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

by Jay Chladek

  As Parazynski was riding to the array’s damage site, shuttle crewmate Paolo Nespoli was reading to him a page of cautionary notes and warnings for what Scott was to observe when around the array as brief reminders. As Parazynski described it, “I quipped, ‘Well that’s a lot of stuff. Is there anything that I can touch?’ [Nespoli] said, ‘Wait, I’m only halfway done.’ It was really an impressive list of things [I] could not touch.”

  Everything Scott used to touch the solar array was specially insulated. He had a set of cutters for the guide wire with insulated handles and an L-shaped, hockey stick–like tool to allow him to either push the panels away or pull them toward him. Getting to a guide hole, Scott would use the hockey stick to pull a panel toward him with one hand. Next, he would align the cuff link block at one end lengthwise with the wire and push it through the guide hole with his other hand while making sure not to let his hands contact the array itself. Threading a cuff link into a guide hole on an array is sort of like trying to stick a piece of thread through a hole in a sewing needle. Once the block was completely through the hole and on the other side, Scott would try to catch the block on the back side of the array to fold it out. To do this, he would use the hockey stick to push the array away from him while putting tension on the cufflink to make sure it was fitted securely.

  Parazynski admits this was a job best suited for three hands, but he made it work. He attached a total of five cuff links to the arrays, having to thread blocks through holes ten times. He made it look easy with skills honed as one of NASA’s most experienced spacewalkers. With the job done, the array was carefully unfurled the rest of the way while Parazynski and Wheelock watched. The cuff links worked, and the array finally snapped into its proper position with no unsightly sags or gaps. The best part was that the array was still generating electricity at 100 percent capacity. None of the panels themselves were damaged.

  50. Scott Parazynski on the OBSS arm extension waves after attaching five cuff links to the damaged P6 solar array. Courtesy NASA.

  With the repair completed, the STS-120 crew wrapped up their tasks while Anderson and Tani finished their crew swap. Discovery undocked a few days later. Pam Melroy, using her commander’s prerogative, managed to convince NASA to sleep shift the crew to perform a daylight reentry from a descending node track over the continental United States as opposed to an ascending node descent over Mexico twelve hours later in the dark. Discovery performed the first reentry over the United States since Columbia’s breakup. The reentry path took the shuttle over central Nebraska, and a sonic boom could be heard near Clay Anderson’s hometown of Ashland. Discovery arrived home safely, and Anderson was reunited with his family, including his mother, Alice, who had been undergoing treatment for cancer. Unfortunately, she died a few weeks later in mid-November before her astronaut son returned to Nebraska for his official welcome-home ceremony.

  Dan Tani’s Heritage

  Dan Tani was born to parents of Japanese ancestry in Ridley Park, Pennsylvania, in 1961. His parents originally lived in California but were rounded up during World War II as part of the forced internment of Japanese American citizens by the U.S. government. Tani’s parents were interned at a camp in Topaz, Utah. Tani’s father was an insurance salesman before the war, but one of his clients worked for the Evangelical and Reformed Church. They helped to find a job for Mr. Tani and helped to sponsor the family’s release from the camp during the war. Dan Tani’s dad became a minister for the church. Over the years, it merged with other churches to eventually become known as the United Church of Christ.

  Dan Tani’s early childhood in the 1960s included watching spaceflights on television, as he has fond memories of watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin doing their walk on the moon. Model rockets were a big thing back then, and Tani was heavily involved with the hobby in his childhood. Going to high school, the space program in combination with his rocketry hobby shaped his goals as he wanted to become an engineer, but he didn’t necessarily want to become an astronaut.

  After getting his bachelor’s degree, Tani went to work for Hughes Aerospace on various satellite projects. One of them included helping to build hardware to repair the malfunctioning Leasat 3 satellite, which had been stranded in a useless orbit after it failed to deploy properly on STS-51D. The satellite was both repaired and redeployed on mission STS-51I. Even with this project’s success, Tani looked for ways to get out of aerospace engineering and pursue a different career path.

