September 17, 2021 • 43 mins
As we look back on the US plans for a space station, we explore abandoned plans for a few different designs. We also learn how politics and space don't always get along.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff. I am your host,
joth In Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart
Radio and I love all things tech. Once again, if
I sound different from this episode than normal episodes, it's
because I'm in our studio in Atlanta, not at home.
(00:27):
But we are continuing our story about space stations, which
just gets longer within free episode I caught. I thought
originally this was gonna be maybe a two partter. Turns
out it's gonna be a four partner and this is
part three. So in our last episode in this series,
we looked at the history of Mirror, the first modular
space station, and there are a couple of things that
(00:48):
I really need to cover before I move on, stuff
I didn't talk about in the Mirror episode for one
reason or another. One of those is that Mirror really
was an amazing achievement, but it was also kind of
a show, at least according to some reports. Astronauts who
visited mir mentioned that parts of the space station were
littered with rubbish because the Russians hadn't really come up
(01:10):
with a way to store that stuff effectively. I mentioned
how the Quant one module sort of became a container
for floating rubbish after the various instruments in that in
that UH module went to put and there was no
real need to use it anymore. But that's not to
say that garbage just continued to accumulate over the fifteen
(01:31):
years span that Mirror was in service. The crew would
actually unpack incoming cargo ships that would dock with Mer.
Then they would shove garbage into the cargo ships that
went back to re enter Earth's atmosphere and then break
apart on re entry, so that garbage was sent hurtling
back to Earth. But you know it's okay because most
(01:52):
of it just burnt up on the way back. At
least I guess it's okay. And in the last episode,
I mentioned that a cargo ship once I did with
the Specter module on Mirror. As the cargo ship was
going through this experimental docking procedure with the Quant one
module nearby, that collision punctured Specter's hole, forcing the crew
(02:14):
to seal the Specter module off from the rest of
the station in order to prevent the full station from
depressurizing the Specter module's power. Generation capabilities were similarly cut off.
That had some solar arrays. But you know, sealing it
off meant that the astronauts, the cosmonauts, I should say,
had no more access to it. However, uh, there were
(02:37):
some some e v A s some spacewalks that the
cosmonauts conducted in order to restore at least some connectivity
with Specter's power generation, though the module itself remained sealed off.
Specter had been where American astronauts had lived up to
that point. Obviously, it could no longer serve that function.
(02:58):
It had been in service for just two years when
this collision brought it offline. There was speculation that the
whole reason that this happened may have been that that
cargo ship that collided with Specter had actually been overpacked
with garbage ahead of that experimental docking procedure, and that
the problem was that because of all that extra garbage,
(03:20):
the ship had more mass than the control crew thought
it was gonna have, so they weren't able to bring
it to a stop the way they thought they would.
Because it's remember that it's you know, it's pretty hard
to judge how much to pack into a ship because
it's really hard to figure out how much stuff weighs
(03:41):
in microgravity because you can't, you know, put it on
a scale or anything. So you you could easily pack
too much mass in a cargo ship and not realize
it when you're in microgravity because there's no easy way
to keep track of that with precision. And as we know,
you know, the more massive something is, the harder it
is to change that object's momentum. A heavy object needs
(04:04):
more energy to get it to start moving than a
lighter object needs, and a heavier object also needs more
energy to bring it to a stop than a lighter
object would. So that might have been why the cargo
ship failed to use enough thrust to avoid the collision
during that docking procedure. That the ship itself was just
loaded down with garbage. Jean Pierre Agnier and I know
(04:26):
I've butchered his name, so I'll just call him Jean
Pierre from now on, a French astronaut and pilot, spoke
with New scientists about what it was like to live
and work aboard Mirror. He said that the station smelled
kind of like burnt coffee and that the fans on
board the ship the fans that you know, we're circulating
the air aboard the ship generated sixty seven decibel's worth
(04:49):
of noise on average, making it sound like a noisy
engine room all the time. He said it was actually
hard for him to get used to silence when he
left the station. He said there was no privacy aboard
the station, that the crew were required to engage in
two exercise sessions a day to counteract the effects that
microgravity can have on the human body, and that on
(05:12):
average they would get two sessions of five minute daily
contacts with Earth and otherwise they were just stuck with
each other. Jean Pierre said that he felt Mirror was
error resistant, that the station itself was resistant to serious errors,
and pointed out that while the station had experienced two
separate emergencies like real emergencies, and one was the onboard
(05:37):
fire and the other was the cargo ship collision, no
one was harmed in either of those, and so while
these accidents happened, the ship or the space station itself
was resistant to catastrophe. He did criticize the procedures that
were followed by the Russian Space Agency, said they weren't
really sufficiently careful or detail oriented and that things could
(05:59):
have been much worse had the tech not been as
a you know, tough. Also, towards the end of Mirror's service,
the crew aboard the station conducted a study on the
microbes that were inhabiting the station. The climate control system
had been leaking slightly, and the crew found that behind
an inspection panel they found orbs of water floating back there,
(06:23):
murky water. Each orb was about the size of a
soccer ball. So these are pretty sizable, you know, groups
of water. And the microbes inside included fun guy mites
and bacteria. And along with that, the crew found that
there were microbes that were feeding off the rubberized seals
around the windows. Now, when you have to be in
(06:43):
a pressurized station in outer space, that's a serious risk.
