by Jay Chladek
The day before launch, the weather was very gloomy with steady rain and lightning at KSC for most of the morning and afternoon. All indications were that the flight would be postponed. But countdown proceeded as normal as conditions on 8 July improved. All along the Space Coast, the viewing sites, roads, and even some waterways were packed with massive crowds of spectators. It was estimated that nearly one million people turned out to watch this final launch of the shuttle program.
For many contract workers at KSC, STS-135 would be their final job. Some would remain to help prepare the orbiters for display in museums. But for many more, their careers at KSC would end once the shuttle landed for the final time. It would be many years before another manned spacecraft would rise into the sky from KSC’s Launch Complex 39.
Liftoff occurred at 11:29:03 EDT, and the launch was a couple of minutes late due to an indication that one of the access arms on the launchpad had not retracted fully. The launch window to rendezvous with the ISS is only five minutes long, and liftoff is typically targeted for the middle of the window. Once controllers verified that the arm was out of the way, Atlantis roared off the pad with only a few seconds to spare. The shuttle stack did its characteristic roll to the proper heading and exceeded the speed of sound just before it punched through a low cloud deck and disappeared from sight. About ten minutes later Atlantis was in orbit. Everyone who saw the launch was left with fond memories of that day, colored with uncertainty about the future of America’s space program.
Two days later, Atlantis performed its backflip rendezvous pitch maneuver and docked with the ISS one final time. No EVAs were conducted by the shuttle crew, although ISS crewmembers Mike Fossum and Ron Garan performed an EVA on the fifth flight day to secure the ammonia pump and attach the fueling experiment. Rex Walheim underwent special training for this mission. When STS-135 was manifested, he tested and refined the hands-on EVA procedures in the NBL himself after Fossum and Garan launched into orbit, in order to help walk them through the tasks. During stowage of the ammonia pump, Walheim said, “Take a look around, Ronny [Garan], you’re the last EVA person in the payload bay of a shuttle.” Garan acknowledged and continued his work. After conducting additional maintenance tasks on the Russian segment, the space walk was completed successfully.
Several more days were dedicated to equipment stowage, with the shuttle and ISS crews acting as one to facilitate these final transfers. The MPLM was loaded back into the shuttle’s cargo bay with almost three tons of cargo for return to Earth. As one final ceremony before the crews parted company, the shuttle crew unveiled a small American flag aboard the ISS. The flag had flown on the first shuttle mission, STS-1 in 1981, and it would remain on the ISS until the next manned U.S.-built spacecraft visited the station to retrieve it and take it home.
The next day, Atlantis undocked from the ISS. Ron Garan rang the station’s bell twice as part of the naval tradition and said, “Atlantis departing the International Space Station for the last time.” The shuttle did a fly around inspection of the station before extending its distance until it was just a tiny dot visible from the ISS. After a couple of more days in orbit, Atlantis landed safely, concluding the shuttle program after three decades of service. From that point on, the ISS would be America’s only manned presence in Earth orbit.
China’s First Space Station
In September 2011 China launched a new module, Tiangong 1 (a Chinese name meaning “Heavenly Palace”), aboard a Long March CZ-2F rocket. It is reported to be a test module of a future Chinese space station design. The module is powered by solar arrays and apparently has an operational lifespan of two years. In November of the same year, Shenzhou 8 launched unmanned into orbit and successfully docked with the Tiangong module, giving China confidence in their growing spaceflight capabilities.
Superficially, the Shenzhou spacecraft resembles the Soyuz, as it features orbital, descent, and propulsion modules similar in shape to their Russian counterparts. Although there are some differences, China based their design heavily on the Soyuz, as they had Russian help early on. The descent module is almost identical in shape yet larger. The orbital module is more cylindrical than spherical. Chinese pressure suits for launches and EVAs are based on Russian Sokol and Orlan suits respectively.
Tiangong 1 superficially resembles an early Salyut station, as it features a stepped cylinder design with a pair of solar arrays. But due to weight limitations with the CZ-2F rocket used to launch it, Tiangong 1 is smaller than Salyut. Inside, it only has enough room for two sleeping racks along with some science and exercise equipment.
After a successful unmanned Shenzhou 8 docking, three taikonauts were launched to Tiangong 1 on 16 June 2012 aboard Shenzhou 9. The crew included veteran commander Jing Haipeng on his second spaceflight; rookie flight engineer Liu Wang; and the first female Chinese space traveler, Liu Yang. The crew of Shenzhou 9 occupied Tiangong 1 for about two weeks before returning home to a touchdown site in Mongolia on 29 June 2012. Allegedly, there are plans to fly future modules based on the Tiangong module to develop a more capable Chinese space station complex, but until China comes up with a fully automated resupply capability, missions to Tiangong-based stations will likely be shorter in duration than missions to the ISS.
