Outposts on the Frontier: A Fifty-Year History of Space Stations (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of Spaceflight)

by Jay Chladek

  The RSM (Zvezda) Flies

  On 12 July 2000 the Russian Service Module was ready to launch from Baikonur. A lot more was riding on this launch than on any other, as Energia had no backup module and no insurance against loss due to their financial troubles. They would be out a lot of money should disaster befall the module either at launch or on orbit. To hedge their bets, NASA developed an Interim Control Module (ICM) based on the Transtage of a Titan rocket to act as a power module capable of reboosting the station complex until a new RSM was ready for flight. If the RSM failed, the ICM would be launched.

  Thankfully, the ICM wasn’t needed. The Proton rocket performed its job as advertised, placing the module into the proper orbit. About two weeks later, on 26 July 2000, Zvezda docked with Zarya’s aft port without any problems. The next day, primary control functions for the ISS were transferred from Zarya to Zvezda. A couple of more shuttle missions would have to fly first for additional construction work, but the wait for the first ISS crew to occupy the new station would not be much longer.

  Outwardly the Zvezda RSM looked about the same as Mir, but only two solar arrays were fitted on either side of the module. These arrays would only be temporary, as the plan was to deactivate and fold them up once the massive set of arrays on the station’s main truss were permanently fitted. Like Mir, the Zvezda had a multiple–docking port adaptor on the front of the station, but it had only three ports, with two mounted vertically, compared to Mir’s five ports. The upper port was originally intended for use by a Russian-designed solar array tower, but budget problems led to cancellation of the Russian array. The bottom docking port could accommodate both Soyuz and Progress craft, and a similar port at the front of the Zarya module could do the same as well. The station also had an aft-mounted Soyuz or Progress docking port located between the module’s engines, just like its predecessors. The RSM added 43 feet (13.1 meters) to the station’s length, giving the complex a length of just under 130 feet long. The new complex was now about 30 percent longer than Skylab and growing.

  43. The American-built Unity node attached to the Zarya FGB and Zvezda RSM, both based on Chelomei’s Almaz designs. Courtesy NASA.

  Major Construction Commences

  By mid-1999 pretty much all the U.S. and European hardware intended for the ISS had been delivered to KSC in preparation for ISS construction. With the RSM docked to the station, the last major stumbling block had been lifted. Hardware could finally be sent up as a busy schedule of shuttle missions began launching on a regular basis at a rate that hadn’t been seen since the early days of the shuttle program.

  The space shuttle Atlantis visited the ISS in September of 2000 on STS-106. The main purpose of this flight was to deliver the last of the supplies to the station in preparation for the first crew and to check out Zvezda’s systems. Astronaut Edward Lu and cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko conducted a six-hour space walk to hook up power, communications, and T. J. Creamer’s computer-network data cables between Zvezda and the rest of the complex. They also installed a magnetometer to help the station know its exact orientation in order to minimize propellant use in orbit.

  A month later, the space shuttle Discovery on STS-92 arrived at the station, carrying two new pieces of hardware in the form of a third PMA and the Z1 truss. For ISS assembly, NASA uses specific nomenclature and a coordinate system to help describe the location of modules to one another on the station. So using the orientation of the Zvezda RSM, looking from its aft end forward, with Zarya and Unity docked to the front, modules placed on top would be designated by the letter Z for “zenith.” Modules docked underneath would be N for “nadir.” Borrowing naval ship terms, modules docked to the left side would be P for “port,” and ones on the right would be designated S for “starboard.” So the Z1 truss would be the first module docked to the top, or the zenith, of the station, and it was mated to the zenith port on the Unity node. The third PMA was docked opposite of it on Unity’s nadir port.

  The Z1 truss formed the early backbone of the station, as it contained electrical hookups for the first large solar array and four control moment gyroscopes for orientation of the complex. It contained a couple of additional unpressurized CBMs as well to help temporarily stow components, such as PMAs and equipment racks, for later construction. Communications antennae were also mounted in the truss, allowing for data transmission of early scientific experiments and television-downlink capability. Over the course of six docked days and four space walks, the truss was positioned and hooked into the station’s systems. Additional time was spent transferring supplies in preparation for the arrival of Expedition 1 less than a month later. The ISS was ready to host its first crew.

  The Fate of Mir

  Meanwhile, in another part of the sky, Mir continued to orbit. After the last Shuttle-Mir mission, the station’s next residents, Gennady Padalka and Sergei Avdeyev, spent much of their mission inventorying the station’s supplies and stowing equipment that was no longer used. They also performed an EVA to adjust some of the power cables between the disabled Spektr’s solar arrays and the rest of Mir.

  French CNES astronaut Jean-Pierre Haigneré took part in the last long-duration mission to the station as part of a program known as Mir-Altair. Haigneré launched into orbit on 20 February 1999 with Viktor Afanasyev and Slovak guest research cosmonaut Ivan Bella (Czechoslovakia divided into the independent Czech and Slovak Republics in 1993) on Soyuz TM-29. Avdeyev stayed on board with Afanasyev and Haigneré while Padalka went home with Bella after a week of joint operations, on Soyuz TM-28. During the mission, the Russians conducted space walks to retrieve the last of the experiment cassettes placed outside for space exposure. On 28 August 1999 the three men closed down the station and returned Mir to autonomous operations, something it hadn’t done in about a decade. They returned home a few hours later on Soyuz TM-29.

