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

by Jay Chladek

  Pettit was also an avid photographer. Most members of the astronaut office were well trained in photography, since the skill is practically a requirement for many missions, but Pettit tried to push the envelope of what was possible with Earth photography aboard the ISS. One of his activities in orbit was to take pictures of cities on Earth at night. But even with the best camera settings, it can be very tough to get a good exposure, due to how fast the planet rotates underneath the station. A slow exposure with a handheld camera tends to produce a blurry image with streaks.

  To compensate for these problems, Pettit used a leftover piece of equipment, an IMAX camera mount. IMAX cameras were flown up during two ISS missions on associated shuttle flights to film footage for the IMAX film Space Station, narrated by Tom Cruise. The IMAX cameras themselves were not on board for Expedition 6, since the film can’t be stored in orbit for a long time as radiation exposure eventually clouds it. But the rig used to mount a camera to one of the view ports on the ISS for filming outside was still on board.

  Pettit modified the rig to support a digital still camera with a telephoto lens. To help compensate for the station’s movement, he modified a pivot mechanism on the mount and used a cordless screwdriver with a jackscrew to act as a movement tracker. When a city came into view, Pettit would use the screwdriver to track the camera on the target and compensate for the station’s motion while it took a long photo exposure of a city at night. The results were magnificent, as bright details from the city lights could be seen clearly.

  As fun as the night photography was for Pettit, one of his proudest accomplishments was a series of videos he filmed on Expedition 6 that he called Saturday Morning Science. Rather than packing his personal flight kit mostly with trinkets and collectibles to fly for family members, Pettit packed it instead with some simple tools, such as small picks, syringes, tubing, stiff wire, and the like. In combination with other items found on the ISS, Pettit used the items he brought along to conduct simple scientific experiments on his days off. Using the wire to make hoops or various diameters that he could steadily brace in front of a camera lens, Pettit would fill these hoops with water droplets of various sizes. The water’s surface tension would keep the droplets from floating free, and Pettit could perform all sorts of experiments, such as injecting them with food coloring, putting air bubbles into them, or seeing how droplets just behave in zero gravity all by themselves.

  A very interesting experiment, which Pettit called “Bubble War,” was the result of sticking an Alka-Seltzer tablet in a water droplet. The tablet fizzed and produced dozens of tiny carbon dioxide bubbles inside the droplet. Eventually, the small bubbles would touch one another, rupture, and the gas pockets would join to produce larger bubbles. The process would continue until all that was left was one large bubble at the center of the water droplet. With a syringe, Pettit could pull that bubble completely out, leaving just the droplet once again. After his flight, Pettit used these videos as part of his public-speaking engagements. Pettit wouldn’t tell the audience what was going to happen in the videos. It was up to the viewers to hypothesize the result before he would let the video run and show the results.

  Pettit also found that the surface tension of water could be used to anchor a can of food to a table during mealtime in the Zvezda module. It’s similar to picking up a glass of ice water from a smooth coaster on a table. Sometimes the surface tension of the condensed water keeps the coaster stuck to the glass. In orbit Pettit would take a can and moisten the back of it with a drop of water, and it would stick to a nice flat surface, which would keep the can from drifting away. For Pettit, eating in zero gravity became an art form as he could coax food out of a can with only a set of chopsticks, using surface tension to keep the food on the sticks until it got to his mouth.

  These experiments, performed with just simple tools and a curious mind, make a great example for why humans should be flying in space. When Don Pettit conceived the ideas for these experiments, he didn’t know what the results were going to be, but he performed the first few and used the results to help come up with a set of ideas for what to try next. A person can do that much easier than a machine and can do it potentially faster than a space probe that might require days of reprogramming on the ground and transmission of new instructions.

