LIVING ALOFT
November 2, 2000

An American and two Russian astronauts set up shop in the international space station, 240 miles above the Earth. After a background report, Ray Suarez leads a discussion about human life in outer space.

 

Online NewsHour Special Reports: Space Exploration 2000 Nobel Prizes: Chemistry, Physics and Medicine July 20, 2000: Exceeding the speed of light June 22, 2000: Evidence of water on Mars April 14, 2000: The fallout from two failed Mars missions. Feb. 14, 2000: The NEAR spacecraft reaches the asteroid Eros. Dec. 7, 1999: Examining NASA after two failed Mars missions. Online NewsHour Special Report: The Mars Polar Lander Aug. 26, 1999: The Chandra Observatory relays pictures of exploding stars. July 20, 1999: 30th anniversary of Neil Armstrong's walk on the moon. Nov. 20, 1998: Launch of the International Space Station's first piece. Browse the NewsHour's coverage of Science.     International Space Station NASA Federation of American Scientists	NASA SPOKESMAN: A milestone in space history set to get underway… RAY SUAREZ: The historic moment came early this morning as a capsule containing three astronauts arrived at the international space station. NASA SPOKESMAN: We have initial contact of the Soyuz capsule with the Expedition One crew to the international space station. RAY SUAREZ: As the astronauts opened the hatch to the station, mission control was enthused about what is hoped will be the first permanent human presence in space.
	The start of a long journey
	NASA SPOKESMAN: First crew went on board the station, and the command was given to the crew: Now make it come alive. RAY SUAREZ: The first team included two Russian cosmonauts, Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev. The skipper is American astronaut Bill Shepherd. After the crew settled in, Shepherd thanked all the people who made the mission possible. BILL SHEPHERD: There are a lot of people behind us to keep the space station going and we're just starting a long journey. NASA SPOKESMAN: Ignition and liftoff. RAY SUAREZ: The crew blasted off in a Soyuz rocket on Tuesday from Kazakhstan. They will spend four months on the station, 240 miles above the Earth and circling the planet 16 times a day. The crew is the first of many that will help complete the space station, expected to be fully finished by 2006. The project-- jointly undertaken by 16 countries including the U.S.-- is now expected to cost more than $40 billion. The bulk of that is to be paid by the U.S. Shuttles, using enormous robotic arms, will deliver materials to help complete the station. When finished, the station will be the length of nearly two football fields. In fact, it will be so large that experts say that like a star, it will be visible from the Earth. In chambers like these, crews will conduct mostly scientific research, such as looking at the effect of weightlessness in space. The international space station follows the Russian space station, Mir. Mir began operating 15 years ago, but has been vacant since June. The United States had its own station, Skylab; that was first launched in 1973, but the last crew left Skylab in 1976. It eventually fell to earth in 1979. Aboard the new space station this morning, the crew began its work by checking operational systems. And despite previous objections by NASA, they gave the station a temporary name-- "Alpha." CREW MEMBER: We do have one request. NASA SPOKESMAN: What's that request? CREW MEMBER: The first expedition on space station request permission to take the radio call sign "Alpha." NASA SPOKESMAN (laughing): Temporarily taken as "Alpha." Go ahead. Have a good day. RAY SUAREZ: While three astronauts will make up the first crews on the station, NASA eventually expects crews of seven people.
