feel it will absorb resources better spent on smaller, more cost-effective projects and that it will undoubtedly run over-budget and behind schedule, to boot. The defenders, however, (and you can count me among them) point out that the scientific experiments that can be carried out in the space station will undoubtedly lead to breakthroughs we can’t even begin to predict, and that every dollar invested in space generates two dollars of economic activity on Earth.
But the most important reason to build the space station, as far as I’m concerned, is that it is the necessary first rung in a ladder that may one day lead humanity to the stars.
With Friday’s launch, we started climbing.