And it's not just like these microbes hitched a ride
aboard all the equipment. The station had come together in
clean rooms on Earth. So clean rooms are facilities that
use powerful air filtration systems to remove particulates and contaminants
from you know, the atmosphere and not have them interfere
(07:05):
when you're building the stuff. So all the grossy stuff
didn't come from the equipment. It came up courtesy of
the cosmonauts and astronauts who visited the Mere space station.
You know, because people are gross. All people are gross,
You are gross, I'm gross. Tari is gross grossness. Aside,
(07:27):
Mirror served many purposes. There were a lot of scientific
studies and experiments on Mirror, including mostly the effects of uh,
what it's like for human beings to be in space
for extended stays. That was really important. It also served
as a test bed for international cooperation with regard to
space science and exploration. You know, a lot of visiting
(07:48):
cosmonauts were from different countries who got to stay aboard Mirror,
and this was an important stepping stone. And now for
one last Mirror story. But it's a heck of a story.
So let's talk a bit more about cosmonaut Saragei Krikolev.
I mentioned him in the previous episode, but this is
(08:09):
a big part of his story. He had joined the
Soviet space program in the nineteen eighties. He was selected
to be a cosmonaut in nineteen eighty five and he
completed his training the following year and he was assigned
originally to the Brand program that was the Soviet equivalent
of the Space station. Ultimately, the brand never flew beyond
(08:29):
an unmanned test flight, but later he was selected to
fly to Mirror, which he actually did a couple of times.
The first time he did it was in nineteen eighty eight.
He was up there for a hundred fifty two days,
but it was during his second visit that I really
want to you know, cover here. He returned to Mirror
on the mission in May of nineteen one with Anatoly
(08:53):
arts Sabarski and Britain's first astronaut, Helen Sharman. Now, the
way Mirror missions were is that you would have cruise
come up and intermingle with cruise from previous missions, so
there would be you know, some some carry over and
some of the folks who were previously a board Mire
(09:14):
would then board the Saya's capsule that had just docked
with the station and then they would leave, they would
go back to Earth and others would stay aboard. And
you couldn't just leave Mere unattended, so there was always
you know, a crew aboard there. Soya's capsules had very
limited capacity, so there wasn't any real way to get
everyone back unless you were to abandoned ship and take
(09:36):
the one escape capsule that was docked with the station
and take that back to Earth, but that would leave
Miror unattended. So Kricolev found himself in a tricky situation
because he was up on Mirror when the Soviet Union
ceased to be. The space program responsible for taking cosmonauts
to and retrieving them from the space station no longer existed,
(10:01):
and there wasn't space in the capsules that were scheduled
to go up and come back for a Crica left
to go along with it. So he was left in
limbo on this space station, not knowing when or even
if he would ever be able to come back to Earth.
And he got the nickname the last Soviet Citizen because
when he went up the Soviet Union was still a thing.
(10:23):
He was a flight engineer. He was stuck keeping Mirror
and working order, and he did ask that one crew
that was going to visit him, but they weren't going
to be able to take him back because again the
says capsule didn't have the capacity for it. He asked
them if they could maybe bring him some honey which
could help lift his spirits. They weren't able to get
hold of any honey, so instead they brought him lemons
(10:44):
and horseradish, which I think is insult to injury personally. Now,
fortunately rescue did come and after more than three hundred
thirty days in space, which was twice the length of
his planned stay, he was able to return and to Earth.