  If things had gone according to NASA’s wishes, Mir would have been deorbited shortly after the TM-29 crew returned home, leaving Roscosmos and Energia to concentrate their interests fully on the ISS. But it didn’t quite happen that way. A commercial space venture known as MirCorp was formed by investment entrepreneurs from the United States and Europe. They put together enough funding to launch a crew to Mir to recondition it and make it ready for use as a possible destination for space tourists and the winning contestant of a planned reality television show called Destination Mir.

  Soyuz TM-30 cosmonauts Sergei Zalyotin and Aleksandr Kaleri would take part in what was billed as the first privately funded mission to space. They launched for Mir on 4 April 2000 and docked with the station successfully a couple of days later. Over the next month, the cosmonauts did their best to refurbish what they could on the station, using supplies ferried up by two Progress modules. These particular Progress craft were newly developed Progress M1s, which differed from the previous Progress M variants by sacrificing a water tank and some bulk storage capacity for more fuel. They would allow the craft to make longer reboost or deorbit burns as needed.

  A space walk was conducted in mid-May to inspect and repair some of Mir’s external damage, plus to take panoramic images of the complex. While the station was in okay shape, it was not great, as a burned wire on one of the Kvant 1 solar arrays had disabled it. Power was in short supply as degradation of the older solar arrays in combination with the damaged arrays of Spektr meant there wasn’t enough power to fully activate the Priroda module. Mir’s useful life was coming to an end.

  It had been hoped that enough funding would be in place to send another crew to Mir or to extend the Soyuz TM-30 mission, but the crew instead came home on 16 June after spending only seventy-two days in space. MirCorp had signed up its first space tourist for the flight, American billionaire Dennis Tito, much to the protests of NASA and members of Congress. The plan was for Tito to visit Mir, but finally Energia concluded that it could no longer support Mir as MirCorp’s funding sources dried up and the expenses needed to continue operating the station were becoming too much of a burden. P
olitical pressure also began to mount as NASA wanted to see the Russians focus all their attention on the ISS.

  A Progress M1 module, M1-5, was launched on 23 January 2001 and docked with Mir a few days later. The Russians had a manned Soyuz waiting for launch as a backup to help guide the Progress in with a TORU system from Mir if the Kurs malfunctioned or if Mir’s attitude-control computer needed replacement, but the Soyuz wasn’t needed. The Progress would deorbit the station, but the maneuvers wouldn’t be conducted until Mir’s orbit had decayed to below 220 kilometers in altitude in order to conserve fuel on the Progress. The natural decay of Mir’s orbit took longer than expected. But on 20 March the first of several deorbit burns was conducted to lower Mir’s orbit.

  On the late night of 23 March 2001, the final three deorbit burns took place over the course of five hours. The first two lowered the station’s apogee and perigee, while the third one set up Mir’s final reentry point over the South Pacific Ocean to the east of Australia and New Zealand. On Mir’s final orbit, onboard television signals picked up by Russian tracking stations showed Mir’s final passage over Central Russia during orbital daytime. Controllers in the TsUP paused for a bit and watched the television feed for a while. Mir would not see another sunrise.

  On the ground, coverage of Mir’s reentry in some ways mirrored that of Skylab. New Zealand issued warnings to ships about possible debris. Japan, which was directly under the orbital path of the station but north of its reentry point, also urged its citizens to remain indoors during the last forty minutes of Mir’s descent. Private individuals and media organizations visited South Pacific islands and chartered passenger aircraft to fly in the vicinity of Mir’s reentry path to both observe and film the fireball trails. The American restaurant chain Taco Bell put up a large target just off the eastern coast of Australia and promised every person in the continental United States a free taco if a piece of Mir debris hit it. It was just an advertising gimmick, though, as there was no chance of a debris strike since Mir’s reentry path was hundreds of miles to the east of the Taco Bell target.

  The station’s atmospheric reentry began at 05:44 GMT. Breakup began with the solar arrays, and eventually atmospheric stress became so great that the station broke apart along its five major modules. By 06:00 GMT the remaining debris from the station that didn’t burn up impacted safely in the ocean. Video footage of the breakup was captured by reporters on the island of Fiji. A little over fifteen years since its core module was launched and after a total of 86,331 orbits around Earth, Mir was no more.

  Expedition 1

  On 31 October 2000 the first ISS crew was ready to lift off from Baikonur aboard Soyuz TM-31. As with other important firsts, the launch would take place from the same R-7 rocket launchpad that had been used by Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin’s Vostok flight. The commander of ISS Expedition 1 was American Bill Shepherd. Accompanying him would be Russian cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko, who were both Mir veterans. Compared to the body of experience both Russian cosmonauts had, Bill Shepherd’s accumulated time in orbit among three shuttle missions was only just over two weeks. The Russian managers on the ground were a bit concerned about that, but the crew themselves managed to integrate with no problems. The three men were a team.