	Scientific research
	RAY SUAREZ: Joining me now, NASA astronaut Dr. David Wolf. He spent four months aboard the space station, Mir, and helped design and develop the international space station; Howard McCurdy, a professor at American University and author of several books on space, including "Space and the American Imagination"; and Alex Roland, Professor of History at Duke University. He served as a NASA historian from 1973 to 1981. Well, Dr. Wolf, now that Alpha is somewhat assembled, aloft, and staffed, what's it for? What's the mission? DR. DAVID WOLF: The international space station has a group of missions. They center on critical scientific research enabling technologies for our future quality of life - exploration, helping us move into the solar system, learn how to build spacecraft to help us do that, understand the human physiology problems that we must get past. There is also the environmental aspect where we have a good platform for globally looking at the earth over long periods of time to help us rationally develop counter measures to our impact on the earth environment, and perhaps most important is the inspiration to the young people. There is nothing that is more powerful to our best young people to help them develop their talents and skills as scientists, engineers, whatever they choose to be, than the thrill they get from space. RAY SUAREZ: Well, you are a veteran of long-term space flight. What's the quality of life up there in the partially assembled space station? DR. DAVID WOLF: Life in space is not an easy life. But we're there to do scientific research and accomplish the types of goals… So we put up with some inconvenience. They have a lot to do. It is like moving into a new house. There's boxes everywhere; they need to make sure the bathroom's working, the galley and food warmers are working, do they have a reasonable place to sleep, and they have a lot of unloading to do. So it's not unlike opening a new laboratory or a new home. RAY SUAREZ: And is Day 105 very different from Day 75 or Day 55? Does this start to wear on you after a while? DR. DAVID WOLF: Each mission has its own character. I can say my 128th day was even better than my 127th, and so on. I enjoyed space in long-term - long duration space flight; you get better at it continuously, more and more comfortable, and it's fun to move to space and think, well, some day I'll move home, and look at it as a place to work, a laboratory to work in - in a permanent sense. RAY SUAREZ: Howard McCurdy, as we noted, there have been long-term missions before - Skylab and Mir. Is this turning a big corner? HOWARD McCURDY: Well, I can tell you what the people who conceived of this objective almost 20 years ago thought they were doing - people like Jim Begs, who was a NASA administrator - Philip Culvertson and John Hodge, who headed the space station task force that drew up the initial conceptual plan. They thought there would be a day from which - from every point forward, that humans would always be living and working in space. And they attached that historical significance to it, and this is the day. People 200 years from now may look back and say, this is the day on which humans began to live and work in space on a permanent basis. The facilities that were mentioned before -- Skylab and the Russian Mir space station -- were generally viewed as pre-cursors to this. They were workshops, preparing for what would be not only a permanent space station but a permanently occupied human presence in space. RAY SUAREZ: Hasn't this particular craft had something of a star-crossed history, sort of shrinking over time and lowering its ambitions? HOWARD McCURDY: It was announced by President Ronald Reagan in 1984 -- he challenged NASA to complete it within a decade. NASA said that they thought they could build the base space station for about $8 billion in 1984 dollars. In 1993, which is about the length of time that it took us to go to the Moon from President Kennedy's decision, we had not produced any piece of space station hardware and had, in fact, expended the entire $8 billion on station redesign. Some of that was NASA's fault, a lot of us was due to circumstances beyond their control - the nature of budgetary politics in this city. And in addition to Congress becoming deeply involved in the actual design of the space station, something that would normally be an engineer's task and certainly during the Apollo program was an engineer's task. It has been a long and tortured history. In fact, I remember as a child a March 22, 1952 issue of "Colliers" Magazine, which had inside it a picture of a space station. And I started thinking at that point, well, this is something maybe we can do in the future. RAY SUAREZ: Did it look like the one that actually - HOWARD McCURDY: No, actually it was not as large; it's 250 feet wide, and this one is much larger, but it was round and it rotated, and subsequent to that, scientists and engineers have learned the real advantage of a space station is micro gravity. Everything that we know about biology and much of what we know about physics on the earth is based upon a life that we live at one G, one gravity. And this for the first time in human history is going to give us a long-term laboratory for studying what it's like for biochemistry and for physics under conditions other than one gravity. We may discover things that we can't even imagine right now.