His landing spot was originally part of the U S.
S R, and his space suit even still had USSR
(11:07):
stitched on it, but now that same landing spot was
part of Kazakhstan. Uh. In fact, his hometown had changed names.
When he went up it was called Leningrad. When he
came back down it had a new name St. Petersburg,
and because of massive inflation issues with Russian currency, his
(11:27):
salary for being a cosmonaut was now about half of
what a bus driver would have made. Yawsa he would
later serve as the guest cosmonaut on the Space Shuttle
program that was part of the Shuttle mirror missions. I
mentioned that in the last episode, and he wasn't even
done with space after that, Like, even after all that,
(11:48):
he was still going to go up into space again,
because he was the first Russian cosmonaut to be a
crew member aboard the International Space Station, which we're going
to talk about more in the next episode, but his
is a really cool story. Okay, So let's switch over
and briefly talk about the space Shuttle program in the
United States because that program would in turn shape the
(12:08):
development of future space stations and have massive effects on
the progress of space station development as well. After the
Apollo missions, with the exception of the Apollo Soyo's mission,
in which an Apollo capsule and a Soyo's capsule docked
in orbit in n well, NASA was looking at what
the future of space flight would be all about. There
(12:29):
was this desire to develop a spacecraft that could go
up into orbit, returned to Earth in a way that
would allow pilots to guide the spacecraft to a landing strip,
then land safely, and then be you know, repaired and
prepared for a subsequent launch so you could reuse it.
A reusable spacecraft would cut way back on expenses because
NASA wouldn't have to commission a brand new spacecraft for
(12:52):
every single mission, although the launch system was a different story.
But anyway, this program got started in eighteen seventy two.
But developing a new spacecraft takes a lot of time.
You have to design things, you have to propose things,
you have to settle on which proposal is best. You
have to you know, award contracts. It's a whole thing.
(13:13):
And as we're covering the in this series, NASA regularly
changes as well due to lots of different reasons from Congress,
you know, shifting budgets year over year, two changes in
presidential administrations that affect the leadership in NASA. So the
hope was to have the Shuttle program up and running
in time to dock with sky Lab and boost the
(13:34):
orbiting laboratory to a higher orbit and extend its useful lifespan.
But the space Shuttle program delays meant that that just
wasn't gonna happen. That's why NASA had no choice but
to allow sky Labs orbit to decay to the point
where it re entered our atmosphere and then broke apart
into pieces, some of which hit Australia. By ninety seven,
(13:55):
NASA was testing a glider called Enterprise to verify that
the basic designs for the space plane would work, but
it wouldn't be until nineteen eighty one that the agency
would have a space Shuttle capable of going into orbit
and returning, and that space Shuttle was Columbia, and it
launched for the first time in April of nineteen one.
(14:17):
Sky Lab, by the way, had already come crashing down
in nineteen seventy nine. Now, the reason I even bring
up the space Shuttle is that this would become the
primary means of bringing astronauts up to the space station
and back down again. The Russians would continue to rely
on the Soyuz capsule to take cosmonauts up to Mirror,
but the Space Shuttle would be the main vehicle used
(14:38):
to you know, shuttle crews and experiments to and from
space stations. And that meant that the design of the
Shuttle itself would inform the design of future space stations.
You want your station to be compatible with your method
of transportation. Makes sense anyway. In nineteen seventy nine, plans
had begun in NASA for a new space station like me.
(15:00):
This one was planned to be modular, with pieces brought
up on separate Space Shuttle missions and then constructed in orbit.