  A few years later, Tani’s former boss at Hughes invited him to visit a new aerospace company called Orbital Sciences Corporation for a job interview. Tani wasn’t really interested as he had found a great job, working for a think tank near Cambridge, Massachusetts, studying how people make decisions. But he went for the interview anyway. He liked what he saw and was hired. Orbital was a new company. Unlike a large firm like Hughes, Orbital employed a small handful of engineers who got the chance to do more exciting things. Orbital’s first major success was the air-launched Pegasus rocket, which began sending small satellites into orbit in 1990. After working for Orbital for a few years, Dan Tani turned his sights upward, eventually becoming an astronaut in 1996.

  After conducting a space walk on STS-108, Tani transitioned into the ISS program, where circumstances ended up with him on the ISS as part of Expedition 16. Initially, his time on the station was only supposed to be three months, as STS-122 was supposed to bring him home in December. But problems with hardware for the next shuttle mission forced a postponement, and ultimately Tani spent four months in orbit. Tani and Peggy Whitson conducted four EVAs on the ISS preparing the Harmony node and PMA-2 for their relocation to the front of Destiny and then finishing out exterior work after the module was moved in November. They also inspected the balky SARJ to try to discover the source of its problems. In January, during their fourth EVA, they replaced an electric motor used to drive the starboard solar arrays. During these four EVAs, the pair conducted the one hundredth ISS space walk, and the time spent outside allowed Peggy Whitson to set a record as the female spacewalker with the most EVA time.

  Not everything was pleasant, though. On 18 December 2007, as the crew was in their pre-sleep period, they got a call from the ground to prepare the private communications line for Tani. Mission control never called in during pre-sleep unless it was important, and the use of a private line usually meant something bad. Tani called his wife, Jane, and was relieved that she was okay, but she was heading to JSC to get the word herself as to what was up. Tani had left instructions that if bad news was being delivered, it would be done by his wife or his flight surgeon. Once his wife arrived at JSC, Dan Tani received the sad news. His mother, Rose, had been killed in a car crash.

  No astronaut had ever lost a family member while on a mission before. The shuttle was grounded and wouldn’t fly until February, and Dan Tani wouldn’t be able to attend the funeral for his mother. Tani credits his support team on the ground and the flight controllers with helping him cope. He still had a job to do, but they gave him plenty of leeway to do what he needed. To Whitson, the loss of Rose Tani was easily the lowest point of the mission. But looking back, Dan Tani felt that it could have been worse.

  Video conferences were arranged with family and friends. Clay Anderson also got to show his support in a private video conference since he had lost his own mother in November. Even though the situation was bad, it didn’t impact the science, support, or assembly schedules for the ISS. If Rose had died when things were busier two weeks before, the packed schedule at that point could have been impacted. As a song from the Beatles says, Dan Tani got by “with a little help from his friends.”

  Finally, February came, and Atlantis docked on STS-122 to take Tani home. Looking back on his experience as an astronaut and being a third-generation Japanese American, Tani sums up his success in life and his heritage in this way: “What makes my story great, I think . . . my parents were, for all effects, imprisoned by the U.S. government for several years of their life. [Wi
th] my father, they took radios and cameras away from him, and yet just one generation later, I’m given the opportunity to represent the United States and entrusted with a space station and entrusted with many radios and many cameras.” The Japanese American community flourished after World War II’s internment to become important contributors to the American experience in culture, art, and science. Dan Tani is very proud to be a part of it, and it has been an honor of his to represent them in space.

  Columbus

  When STS-122 arrived, its main payload was the Columbus laboratory built by the ESA. Like the MPLMs, the structure for Columbus was built at a factory in Rome, Italy, by Alcatel Alenia Space. Alcatel had also been involved in construction of the Unity and Harmony nodes, and all the modules shared similar structures. Even the Japanese Kibo laboratory module’s basic structure used the same design. The Columbus would allow the ESA to carry out its own dedicated scientific activities. The module was also directly related to the old Spacelab pressurized module, but it featured many improvements to conduct science inside and on racks mounted outside.

