While World Changes, Space Station Partnership Holds
Strong
Irene Klotz October 14, 2020
It began with
technical and operational standards, allowing hardware that had never been in
contact on Earth to connect and function together upon reaching low Earth orbit
(LEO). NASA is now looking to extend those standards for programs and
partnerships beyond LEO under the Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts
to the Moon as a precursor to human missions to Mars.
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Businesses are testing LEO waters
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ISS is the model for future joint
missions
“In the early days of
ISS design and assembly, everyone was just incredibly nervous,” recalls John
Mulholland, who now serves as ISS program manager for lead contractor Boeing.
“One of the biggest risks was: ‘Are we going to be able to assemble all of
these [modules] on orbit and have everything work the first time successfully?’
“The space shuttle
program had put a lot of plans in place to be able to return a module and then
fly it back. We never had to do that,” he adds. “Looking back, [the ISS] was
just an incredible engineering achievement, probably the most incredible
engineering achievement of our lifetime.”
The station’s base
block, a Russian-built, U.S.-owned propellant module named Zarya—Russian for
“dawn”—was launched into orbit on Nov. 20, 1998. The first of what would become
37 U.S. space shuttle assembly missions followed in December to attach
connecting Node 1, Unity.
Delays building the
third component, Russia’s Zvezda service module, which was needed for early
crew habitation, put construction of the outpost on hold for two years. Zvezda
(Russian for “star”) finally reached orbit on July 12, 2000, and docked with
Zarya on July 25, kicking off a decade of assembly and outfitting missions by
the U.S. and Russia.
The first crew,
Expedition 1, comprised of NASA astronaut William Shepherd and Russian
cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko, lifted off aboard a Russian Soyuz
rocket on Oct. 31, 2000, and reached the fledgling station two days later. The
orbital outpost, now about the size of a six-bedroom house, has been
permanently staffed by rotating crews of astronauts and cosmonauts ever since.
The Expedition 1 crew reached the nascent space station (left) on Nov. 2, 2000. From left: cosmonaut Yuri Gidzenko, astronaut William Shepherd and cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev. Credit: NASA
“The demonstration that nations can come
together and pull off something magnificent and sustain it for 20 years is
probably the most significant achievement of the International Space Station,”
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine tells Aviation Week. “It is definitely a
marvel of technology, but I think it’s also a marvel of diplomatic power, not
just for the United States but for all of the partners that are involved in it.
It really shows that when we all collaborate we can do things that have
sustainability and durability.”
After a 10-year
hiatus, the U.S. and Russia are again preparing to add modules to the ISS,
though the U.S. facilities will be owned and operated, not by NASA, but by
private companies. Nanoracks, which broke into the LEO services business by
integrating experiments and launching cubesats from the ISS, is preparing for the
November launch of its Bishop Airlock, which will become the first commercial
module permanently attached to the station. (The Bigelow Aerospace-owned
Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, known as BEAM, joined the ISS in 2016 as a
technology demonstration, not a commercially operated facility.)
·
See also: International Space
Station Facts And Figures
Bishop is to be
followed in 2024 by a module owned by Axiom Space, which intends to parlay a
$140 million contract with NASA for docking rights at the Harmony Node 2
forward port into a privately owned (and eventually free-flying) commercially
operated platform in LEO.
Meanwhile, Russia’s
Roscosmos State Corp. for Space Activities is preparing for a May 2021 launch
of the Nauka multipurpose laboratory module, followed six months later by the
arrival of a five-port docking hub for the Russian segment, says Roscomos
Director General Dmitry Rogozin.
The growth spurt
coincides with the resumption of ISS crew rotation missions from the U.S., a
service that has been unavailable since the space shuttles were retired in
2011. Looking for a safer and less expensive alternative, NASA shifted to
fixed-price contracts and partnerships to deliver first cargo and then crews to
the ISS.
U.S. station resupply
lines are currently operated by SpaceX and Northrop Grumman, with Sierra Nevada
Corp.’s Dream Chaser winged spaceplane expected to join the fleet in 2021.
SpaceX and Boeing have NASA contracts to fly crew, with the first operational
Commercial Crew mission, SpaceX Crew-1, now targeted for launch in November.
The arrival of Crew-1, with NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Soichi Noguchi, will mark the beginning of a five-member U.S. Operating Segment staffing, which will dramatically increase the time available to conduct research, the primary purpose of the station.
To date, the station has hosted nearly
3,000 investigations involving scientists in 108 countries from a wide range of
fields including pharmaceutical research, fluid physics, chemistry, human
physiology, biotechnology, Earth science, astronomy and astrophysics. “To my
knowledge and to many others, there is no other international activity that has
been as successful as [the ISS] has been,” says Joel Montalbano, NASA’s ISS
program manager.
NASA is counting on a
growing commercial space sector so that it can free up funding to push human
exploration and development into deep space with the Artemis program. The
agency intends to rely on commercially provided services and platforms to
continue research and technology demonstrations in LEO, especially after the
ISS comes to an end.
The 15-nation ISS
partnership, which includes the U.S., Russia, 11 European nations, Japan and
Canada, is looking to keep the station operational at least until 2028-30, and
possibly longer. NASA needs the ISS or other LEO platforms to test life
support, exercise equipment and other technologies for long-duration missions
to the Moon and eventually Mars.
“As we go farther away
from low Earth orbit, where we don’t have a capability to resupply very
easily—if at all—we have to understand the reliability of these systems. We
have to be able to plan for the right number of spare parts and be confident
that we’re going to have a successful mission,” says NASA acting ISS director
Robyn Gatens.
“What we’ve learned so
far with more than 10 years of operating the [life support] system on ISS is
that we’re still learning about it,” she says.
Other U.S. agencies
besides NASA fund microgravity research aboard the ISS, which also operates as
a national laboratory. “There are a lot of things that have been discovered or
developed in microgravity that have done good for people on Earth,” says
Michael Lopez-Alegria, a former NASA astronaut and ISS commander who will be
training and accompanying three paying passengers to the orbital outpost under
a contract with Axiom.
The flight, known as
AX-1, scheduled for late 2021, is among a handful of private crewed orbital
flights in development.
“We’ve been living in
orbit for 20 years now, and we’ve kind of made access to at least low Earth
orbit become—I hate to say ‘routine’ because space is never routine—but
something that is reliable and can be counted upon,” says Lopez-Alegria. “That
really enables a transition from government to commercial entities to establish
an LEO economy that then supports beyond-LEO exploration. It’s changing the
paradigm from making sojourns into space to actually inhabiting space for the
first time.”
NASA’s Phil McAlister,
director of commercial spaceflight development, adds: “I read somewhere that a
generation is 22 years. Thus, we have had a generation of humanity that has essentially
lived their entire lives with people in space continuously. It probably does
not feel profoundly different day-to-day for most people. But, I think we will
look back on this time and see that this was an inflection point in human
history and in our exploration of the cosmos.”
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