And as a stepping stone toward that, NASA formed a
strategic partnership with the European Space Agency. One of the
early examples of this in the Space Shuttle era were
these things called space labs. The e s A, the
(15:20):
European Space Agency, created these laboratories which would be loaded
into the payload cargo bay of the Space Shuttle, and
they would serve as lab space for specific experiments. There
were lots of different space lab missions. In fact, there
were more than twenty of them throughout the Space Shuttle program. Now,
the space labs were not space stations themselves. They remained
(15:43):
connected to the shuttle, but their development would lead to
advancements in the E s A, and they would serve
as the foundation for space station modules down the line
in the future. There were also plans to have the
Space Shuttle visit Saliott stations in partnership with the then
Soviet Union. This gets into politics a bit so. Beginning
(16:04):
in the late sixties, the U s s R. And
USA started to work toward more cooperation and everything from
space exploration to pumping the brakes on the arms race
around the world. It wasn't always a super happy, fun friendship,
but it wasn't as adversarial a relationship as the two
(16:25):
had experienced in the nineteen fifties and early sixties. This period,
called the Detante, lasted from nineteen sixty nine to nineteen
seventy nine, but it ended right around the time the
Space Shuttle program was making real progress. We'll pick up
with more about how the political situation affected the space
exploration industry after we take this quick break. The reasons
(16:56):
for the breakdown and dissolution of the Detant are pitty
complicated and obviously well beyond the parameters of this show.
But things were already tense before the Soviet Union invaded
Afghanistan in nineteen seventy nine. What followed would be increased
tension between the two nations, with a resurgence in arms
development and deployment to follow. So, yeah, that was my childhood.
(17:21):
That was a childhood in which there was this omnipresent,
vague thread of nuclear annihilation simpler times, man. Now what
this means for our podcast is just that any plans
to have the Space She will be part of the
Saliot program. We're put on ice and by then the
USSR was focusing on Mirror as well. Things would change
later after Gorbachev worked to re establish a more friendly
(17:44):
relationship with Europe and the United States. So in nineteen two,
NASA formed a special group, the Space Station Task force.
This group started to put together a plan for a
space station. Further, the plan was to involve the international community,
opening up the whole process, from development to construction to
operation to other nations. In nineteen three, NASA hosted a
(18:08):
workshop focusing on space stations. The following year, US President
Ronald Reagan specifically called for the development of a space
station during his State of the Union address. NASA subsequently
created the Space Station Program Office to go from the
kind of brainstorming phase and the buy in phase to
(18:28):
a more formal planning phase. NASA also issued an RFP
that's a request for proposal, and this RFP went out
to various companies in the aerospace industry to submit proposals
as to the design of space station components like modules
and such. The plan for what the space station would
look like and thus how designers would arrange all the
(18:50):
components changed a few times. One of the early designs
got the nickname the Power Tower, which makes me think
of like a pro wrestling team. But the power Tower
space station design was a pretty darn long one. The
main structure would have measured one twos once fully assembled,
that's around four feet. That is a long space station. Now,
(19:14):
not all of that length was habitable. It wasn't all
like modules where astronauts could you know, float around. The
design actually included a truss or scaffolding from which components
like radio telescopes and solar arrays could hang. In fact,
extending out to either side from the center mass of
(19:35):
this power tower would be forty one worth of solar
arrays on either side. That's about a hundred thirty four
and a half feet of solar rays sticking out to
either side of this thing. The structure would have articulated
attachment points for various payloads, allowing NASA and the E
s A and other partners to create scientific experiments that
(19:56):
could do all sorts of different kinds of research, from
Earth's studies to astronomical observations. It would be a massive undertaking,
or I should say it would have been a massive undertaking.
Assembly would have required twelve separate shuttle flights, as estimated
by NASA in order to get all the components into
(20:16):
orbit and then connected to one another. NASA's projected schedule
for doing that would span nineteen nine two to nine.
Not keep in mind, this is a plan that's being
proposed in Night and parts of the station, according to
this plan, would be ready for astronauts actually inhabited by three,
So while the station would not be complete till starting
(20:40):
in ninety three, there would be enough there for astronauts
to go there and work and live aboard the space station. However,
there were some external issues that would mean that this would,
you know, be the space station that never was, and
the reason for that was primarily related to budget. Even
go into a decade before the station would have been
(21:03):
completed if things had gone as planned, Reductions in NASA's
budget meant there just was no viable way for the
agency to stay on target with a plan to go
this direction. But in addition to budgets, there were criticisms
about the design. Oliver Harwood, who had been a space
station engineer, said that he felt the various contractors had
(21:25):
all submitted pretty similar designs for the station, and that
these designs showed that the contractors weren't actually looking to
find the best way to solve engineering problems. Instead, they
were trying to make sure that their design looked a
lot like NASA's original proposed design, just in an effort
to win a contract. So, in other words, he's he
(21:46):
was saying that these companies were saying, this is not
necessarily the best way, but it might be the best
way to get paid. And that's not necessarily great if
you're looking to build something that's supposed supposed to support
people in space and you know, be a platform on
which you do a lot of science. Another criticism was
that the sections of the inhabited power tower depended upon
(22:06):
a construction approach in which modules were stacked one on
top of another in a linear fashion, but some engineers
worried that this could lead to dangerous situations. So imagine
you've got a space station made out of you know,
like seven modules, and they're all arranged in a line
end to end. So you have module one on one end,
(22:27):
you've got modules seven on the opposite end, and you
know two through six are in between. Now, let's say
there's a point where maybe module modules four and six
catch on fire, and someone happens to be in module five.