  Expedition 16 crewmember Léopold Eyharts and STS-122 ESA astronaut Hans Schlegel of Germany were heavily involved in outfitting the module once it arrived on orbit. Schlegel was also scheduled to perform the first space walk of the mission with astronaut Rex Walheim. But a minor medical issue sidelined Schlegel, and Stan Love performed the space walk with Walheim instead. Schlegel performed the second space walk of the mission just fine as Columbus was firmly attached to the ISS and opened for business. Walheim and Love performed STS-122’s third space walk as well.

  STS-124 came next as the space shuttle Endeavour transported up the first segment of the Japanese laboratory, Kibo. The Kibo complex is made up of a short Experiment Logistics Module segment, the main module segment, and an external equipment rack with its own robotic arm. The first module flown was the Experiment Logistics Module. This mission also delivered the Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator, also known as Dextre. Dextre is a multiarmed robot that can be positioned at the end of the SSRMS to perform complex assembly and support tasks, either preprogrammed or with an astronaut operating it from inside the station using telepresence. It was built by Canada as their final major piece of hardware for the ISS.

  51. The ISS as viewed from Discovery on STS-124 after undocking. Courtesy NASA, photograph labels by the author.

  Garrett Reisman took over for Eyharts after only a month in orbit for the Frenchman. Five EVAs were conducted on this mission to hook up the new modules and Dextre. A final task involved temporarily stowing the shuttle’s OBSS on the ISS, since there wasn’t enough weight available on the next shuttle to carry it into orbit aboard STS-125. After the OBSS was stowed, a power cable was hooked up to it to maintain its systems for its two months of scheduled hibernation. Additional inspection work was also conducted on the balky starboard array’s SARJ. Endeavour stayed docked with the ISS for eleven days before departing.

  Jules Verne

  On 9 March 2008 the first ESA-built ATV was launched into orbit from ESA’s spaceport in French Guyana aboard an Ariane 5 rocket. The ATV is an automated spacecraft designed to haul cargo to the ISS. It is much bigger than a Progress craft, and it can handle three times the payload. The ATV is designed to dock with the aft Russian docking port on the Zvezda module, so it can replenish the station’s fuel and water supply using the standard Progress hookups. The engines on the ATV can be used for reboosting the station’s orbit as well.

  The first ATV was named after the great science-fiction author Jules Verne. After nearly a month in orbit undergoing a thorough checkout, Jules Verne achieved a successful docking. It stayed docked for many months, acting as a storage room after delivering its supplies. It was loaded up with trash before it undocked to burn up in September.

  Ballistic Reentry, Part 2

  Less than a week after the first ATV arrived, it was time for Expedition 16 to conclude and hand over the reigns to Sergey Volkov and Oleg Kononenko. Garrett Reisman would remain on board to handle the Expedition 17 transition. Both Volkov and Kononenko were flying their first missions into space. Sergey Volkov was the first second-generation space traveler to fly, as the son of Salyut 7 and Mir cosmonaut Aleksandr Volkov; at age thirty-six, he also became the youngest commander of the ISS to date. Joining them on Soyuz TMA-12 was South Korean spaceflight participant Yi So-yeon. She was flying as part of a Korean astronaut program and had originally been the backup until prime crewmember Ko San was scrubbed due to violating Star City’s rules for taking training manuals out of the classroom. Yi’s mission involved eighteen microgravity experiments, ranging from taking three-dimensional pictures of her face for the purpose of measuring how fluid in the human body redistributes itself in zero gravity to studying the behavior of fruit flies in orbit. After ten days in space, Yi returned to Earth with Whitson and Malenchenko.