	The cost of human endeavor
	RAY SUAREZ: Alex Roland, do you share Howard McCurdy's enthusiasm about the international space station? ALEX ROLAND: No, I'm afraid I don't. I remember the claims that were made for the space station and that it would be the beginning of permanent inhabitation of space -- and it reminded me of the claims that were made when we went to the Moon; that we would have Moon colonies and permanent stations there. And of course, we haven't. And the reason was when we went to the Moon, we found that there was nothing there worth sending people back for. And I'm afraid that's what we're going to find with this space station as well; that it's not worth the candle of putting people up there. It is enormously expensive to put people there with any space activity that you can identify. It is much cheaper, it's much more efficient and of course it's much safer to send machines to do it. And whenever you put people on a spacecraft - whether it's the shuttle or a space station - you increase the cost of the activity, and you also change the nature of the activity. You are no longer doing research. You are no longer setting up communications. You are no longer looking at the weather. You are no longer doing science. What you are doing primarily is trying to get the astronauts and the cosmonauts back alive. One NASA official during the Apollo program estimated that whenever people were put on a spacecraft, it increased the cost by 10 times and that's the problem with the space station. Anything that they want to do on the space station, we can do more efficiently, more effectively and much safer without the people on board. RAY SUAREZ: So when you read about things like, doing advanced material science, trying to make things in zero G that you can't make on earth, are these things that can be done by remote control? Or do you need a human being there to do them? ALEX ROLAND: It is not clear that you need humans for this. In an age when we are automating our factories here on earth, it seems strange that we have to send people up into space to conduct fundamental fairly simple, straightforward experiments. And also a lot of the claims made early on from what we were going to do on the space station, have now been withdrawn. There were claims we were going to have manufacturing there. You don't hear much about that any more; that we were going to send tourists there. We were going to have citizens in space. And now, about the only reason for the space station is to have a platform for the people. And that is more expensive than it is worth. RAY SUAREZ: David Wolf, what do you make of that? DR. DAVID WOLF: I can tell you that one of the great strengths of this space station is, in fact, having the human involved to make observations, to make the discoveries, and, in fact, having the earth-based scientists seamlessly, through data links, involved also. So effectively, we have a research laboratory extension in space which has the special condition of zero gravity that the Earth-based researchers can use. Gravity affects everything, including our bodies, the materials we make, semiconductor fabrication, essentially everything, and it's a new element to consider it a variable in our research, one that will be very important in the future. As far as cost goes, to put that in perspective, this country will spend 10 times more on tobacco this year than on the whole shuttle and space station program combined. RAY SUAREZ: Howard McCurdy, isn't that the essence of the debates that we had over space flight for the last 20 years, manned versus non-manned? HOWARD McCURDY: It is, and I think to a certain degree it's a misdirected debate. The people who conceived of the space station saw the space station as being a combined facility, one that relied heavily upon robotics and at the same time had a human presence. Think of it this way: a hundred years ago we did all of our work and all of our living on the surface of the Earth, and today large numbers of people spend a considerable amount of time in the air - for me, too much time. But we live in the atmosphere now, and that's going to extend into space in the next century. It will be seamless. We won't spend as much time in space as we spend on the earth, but nonetheless, human presence will extend there for commercial purposes, for scientific purposes and for national security. It is inevitable if we commit ourselves to being a technological civilization that we'll need to use space in this way both to manage the earth and its environment, and also to learn things and manufacture things in space.
	Automated research
	RAY SUAREZ: Alex Roland, how do you respond? ALEX ROLAND: I don't doubt that in some far distant future we are going to populate the heavens and have people in space regularly. But we're not going to do with it the technology we have now. We're not going to do it with the shuttle and we're not going to do it with this space station. And what NASA should be spending its money on is doing the research that will open up space instead of sending astronauts up to do basically what they have been doing for the last 30 or 40 years. They have been conducting scientific experiments in orbit on the space stations that have been up there. There isn't very much to show for it. Throughout its history NASA has spent two-thirds of its funding on manned space flights, one-third of it on automated spacecraft. All the really important returns from our space activity have come from those unmanned spacecraft, the scientific exploration, the communication satellites, the weather satellites to say nothing of all of the military satellites that played such an important part in the Cold War. We need to reduce the cost of getting into space and then it might be practical to send people up. RAY SUAREZ: And just before we go, Dr. Wolf, can I ask you about the language barrier briefly before we wrap it up? Is it easy to get along with Russian crewmen? DR. DAVID WOLF: Absolutely. They are wonderful crewmen -- very talented partners in space. We're lucky to have all 16 countries involved. RAY SUAREZ: How is your Russian today? DR. DAVID WOLF: (Speaking Russian) -- Not bad. RAY SUAREZ: Dr. Wolf, professors, thank you all.