So you seal off modules four and six so that
the fire doesn't spread. But now you've got an astronaut
(22:49):
stuck in module five. They have no way of getting
out because one end of the station seven is on
the other side. Of the sealed off five and or
six rather and the other end of the station is
on the other side of sealed off module four, so
you'd have this dead end situation. It could be castrophic
at any rate. By the time we were actually into
(23:11):
the power tower, design was abandoned, and in the fall
of eighty five, NASA studied a different design called a
dual keel station. That's keel as k e e L.
It's you know, a boat term. The design had a
massive trust, sort of like a long rectangle of scaffolding
and a length of scaffold going across the middle halfway
(23:32):
down the length of the rectangle. NASA plan to mount
modules on this trust connected to one another, and also
have solar arrays attached to either side, extending outward from
the edges of this rectangle, and modules amounted along the interior.
It's kind of hard to describe, so if you want
to get an image of this, you can search dual
(23:53):
Keel spaceship and there are a lot of illustrations and
models of it. And it's kind of a moot point
because NASA would later abandon this design too, But the
idea was that the design would provide stability in micro
gravity for the entire station, that it would keep things
stable so you didn't have to worry about too much
mechanical stress being placed on any point of the space station,
(24:16):
which could then lead to failure. The size and complexity
of the design also meant the NASA increased the crew
complement to eight astronauts. The earlier designs had focused on
a crew of six, but there was this concern that
six astronauts wouldn't be enough to both get the station
up and running and keep it running while also doing
(24:36):
experiments like the station would be so complicated that astronauts
would be spending all of their time assembling things, empowering
them on and maintaining them, and never getting around to science.
NASA estimated that it could get all the parts of
this space station up into orbit in eleven Shuttle missions,
so even one fewer than the power Tower version, and
(24:57):
that the added cost of the change in in the
design would be quote unquote just four hundred million dollars.
And uh I say that because the Power Tower space
station cost and estimated around eight point one billion dollars
when it was all said and done, like that was
how much it was estimated to cost had we gone forward.
(25:18):
So in that sense, four million is just kind of
a drop in the bucket if you're talking about eight
point one billion dollars. But there were critics who were
worried that NASA was being super conservative with those estimates,
that it was actually gonna cost way more than that,
and the tendency for projects to go over budget was
well established. Now again I want to stress that this
(25:39):
tendency for NASA projects to go over budget, I don't
think that's necessarily an inherent flaw in NASA, or that
people are being dishonest or something. Rather, I think this
is something we should expect because NASA's tied to politics,
So changes in the political landscape, like changes in how
much Congress budgets towards ASSA, not to mention who happens
(26:02):
to be leading NASA after presidential administration's change, all of
that can have a massive effect on the agency itself,
and it's beyond the project leader's control. Now, in the
design process, engineers found it necessary to deviate from the
initial you know, design in order to meet all the
parameters of the mission. And this is where they ran
(26:23):
into some serious problems. Now, maybe you've heard a phrase
similar to this. You can have it done fast, you
can have it done right, and you can have it
done under budget, but you can only pick two of
those three things. Well, NASA was trying very hard to
do everything, and there are actually more requirements than just three,
(26:43):
and it was proving to just be too big of
a challenge. Complicating matters was the tragedy of the Space
Shuttle Challenger disaster that happened in and the loss of
all hands aboard was a huge blow to both the
nation and the space program in particular, and NASA grounded
the Shuttle program for more than two and a half
years while investigating the causes of that explosion. Obviously, that's
(27:07):
going to have an impact on plans for a space station.