  Soyuz TMA-11 undocked just fine and conducted a normal deorbit burn, but a very serious problem developed as the propulsion and descent modules didn’t separate from one another cleanly. Some of the explosive bolts holding the pair together failed to fire. Due to the spacecraft’s center of mass, TMA-11 began a ballistic reentry front first, like Soyuz 5 almost four decades earlier. Both Whitson and Malenchenko could feel that they were in trouble as the craft seemed to rock back and forth during reentry. To Peggy, it felt like a pitching motion, while Yuri perceived it rocking from side to side, but their inner ear perceptions couldn’t be entirely trusted, since neither crewmember had felt gravity in many months.

  Finally, the struts broke apart due to the pressure buildup and the descent module righted itself as it was designed to do, continuing a ballistic descent. Soyuz TMA-11 would land about three hundred kilometers short of its final destination. The front of the module was heavily charred, and the communications antenna had burned off. Photographs of TMA-11’s landing show that the hot Soyuz also managed to start a smoldering grass fire, which scorched a fair amount of land before it was extinguished. Malenchenko climbed outside the craft and used a satellite phone in the craft’s survival pack to contact the recovery forces. Even though forces were pre-staged in preparation for a possible ballistic reentry, it still took the helicopters forty-five minutes to arrive and render assistance.

  At the conclusion of the flight, Yi So-yeon spent a few days recovering at a hospital in Korea due to pain in her back from her spine lengthening a little in orbit. Otherwise, everyone recovered fully from their ordeal. A postflight investigation eventually focused on the cause of the problem, a suspect batch of pyrobolts in the struts that connected the descent and propulsion modules together. It would take time to decide if corrective action for TMA-12 was needed. The head of Roscosmos at the time, Anatoly Perminov, created some additional controversy when he also speculated that the incident in part might be connected to a Russian nautical superstition about the number of women on the flight outnumbering the men on board causing bad luck. He said that he would take steps to avoid having that many women on future flights.

  In 2009 Peggy Whitson took over the job of NASA’s chief of the Astronaut Office, joining the ranks of other famous names that held the position, such as Deke Slayton, John Young, and Hoot Gibson. This is the highest-ranking management position among active astronauts, and Whitson was the first woman selected. Her selection marked a fundamental shift of the role traditionally being held by a pilot-astronaut to one occupied by a nonpilot with a scientific background and paralleled the fact that the ISS was becoming NASA’s primary space program with the space shuttle’s retirement date edging ever closer.

  14

  Final Construction

  “How Do You Go to the Bathroom in Space?”

  One of the biggest challenges to overcome in long-duration space missions is trying to create a closed loop system to minimize the amount of resupply needed. Even though the ISS wasn’t flying to a distant planet, the need to make things as self-sufficient as possible was a critical one with the shuttle’s
retirement looming. For a closed loop system, recycling liquid human waste such as urine and sweat becomes a high priority.

  The Russian toilet on the ISS was an evolution of the designs first flown on the stations Salyut and Mir. It works by using a vacuum to help draw off the fecal material into the bowl or liquid urine through a hose. Urinating into the system is relatively easy to do, but learning how to use the bowl properly can take skill to master. Part of the crew transition period in orbit involves instruction in the proper technique to ensure that the feces goes down the hole and doesn’t bounce out to float free in the cabin.

  The feces gets collected in individual bags in a storage container at the base of the toilet, and it is compacted down to save space. The urine collects into a sealed tank. In order to reuse the tank, its contents are offloaded into the liquid storage tanks of a Progress before undocking. Since some of the instruments on the ISS can be affected by contamination from water ice crystals, overboard urine dumps are not carried out. Due to the acidic quality of urine, there is a use life for the urine tanks, and they are periodically changed out as fresh ones are brought up on Progress vehicles. Used fecal storage containers are loaded into the Progress for disposal.

  For three crewmembers on a long-term stay or six crewmembers on a short-term one, this system works just fine. But with increasing the ISS crew size from three to six people, water recycling became more critical. Once the shuttle fleet had retired, NASA would lose the capability of using the shuttle’s fuel cells to generate water; since water weighs about six pounds per gallon, devoting weight in a Progress or an ATV to launch water means less weight for other cargo.