  Handover

  On 28 April 2003 a visiting spacecraft finally arrived at the ISS in the form of Soyuz TMA-2. On board was the two person Expedition 7 crew of cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and NASA astronaut Ed Lu. With their arrival, Expedition 6 would be free to return home on Soyuz TMA-1. Expedition 7 was to have been a three-person crew, but it was reduced to two in order to stretch out the station’s supplies and to allow for support only from Soyuz and Progress craft. Permanent occupancy on the ISS would continue while the shuttle was grounded, but the scientific workload would be cut back, as Expedition 7 would only conduct fifteen experiments from the Destiny laboratory during their occupancy period.

  While Expedition 6 had trained on the Soyuz systems as part of their pre-mission exams, their original ride home was supposed to be the shuttle. However, every resident ISS crewmember is fitted for a seat liner and a Sokol pressure suit. Even if a shuttle is used for the trip up, the seat liners and Sokol suits are carried since the Soyuz acts as the lifeboat. These items are transferred into the Soyuz once the shuttle docks, and ISS crewmembers run a final check of their Sokol suits before the shuttle leaves to make sure everything will work. The fitting of the suits and liners takes place in Russia at the Zvezda facility, which has been making pressure suits going back to before the days of Yuri Gagarin. The suit liners are custom-fitted to each crewmember as a person sits in a seat mock-up and a fast-drying plaster is poured around them to get a casting of their backside. Then the crewmember being fitted gets out of the seat, and technicians sculpt the mold to remove pressure points. Once a mold is taken and a liner is made from it, the crewmember then dons a Sokol suit and sits in the liner for additional fit checks.

  The need for fit checking and snug suit liners would become of great importance on Soyuz TMA-1’s return to Earth. TMA stood for “Transport Modified Anthropometric,” in Russian. It featured a few minor changes from the older TM series Soyuz. The internal size of the TMA’s descent module was expanded slightly to allow taller crewmembers to fit inside, so astronauts like Scott Parazynski who are slightly too tall to fit into a Soyuz TM can potentially fly on a Soyuz TMA spacecraft. Improvements were also made to the TMA’s Argon computer system and displays. It was unusual, compared to previous practices, to send a new design of spacecraft, even if it was a modification, into space manned on its very first flight, but Energia and Roscosmos were still cash-strapped and couldn’t afford a dedicated test flight. The systems alterations were very minor compared to previous Soyuz upgrades anyway.

  The TMA-1 had docked properly months before, and all seemed well when it undocked from the station on 3 May 2003. In addition to the crew, some experiment results were being brought home, and Pettit had several digital videocassettes packed in a bag on his lap. Many of the cassettes contained his Saturday Morning Science footage. While the ISS had the ability to downlink high-resolution photographs to the ground, high-resolution video still took up too much memory on available computers back in 2003. Don Pettit had to haul his own videos home.

  Reentry began as normal with a controlled descent, but a fault developed with the computer system, causing it to switch to a backup reentry mode. Instead of coming home at a relatively gentle 3 to 5 g’s, Soyuz TMA-1 experienced a ballistic descent of over 15 g’s. One might think that compared to six months of zero gravity, this crushing type of reentry would be unbearable. But according to Don Pettit, the custom suit liner and seated positions used for this type of reentry made it at least tolerable, and the crew didn’t black out. They landed safely, albeit three hundred miles short of their planned landing point.

  Upon landing, the crew were on their own for over an hour, as there were no recovery forces in their
area and they didn’t land near any communities. Because one of the antennae was ripped off in the descent and two others did not deploy, they had no communication with recovery forces until Budarin made use of an emergency satellite phone. Getting out of the craft required a lot of effort; even with regular exercise to prepare them for gravity, their bodies weren’t used to 1 g. But eventually, the crew were recovered safely and returned home with no injuries. Of the three crewmembers of Expedition 6, Budarin and Bowersox wouldn’t fly another mission, but Don Pettit would fly again a couple of more times.