Towards the end of the project, NASA estimated it might
take more than thirty missions, not eleven, in order to
complete the station, with it being suitable for occupation after
twenty one missions. Meanwhile, astronauts with experience in space, you know,
they critiqued the design of the station. They called out
(27:28):
flaws that would make it, you know, more difficult for
astronauts to do their jobs in space, and budget cuts
meant that NASA would have to look to eliminate certain
modules and reduce the capacity and thus usefulness of the
station in an effort to meet new budget constraints. In
NASA submitted a cost assessment for building the dual keel design,
(27:50):
and the new cost was figured to be at least
fourteen point five billion dollars. Congress flipped out, and several
politicians at expressed doubt that the station would ever actually
go into orbit. Because of all the various delays and
changes in design. The whole possibility of a modular space
station with the US taking a lead role was in
(28:10):
jeopardy now. Eventually, NASA and several representatives from the government
were able to hash out a compromise. NASA would abandon
the dual keel design, not entirely. Some elements of the
project would actually find their way into a new proposal,
but the majority of it would be put on indefinite
hold until it was effectively just gone, and NASA would
(28:34):
instead design, build, and deploy what was being called a
Phase one space station, something to serve as kind of
an interim step toward establishing a permanent space station in orbit.
After all, that was the goal to create a space
station that could stay in orbit indefinitely, serving as a
scientific platform and a stepping stone toward future space exploration
(28:54):
missions to places like Mars. The new design, NASA estimated,
would need either to in or eleven missions to get
everything into orbit. It would omit lots of stuff from
the previous designs, including half of the power generators, so
its capacity would also be limited. The Reagan administration gave
the new design the name of space Station Freedom, so
(29:15):
at least this version got as far as getting a name,
which is more than I can say about Power Tower
and Dual Keel. However, like those unnamed stations, Freedom would
also never become a real station. Parts of Freedom would
evolve to become components for the International Space Station. But
that's further down the line. Let's talk a little bit
(29:36):
more about what Freedom was supposed to be. So this
was still going on in the late nineteen eighties when
these conversations were going The Soviet Union was still a
thing at that point, so Mirror was still a thing.
It had been nearly a decade since sky Lab had
come crashing back down to Earth, and more than a
decade since the United States had astronauts aboard a U
(29:58):
S space station. Now AASA continued to receive criticism for
the proposed station design. To meet the lower budget requirements
that Congress set, NASA had simplified freedom so that it
would have just two connecting points for additional modules. The
dual keel design had had five of those. This prompted
(30:19):
some critics to suggest that the station wouldn't actually support
enough scientific work to be a good return on investment.
There were calls to abandon the modular approach entirely and
then send up something more like the monolithic stations of
the Saliot and sky Lab eras. Meanwhile, the European Space
Agency was at loggerheads with NASA because the two agencies
(30:42):
couldn't come to an agreement regarding module design and purpose,
and the e s A was growing frustrated that NASA
was blocking some of their proposals and thus bringing the
international project into jeopardy. Then on the home front, here
in the US, there was another adversary. There was the
Department of Defense. The d D wanted to have full
military access to the station for the purposes of military research.
(31:06):
Now that would already be a complication if the station
were purely an American project, because scientists would be forced
to surrender space to researchers conducting experiments for the military.
But since Freedom was supposed to have international cooperation, this
was even more complicated. After all, Europe wasn't likely to
grant full access to any es A modules to US
(31:29):
military researchers, and that got Congress involved, with members of
the d O D and Congress people getting into some
pretty heated battles over the whole thing. Station Freedom was
starting to take on a pretty ugly context, and there's
probably something allegorical to be said about that, but I'm
going to leave that to the poets out there. Despite
all these issues, Freedom did get initial approval to move
(31:52):
forward before it would ultimately dissolve and morphintic contributions towards
the International Space Station. More on that after this quick
break so to find a lot of drama and disagreements,
NASA got approval from the National Research Council in ven
(32:17):
to go forward with the construction of space Station Freedom. However,
that approval did not come with a lot of enthusiasm,
but it did give NASA the ability to start securing
development contracts with various vendors, thus moving from this sort
of theoretical planning stage to something a bit more concrete,
with companies actually manufacturing hardware. Critics continued to complain about
(32:40):
the station plan in general, with some saying that it
was putting way too much emphasis on material science experiments.
