By Joel Achenbach
Long ago, in a dreamier era, space stations were imagined as portals to the heavens. In the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, the huge structure twirled in orbit, aesthetically sublime, a relaxing way station for astronauts heading to the moon. It featured a Hilton and a Howard Johnson’s.
The international space station of the 21st century isn’t quite as beautiful as that movie version, and it’s not a gateway to anywhere else. It’s a laboratory focused on scientific experiments. Usually there are six people aboard. When they leave, they go back home, down to Earth. Three came home Wednesday, landing in Kazakhstan.
The space station circles the planet at an altitude of about 250 miles. Faint traces of atmosphere exert a drag on it, so the station must be boosted regularly to stay in orbit. In the grand scheme of things, the space station simply isn’t very far away. The station has a phone number with a Houston area code.
Advocates for human space exploration insist that Nasa must think bigger, developing missions beyond Low Earth Orbit, into deeper space — perhaps back to the moon, or to an asteroid, and certainly to Mars eventually.
But Nasa has been struggling for years to square ambitions with budgets. The space station is widely praised as an engineering marvel, but it didn’t come cheap. The United States has poured close to $100bn into the programme and is contributing about $3bn a year to the station’s operation. Space policy experts warn that, without a significant boost in budget, Nasa will not be able to keep running the station and simultaneously carry out new, costly deep-space missions.
The United States and its partners need to make a tough call: Keep the station flying? Or bring it down?
Boeing, the prime contractor, is trying to prove that the station’s components can hold up through at least 2028. Three years ago, Congress extended funding for the station through 2020, and Nasa’s international partners — Russia, Japan, Canada and the European Space Agency — have made a similar commitment. But behind the scenes, Nasa officials are working to persuade the White House to make a decision, pronto, to keep the orbital laboratory flying after 2020.
The alternative is to crash the massive structure into the South Pacific.
The decision needs to be made in 2014, said William Gerstenmaier, the top Nasa official for human spaceflight.
Companies such as SpaceX and Sierra Nevada, which are competing for a Nasa contract to carry astronauts to the station, need to know that their market isn’t going to vanish in 2020, he said. Scientists, pharmaceutical companies and other organizations that do zero-gravity experiments also need to know soon whether “there’s a horizon for the station beyond 2020,” he said.
As the decision makers in the US government discuss the fate of the orbital laboratory, they face tough questions about the future of Nasa in a broader sense. The dean of space policy analysts, John Logsdon, former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said of Nasa: “It was not given a strategic purpose after Apollo. Why does it exist? What do you want to do?”
Although it’s true that the international space station (ISS) never strays far from Earth, cosmically speaking, it has the virtue of showing what life in space is really like. The PowerPoint version of space travel is always easier than the real thing. There are things that reveal themselves only in zero gravity.
“Stiction,” for example — the way delicate materials stick together without gravity to tug them apart. There’s no way to replicate that on Earth.
Dust has no urge to settle down, and so it clogs air filters faster than engineers had once anticipated. Bacteria grow in odd corners and crannies. Mysterious disks of zinc oxide have stopped up a water line, defying explanation.
In theory, equipment has its own storage space. But that’s not how the place looks in real life. There are laptop computers everywhere and tools Velcroed to the walls. It’s cluttered. New crews famously have to go on treasure hunts to find things that have vanished.
Mundane problems such as clogged filters and mold formation provide lessons for an eventual human mission to Mars. On a Mars voyage there would be no way to turn back halfway, so engineers have to understand in advance what could go disastrously wrong.
The Apollo model of spaceflight puts the emphasis on destination; the space station model puts the emphasis on simply living in space, in that alien environment.
“For folks like me, who consider Apollo a poor model for the future of human exploration, the ISS is the essential demonstration site and stepping stone for a sustained future in space with humans,” senior Nasa scientist Harley Thronson said.
Space is perhaps the most dangerous place that people have ever lived continuously. A stray pebble or piece of space junk could puncture the shell of the structure and lead to rapid depressurization. Day in, day out, ammonia is a concern. It is critical to the station’s cooling system, but it is also highly toxic.
“Ammonia will kill you in one breath,” said Chris Hadfield, perhaps the most famous astronaut of the 21st century.
“A towel with some texture on it is like heaven, because you can get all the dead skin off you,” Wheelock said. “It feels so good, psychologically.”
Astronaut Mike Fincke spent his down time reading science fiction, including the Arthur C Clarke novel 2001.
Picture it: A man in a space station reading a novel about people on a space station. That closed a cultural loop.
“We take these dreams and make them real,” Fincke said.
The US raced to the moon to beat the Soviets, who had their own lunar aspirations. Nasa then wanted to build a space shuttle and a space station, but President Richard M Nixon told the agency it couldn’t do both. Nasa went with the shuttle.
After aides mentioned to President Ronald Reagan that the Soviets had a space station, named Salyut, he decided that the United States needed one, too. In his 1984 State of the Union Address, he vowed to build a space station within a decade. “We can follow our dreams to distant stars, living and working in space for peaceful, economic and scientific gain,” Reagan said.
Early estimates put the construction cost at $8.8bn, but the government spent roughly that much simply designing the laboratory on paper while Congress debated whether to build it, said Howard McCurdy, an American University professor of public affairs and author of The Space Station Decision.
The collapse of the Soviet Union created the final incentive to go forward. US officials worried that Russian rocket scientists would go to work for rogue nations, spreading missile technology. In 1993, the United States and its allies brought the Russians into the fold for what would now be called the international space station. The international agreements ensured that the funds would keep flowing to the project despite changes in administrations and turnover in Congress.
Russia launched the first module in the fall of 1998. After more than 100 rocket and space shuttle launches to ferry components to orbit, and an astonishing 160 spacewalks, the orbital laboratory — as broad as a football field, including end zones — was finally finished in 2011. The ISS is modular, with one main truss lined with protruding elements and framed by symmetrical solar arrays, the whole thing rather insectoid, like something that would make a buzzing sound if a tiny version flew by your ear.
During a deployment of solar arrays in 2007, one of the arrays suffered a tear. Astronauts on the station and engineers in Houston scrambled to come up with a solution, pressed for time before the array disintegrated. In an emergency spacewalk, astronaut Scott Parazynski crawled to the remote end of a boom — farther from the air lock than any astronaut had ventured — and repaired the tear with makeshift “cuff links.”
“It was definitely a Superman moment,” said Mike Raftery, a top station official with Boeing.
A sociological truth has emerged from the international effort: American engineers are more likely to try to finesse a structure, to make it as lightweight and as efficient as possible, while Russians build things stout.
Mike Suffredini, the Nasa program manager for the space station, said the station proves that in-orbit construction is possible, and he noted that no component has had to come back to Earth for retooling.