There have been some calls internationally for China to perhaps take part in the ISS program, but the invitation to join has not been extended by NASA. Indeed, many ISS participants have looked at China’s program with caution since it seems to be controlled by the military rather than by a civilian agency. Another incident that hasn’t helped Chinese space relations was a test by its antisatellite program (ASAT) that took place on 11 January 2007. A Chinese missile was launched at a deactivated weather satellite in a five-hundred-mile-high polar orbit, and it scored a direct hit. While the test was successful, it was not announced ahead of time and produced a very large debris cloud with over two thousand pieces of debris large enough to be tracked by the ground and potentially thousands more too small to be detected.
Over time, several pieces of debris have drifted lower into the path of the ISS; on numerous occasions, the station has had to perform orbital adjustment burns to avoid potential collisions with this debris. Debris avoidance has become a fact of life in Earth orbit, with the remains of dead satellites and spent rocket stages being common. Periodic increase of solar activity causing Earth’s atmosphere to expand helps to sweep the sky of debris in lower orbits, but it can still take many years before debris from a high orbit drops low enough to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, producing a potential hazard to space navigation in the meantime.
Donald Pettit’s Return to Orbit
On 21 December 2011 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, an R-7 rocket stood on the same launchpad where, over fifty years earlier, Yuri Gagarin had taken mankind’s first trip into space. The craft perched on top was Soyuz TMA-03M. The craft was a new variant of Soyuz that had begun flying the previous year. This new design weighed about seventy kilograms lighter than the previous variants. This particular vehicle would be only the second Soyuz to fly in space since the shuttle’s retirement. On board was a veteran crew. Commanding the craft was Oleg Kononenko on his second spaceflight. To his left sat Dutch ESA astronaut André Kuipers, taking his second trip into space. To their right sat probably the keenest mind of the group, NASA astronaut Don Pettit, on his third spaceflight. All three men were part of Expedition 30 and would join their colleagues Dan Burbank, Anton Shkaplerov, and Anatoli Ivanishin already in orbit.
54. On 21 December 2011 Expedition 30 crewmembers Kononenko, Pettit, and Kuipers lift off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome’s Site No. 1 aboard Soyuz TMA-03M. Courtesy NASA.
Expedition 30 had some great plans in store. If all went well, Pettit would use the SSRMS to snag the first SpaceX Dragon spacecraft to visit the station in the coming months. There were also plans to take part in an experiment with amateur and professional astronomers in San Antonio, Texas, to see if spotlights and a laser could be used to signal the ISS from th
e ground. In orbit that day, Dan Burbank was shooting photographs of Comet Lovejoy, which passed within 140,000 kilometers of the Sun’s surface without burning up. The AMS was continuing to produce data, as were the racks in three scientific modules and additional experiments fitted outside the station. The next six months were shaping up to be very busy ones aboard Earth’s manned outpost.
It was very cold at the time of launch, with a temperature of minus eighteen degrees Celsius (zero degrees Fahrenheit). But at least it was a beautiful night to launch, with no clouds in the sky, unlike the day on which Burbank’s crew launched, which lifted off into orbit under gray, overcast skies during a snow shower. In the early evening darkness at 13:16 GMT, the Soyuz lifted off successfully. Two days later, the Soyuz docked with the ISS, and the three men got right to work, continuing the job started by countless crews who had come before them. Mankind had learned a lot, but it still had much more to learn. And it was time to get down to the business of unlocking but a few of the secrets of Earth, humanity, and the universe.
Epilogue
At the close of 2011, over fifty years had passed since the first manned flights of Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard. Two countries that had once started out as adversaries in a contest for global influence had become well-established partners in spaceflight, even if they hadn’t become firm friends.
Periodically, the relationship has been an uneasy one. It was tested in early 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine after unrest in that country led to the ouster of its Russian-backed president. To this day, ongoing tensions in the region continue to cast a shadow over political and economic relationships between the United States, Europe, and Russia. There have been calls to have NASA assume full control of the ISS, but that type of intervention is simply not possible. Put simply, the Russians know their modules best and have the expertise to keep them operational, while NASA does not. Those modules form the backbone of the ISS, and they can’t be replaced or bypassed easily.