  Expedition 7

  During the long months that Lu and Malenchenko were in orbit, a couple of space firsts were achieved. Yuri Malenchenko became the first person to get married in space. He married his girlfriend over the radio while Ed Lu played wedding music on an electronic keyboard. Both men had flown in space together and conducted an ISS assembly space walk on STS-106 in 2000. Being of Chinese American descent, Ed Lu was in a unique position to congratulate China on being the third country to launch a citizen into orbit on a rocket and spacecraft of their own when Chinese taikonaut Yang Liwei rocketed into space aboard Shenzhou 5 (a Chinese term meaning “Magic Vessel”). The flight took place on 15 October 2003 and lasted twenty-one hours before Liwei returned safely.

  Of the cosmonauts who have been part of the ISS program, Yuri Malenchenko is a hard worker and a very experienced cosmonaut, having taken part in a space walk using American equipment on a previous shuttle flight. Malenchenko’s piloting skills were successfully tested during a Mir stay as he used the TORU to successfully dock a Progress when the automatic system failed. He flew fighters for many years as a pilot in the Soviet Air Force before becoming a cosmonaut in 1987. In official photographs taken of Malenchenko, he never smiles on camera, primarily due to his Russian cultural upbringing, but many who have worked with him say that he is known to crack big sincere smiles when the cameras aren’t rolling.

  47. The ISS as it looked from late 2002 to 2006. Visible are the main truss, the P6 solar array temporarily attached at Z1, and the Destiny Laboratory module. Courtesy NASA.

  Expedition 8

  On 18 October 2003, Soyuz TMA-3 lifted off from Baikonur with three crewmembers on board. Mir veterans Michael Foale and Aleksandr “Sasha” Kaleri would crew the ISS as part of Expedition 8, with Foale in command. Joining them was Spaniard Pedro Duque, an ESA astronaut and veteran of STS-95. Duque would use his brief time in orbit during the crew handover to conduct experiments using ESA equipment in the station’s Destiny laboratory as part of a Spanish ESA program called Mission Cervantes in honor of the sixteenth-century Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes. During his eight days in orbit, Duque devoted about forty hours of his time to conducting his experiments.

  In his diary, Duque helped to debunk the myth of the space pen and pencil. A popular Internet story stated that NASA had spent plenty of money to engineer a special pen to work in the zero gravity of outer space, while cosmonauts just used a pencil instead. Duque found out during training that the Russians had always used standard ballpoint pens on their missions, even though many of his colleagues said a pen would not write properly in orbit. So to help prove that a special pen was not required, he took a common ballpoint pen into orbit to write in his diary, and it wrote just fine with no problems.

  Duque returned home with Lu and Malenchenko aboard Soyuz TMA-2. The descent module performed a controlled reentry with no repeat of TMA-1’s problems. Foale and Kaleri were left to continue the caretaker role aboard the ISS. For both men, this mission was much less eventful than their previous visits to Mir. Both men conducted a space walk on 26 February 2004 from the Pirs airlock, using Orlan suits to do some maintenance work on the Russian side before a malfunction in Kaleri’s suit forced the EVA to be cut short. It was the first time a space walk had been conducted on the ISS using only two people with no one inside to mind the store while they were away.

  The Return of Shuttle

  During the next three ISS expeditions, things went rather well in orbit. Expedition 9 crewmembers Gennady Padalka and Michael Fincke took over from Expedition 8 in April 2004. Joining them for the handover was Dutch ESA astronaut André Kuipers for a week-long set of experiments. Foale, Kaleri, and Kuipers returned home aboard Soyuz TMA-3. Salizhan Sharipov and Leroy Chiao then took over for Padalka and Fincke, on Expedition 10 from 16 October 2004 to 24 April 2005. Joining Expedition 10 for the trip up was military cosmonaut Yuri Shargin, who apparently performed some classified tasks while in orbit. The trip home for Padalka, Fincke, and Shargin was a little eventful as they had to perform a manual undocking due to a faulty battery on the Soyuz. But they returned home safely.