A big part of the original station plan was to
pursue the possibility of bringing commercial manufacturing to space, but
then folks figured that that didn't make a whole lot
of sense unless you were just building stuff meant to
we're in space, like to fly off to the Moon
(33:02):
or Mars or something, because otherwise, the cost of getting
raw materials to space and then bringing finished products back
to Earth is just I mean, it's astronomical to use
a pun. The plan was that the US would take
the lead on this station. It would have majority ownership,
like vast majority ownership of the station. Canada would have
(33:24):
like three percent ownership of the station, and then the E,
s A, and Japan would each have fifty one percent
ownership of their individual modules that connected to the station.
The crew would consist of eight astronauts, six of whom
were to be American and the other two being International astronauts.
Each crew was expected to serve a ninety day tour
(33:47):
of duty. But then NASA leader said, you know what,
we changed our minds. Let's make it a hundred twenty
days for a tour of duty instead. UH. That was
because they were trying to figure out a way to
reduce the number of space Shuttle missions they would need
to send in order to you know, keep up that
particular schedule. Uh. And there were a lot of people
(34:09):
on Earth calling for NASA to explore alternatives to the
space shuttle program, including the use of heavy lift rockets
to bring stuff up to a proposed station. This was
largely because of that Challenger disaster. There were people saying,
we need to have a different alternative to just space shuttles.
On the political front, NASA saw it's budget slashed a
(34:31):
few times, including massive cuts to the Space station budget.
And as you can imagine, when you're trying to complete
a very challenging project, it does not get easier to
do when support for your project goes away. NASA had
originally hoped to begin launching components by but at this
stage that had slipped to with them, you know, estimating
(34:53):
that astronauts could potentially begin to occupy the space station
starting in UH. Even that decision was met with criticism,
namely from NASA's partners, because Japan and Europe were both
upset that NASA did not first consult with them before
announcing this pushed back launch date. The international participation meant
(35:14):
that all these agencies are dependent upon one another to
at least some extent, and so a delay with one
obviously affects the others. And I suppose they weren't really mad,
they're just very disappointed by space station Freedom whimpered to
a halt. The project had pretty much failed in every metric,
(35:34):
and audit showed that the station design was more massive
than originally planned. It was heavier in fact, and that
would put more strain on making sure that NASA could
keep the thing in orbit and not have it decay
and re enter the atmosphere. It would mean, you know,
more mass means again that you have to keep on
pushing to keep that momentum going or else you know,
(35:57):
it'll slow down gradually and come crashing to Earth. The
design was also extremely complex for Freedom. Some critics felt
that in fact, it was overly complicated, and that meant
that it was both driving up the cost and also
it would make it harder to actually build and operate
the ding dang thing. On top of that, the you know,
(36:19):
in order to meet the budget needs, NASA was starting
to make some pretty massive cuts on the design, including
cuts to the power generation. Now, that prompted scientists to say,
you might not even be able to generate enough power
to run all the different experiments, and that would be
an issue too, Like, if you can't actually run the
(36:40):
experiments you need to run, then why are we even
building the thing. The findings of the you know reports
showed that there would be a thirty four percent shortfall
in power supply, and so you know, you have a
third of the power you need is just not there.
That's not great. Essentially, the conclusion was that the state
was going to be too expensive and not actually do
(37:03):
what scientists needed it to do. So the whole thing
kind of fizzled out. Now, NASA still wanted to build
a space station, and folks in the government still wanted
that too, at least some of them did, but the
agency was told it would be getting less money than
and it would also require another redesign. They weren't going
to be able to go with station freedom. Now, if
(37:24):
this episode has nailed any point home, I think it's
that this whole process is laborious to the extreme. But
the engineers went back to the drawing board and NASA
created a new design. In the news station, we use
prefabricated trust segments that would not require assembly in space,
and that would reduce the number of e v A
(37:45):
s or extra vehicular activities or spacewalks that would be
necessary to bring the station together, which had been a
criticism of the previous designs. They would have required thousands
of hours of spacewalks, and the goal was to aim
for more like a few hun hours of spacewalks per year. Uh,
the station would be smaller, and it would have fewer
(38:05):
modules and fewer power generators to boot. Crew quarters would
get smaller. Crew capacity would go from eight astronauts to four.