The Russians do not have the capability to operate or maintain NASA’s hardware, either, for any more than a brief period of time. A split of the ISS partnership means Roscosmos would no longer have a destination for their manned space program or enough income to build the additional Soyuz and Progress spacecraft needed to support it. The Soyuz currently is the only method for sending people up to the station, but it is believed that commercial manned spacecraft for NASA’s use will be ready for flight testing in 2017 and operational missions by 2018.
But how long can the ISS remain operational? The Russians recently stated that they plan to support the ISS through 2024. By that time, the RSM will be nearly twenty-five years old, twice the age of Mir when it started having problems. The United States wants to operate the ISS well into the 2020s also. But the oldest NASA modules will be pushing two decades in age, and critical systems will likely need refurbishment or perhaps replacement in that time.
In preparation for that, the ISS already has an electronics soldering station aboard the ISS, and in September 2014 a SpaceX Dragon resupply capsule launched a prototype 3D printer to the station. It is hoped that this printer will prove useful in manufacturing spare parts on an as-needed basis. But even with these capabilities, there likely will still be problems that crop up that will require more-creative solutions to repair them.
There are additional concerns about other equipment, such as the EMU and Orlan space suits, as they get used more often. Astronauts Luca Parmitano and Chris Cassidy had to cut short an EVA in July 2013 when water from Parmitano’s cooling system backed up into his helmet, threatening to drown the young Italian astronaut.
Even with the uncertainties about the station’s long-term future, the International Space Station can easily be tracked in the sky both by the naked eye at night and by software applications for computers and smartphones. As of 20 November 2013, the fifteenth anniversary of the launch of the Zarya module, the station had travelled 85,916 orbits during 5,479 days, with it being occupied for 4,766 of those days. It has conducted over 1,500 scientific experiments thanks to partnerships with over sixty-eight countries.
In popular culture, the ISS has replaced the space shuttle as NASA’s flagship manned space program. It has been featured in educational programs, music videos, fictional television shows, and documentaries. In the late summer of 2013, the ISS also briefly shared movie screens with actors Sandra Bullock and George Clooney in the space disaster motion picture Gravity, which became a worldwide hit with the general public. Several ISS astronauts have become well known in their home countries. A prime example is Chris Hadfield, who became the first Canadian commander of the ISS during Expedition 35 in early 2013.
But even with this spotlight, most of the day-to-day activities in orbit aren’t covered all that much by the major news organizations, leaving it instead to various websites and online blogs to provide coverage unless anything “newsworthy” happens. NASA television provides daily coverage of the station, allowing viewers to periodically peek in to see what is happening on board, thanks to cameras mounted both inside and out.
Both before and during its construction, the ISS was criticized as being a waste of money and the only project NASA could take part in because it lacked the focus and budget to do the “exciting” missions to other worlds. While there is some validity in those points, they tend to gloss over the fact that a big key to the success of future missions beyond Earth orbit will likely lie not just with the exciting bits of the launch, landing, and return but also with a journey itself, potentially lasting weeks, months, or even years.
There are still a lot of questions that need to be answered as to how well a human body will tolerate such journeys both physically and mentally. Even though both the Russians and the Americans have answered many of those questions by breaking endurance records on previous missions, it always helps to collect more data as science gathering tools improve. To that end, in March 2015 both NASA and Roscosmos launched cosmonaut Mikhail Korniyenko and NASA astronaut Scott Kelly into orbit on a year-long mission to the ISS. Scott’s twin brother, Mark Kelly, was monitored medically to see what physiological changes took place during that time. The data collected from their mission is intended for use to help understand the space environment better and potentially reduce the risks associated with long-duration journeys in space.
Regardless of whether one holds the ISS program in high regard or considers it an expensive diversion from other types of space exploration, the International Space Station has done one important thing: it has given many people the opportunity not just to visit space for a few days but rather to live and work there for long periods.
The famed explorer Roald Amundsen may have led the first expedition to successfully reach the South Pole in Antarctica and return, but it took individuals like Richard Byrd to spend months and years on the continent, trying to figure out how to live there while conducting sustained science and data gathering. These early efforts led to the permanent establishment of research bases on Antarctica that remain in use to this day. The ISS and future space stations have the potential to offer similar benefits for space research.
Financial support and public interest will help dictate where mankind goes from here in future space endeavors. It could be a few years yet, or perhaps even decades, before humans set foot on the moon again or other worlds for the first time. But contributions from the stations and laboratories that have flown before will be no less important to space exploration’s future than missions that commanded the headlines of decades past.
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