  Bill Shepherd’s path to spaceflight was somewhat unusual. Shepherd was a graduate of the Naval Academy and earned a degree in aerospace engineering, but rather than taking on pilot training or some other field related to aircraft, Bill instead decided to take on the intense training required to become a Navy SEAL. The SEALs are the U.S. Navy’s special forces arm, and the training required has a very high dropout rate compared to most of the special forces of other U.S. military branches. Even if a SEAL trainee can handle the mental pressures, sometimes their bodies can give out physically, and it might take more than one attempt to get through all levels of training successfully. Bill Shepherd succeeded and joined the elite SEAL ranks in the early 1970s, while also earning an ocean engineering degree from MIT in 1978.

  Shepherd joined NASA’s astronaut ranks in 1984 after three tries. His SEAL training became unexpectedly useful as he was involved in salvage operations off the coast of Florida to recover debris from the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986. His first mission into space was on STS-27 in 1988, which deployed a classified satellite payload for the DoD. On that mission, Shepherd gained a reputation as a fun-loving practical joker, according to the book Riding Rockets, written by fellow STS-27 astronaut Mike Mullane. On that flight, Shepherd let a piece of breakfast sausage loose in the cabin and had the other crewmembers believing it was a piece of fecal material from an apparent malfunction of the shuttle’s toilet before realizing they’d been had.

  44. The crew of ISS Expedition 1: Krikalev, Shepherd, and Gidzenko. Courtesy NASA.

  Shepherd gained a reputation as a capable astronaut during the next decade as he was assigned management jobs in NASA’s space station program in 1993 to try, as he described it, “to bring order to what had been eight years of chaos.” As Shepherd described the ISS situation in those days, the problems weren’t with the astronauts, cosmonauts, or engineers in both programs but rather with the higher echelons of management and at the political level. Due to his hard work on the ISS, he was the choice among some members of NASA’s management to become the first astronaut to visit Mir, but Norm Thagard was chosen instead. Still, Shepherd became a natural choice when he was selected by NASA to become the first commander of the ISS.

  During his training in Star City, Shepherd started a new tradition by creating a bar in the basement of one of the American-owned duplexes. Known today as Shep’s Bar, it provided a nice place for training-station crewmembers of all nationalities to unwind in a casual yet somewhat private setting. More than just a place to drink, the bar has a jukebox, a piano, a billiard table, and several benches. The bar is still used to this day, even though Bill Shepherd himself has long since retired from NASA.

  By the time Expedition 1 launched, the crew had been training together for about five years. After launch and a little over two days in orbit spent catching up with the station, the crew docked Soyuz TM-31 successfully. The crew entered the station, and on the early morning of 2 November 2000, the ISS was occupied. From that point on, except for brief periods when crewmembers would transfer a Soyuz craft to a different docking port, the ISS would be manned continuously.

  The first month was very busy, and the crew spent it unpacking and activating equipment. Shepherd commented during a space-to-ground interview that the biggest challenge for him was packing thirty hours of work into an eighteen-hour day. The crew communicated with one another speaking half-English and half-Russian, sometimes with both languages in a sentence in a form Shepherd called “Rusglish.” Krikalev was a fluent English speaker, and Gidzenko was not far behind, while Shepherd did his part to keep his own Russian-language skills current. All communications with controllers at the TsUP were done in Russian. Each crewmember had their assigned tasks in orbit and sometimes didn’t get to work in the same areas of the station, but each day at mealtimes, they all tried to eat together in order to share stories and keep each other updated as to the status of things.

  Not long after arriving at the ISS, the crew came to a decision regarding the name of the station. Naming the ISS had been a point of political contention for several years. In NASA circles, it was known as “Freedom” and later “Alpha,” while the Russians had their own ideas for what to call it. The name International Space Station is rather cumbersome to say in Russian, so Shepherd used his privilege as Expedition 1 commander to give the station the radio call sign “Alpha,” which is the name of the first letter in the Greek alphabet. While it wouldn’t officially become the name of the ISS, it was at least a start, and the station was known as “Alpha” during Expedition 1’s stay.

  Visitors

  “Alpha” received its first Progress module on 18 November. The cargo vehicle did a normal approach, but the onboard docking sy
stem failed, so Gidzenko had to dock the craft using the station’s TORU system. While TORU had been a source of controversy on Mir due to its use in something it wasn’t originally intended for, it is a very capable system when used properly. One advantage the ISS TORU system has over its Mir counterpart is that it has a built-in simulator, meaning it can be used to help keep docking skills current.

  After a month in orbit, the space shuttle Endeavour paid a visit to the station on mission STS-97. The primary payload for this flight was the P6 truss, containing the first set of solar arrays for the ISS. The small arrays on the Russian segment had been barely adequate to support the needs of the first crew. With these new arrays, the station’s power generation capability would be increased fivefold and support the next phase of station expansion. Also delivered on this mission was a set of folded-up heat radiators. Once unfurled, these radiators would allow waste heat from the station’s electronics to be expelled in order for the interior of the ISS to be maintained at a comfortable temperature.