  Sharipov and Chiao conducted two space walks from the Pirs compartment with Orlan suits during their stay, in order to prepare the station for the arrival of the first ESA Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV). The ATV was designed to be a heavy-lift vehicle, capable of hauling up cargo that was too big for Progress when a shuttle wasn’t available. A total of six ATVs were originally planned for flights to the ISS, with the launches taking place from the ESA facility in French Guiana and using the Ariane 5 rocket. While the first ATV flight was planned for 2006, one wouldn’t finally visit the station until 2008. For docking, the ATV would use the aft Soyuz port on the station’s Zvezda service module.

  Expedition 11 aboard Soyuz TMA-6 came next. Sergei Krikalev was in command, with NASA astronaut John Phillips as flight engineer. Italian ESA astronaut Roberto Vittori occupied the third seat of the Soyuz and came home with the Expedition 10 crew of Sharipov and Chiao aboard TMA-5. The reentry of the Soyuz was perfect, and the craft touched down right next to Russian recovery forces.

  The Expedition 11 crew would be on board when the shuttle program finally got off the ground again. The shuttle Discovery would conduct a newly revised STS-114 mission. In addition to its ISS resupply duties and EVA assembly tasks, the crew would also test out several new shuttle repair techniques using different tile-filler materials and a patch material designed to fill small holes in the RCC panels.

  The shuttle would also carry a new device into orbit, the Orbiter Boom Sensor System (OBSS). The OBSS was built using a fifty-foot segment of an unused shuttle RMS, and it was fitted with special cameras and a laser range imager at one end, a grapple fixture at the other, and a second grapple fixture midway along its length. Using the OBSS, the shuttle’s RMS could inspect the shuttle’s RCC and tile panels for damage in spots that couldn’t normally be reached by just the RMS. The cameras and sensors built into the OBSS could scan the tiles and generate a three-dimensional picture if damage was found, to determine if a dent in a tile was deep enough to cause concern.

  Additional cameras were fitted to the shuttle’s SRBs and ET, and these would film the shuttle’s ride into orbit. The SRB camera footage wouldn’t be available until the boosters were recovered after splashdown, but the ET camera would deliver real-time video footage back to mission control until just after the shuttle separated from it. Still cameras in the shuttle’s fuel line attachment wells would take pictures of the tank during jettison, and astronauts on board would take additional photographs with handheld cameras.

  As a final inspection procedure, before beginning its final approach to the station from a few hundred meters away, the shuttle would conduct a rendezvous pitch maneuver, a type of slow backflip. When the bottom was visible from the ISS, crewmembers aboard the station would shoot pictures with their onboard digital cameras, using 400 mm and 800 mm telephoto lenses. The images would be transmitted back to Houston for detailed analysis to clear the shuttle’s heat shield for return. All this preparation was designed to see if a debris strike caused any damage to the orbiter.

  On 26 July 2005 all was finally ready. The mission was commanded by Eileen Collins on her fourth spaceflight. She was the first female shuttle commander of the program, and this was her second mission in this role. Jim Kelly would serve as pilot. Space walks on the mission would be conducted by Stephen
Robinson and JAXA (Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Soichi Noguchi. Mir veteran Andy Thomas as well as Wendy Lawrence and rookie Charlie Camarda would help with EVA operations from inside the shuttle and ISS, while also helping with the transfer of station supplies.

  The space shuttle Discovery lifted off from pad 39B at exactly 10:39 EDT. On the way up, it scored roadkill as the nose of the ET managed to hit a turkey buzzard on ascent. The bird did no damage to the shuttle as it was a relatively slow-speed collision, but the unconscious bird was vaporized by the shuttle’s exhaust plumes as it fell to Earth. The rest of the climb into orbit seemed uneventful as the new cameras did their job. Inspections the next day revealed no damage to the critical areas of the shuttle’s heat shield, but analysis of the ET camera footage revealed that a large chunk of foam broke off from the tank about 127 seconds after liftoff. While the foam chunk didn’t strike the orbiter, it was big enough to potentially do serious damage. NASA administrator Michael Griffin announced that future shuttle missions would be delayed until the problem of foam loss was fully corrected.