The life support system was simplified. It also meant that
NASA would have to fly more resupply missions to the
station to bring up more water and oxygen because the
(38:25):
simplified version of life support would not be able to
reclaim and recycle oxygen and water as effectively, So that
would be an additional burden, right, You would have to
keep bringing more supplies up, and that's expensive. Scientists worried
that a crew of four would be too small to
do anything really useful aboard the station, and that any
(38:48):
experiments would be so limited as to be a terrible
return on investment. So politicians began to question the viability
of this project. Now I feel a lot of sympathy
for NASA, because here there's an agency trying desperately to
put together a working plan for a space station, but
with all the different pressures and components in place, the
task was next to impossible. At one point, in House
(39:12):
Appropriations Subcommittee actually voted determinate all funding for the space station,
which at that point had received the derisive nickname space
Station Fred because it was a fraction of the size
and capability of the proposed space station Freedom Freedom got
shortened to Fred. Now. Despite the vote to terminate support,
(39:36):
Congress as a whole decided to continue providing funding for
the station, particularly after NASA made some deep cuts elsewhere
in its various programs. The following year, Congress held a
vote to cancel the project, but that vote was defeated
and it kept the station alive for the time being.
And this whole time there were companies working on building
(39:56):
that actual hardware that would make up the modules on
the space station. So NASA had kept tweaking designs, but
doing so while trying to maintain compatibility with older plans
so that the pieces that were already in motion would
still be usable. By the time, you know, they were
ready to launch the space station, some of the hardware
(40:17):
was actually nearing the point where NASA was going to
need to do some flight testing. So like stuff was
coming together, It's just that the overall space station project
itself was at risk. Then the USSR fell apart, and
the Cold War effectively came to an end. At least
that Cold War came to an end. I would argue,
(40:37):
we have other Cold Wars going on right now, including
one with Russia. Now there were there was no longer
an adversary in the form of the U S s
R that was gone. This also meant that Congress started
to look at reducing budgets for things like military budgets
as well as the space budget. And this reinforces the
(40:58):
fact that the space program was in part fueled by
the rivalry that the United States had with the Soviet Union,
and without that rivalry, a lot of politicians just didn't
see the expense of a space station as being justifiable,
the Clinton administration gave NASA a new order to come
up with three different proposals for a space station that
(41:19):
would honor the international commitments that NASA had made with
partners like the European Space Agency, and they had three
different budget caps. There was a budget cap of five
billion dollars, seven billion dollars, or nine billion dollars. So
in other words, hey, NASA, propose space stations. These are
the three categories. They can't go over nine billion, and
(41:42):
then we'll decide which one we're gonna go with. Considering
that even Station Fred was projected to cost nearly seventeen
billion dollars, this was a huge request. However, you could
say that NASA had already done some of this work, right,
Some of those contracts that had made had already started
to produce components for a space station, so at least
(42:04):
some of it had already been paid for. Now, as
it would turn out, the collapse of the USSR would
mean that Russia, once considered a great enemy to the
United States, could join in this international project. This finally
sets the stage for the International Space Station, and that
is what we will talk about in the next episode
in this series, but for now let us say goodbye.
(42:27):
If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in
future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me.
I greatly appreciate it. The best way to do that
is on Twitter. The handle for the show is text
Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again, really Sion.
(42:48):
Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more
podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
One
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff. I am your host,
joth In Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart
Radio and I love all things tech. Once again, if
I sound different from this episode than normal episodes, it's
because I'm in our studio in Atlanta, not at home.
(00:27):
But we are continuing our story about space stations, which
just gets longer within free episode I caught. I thought
originally this was gonna be maybe a two partter. Turns
out it's gonna be a four partner and this is
part three. So in our last episode in this series,
we looked at the history of Mirror, the first modular
space station, and there are a couple of things that
(00:48):
I really need to cover before I move on, stuff
I didn't talk about in the Mirror episode for one
reason or another. One of those is that Mirror really
was an amazing achievement, but it was also kind of
a show, at least according to some reports. Astronauts who
visited mir mentioned that parts of the space station were
littered with rubbish because the Russians hadn't really come up
(01:10):
with a way to store that stuff effectively. I mentioned
how the Quant one module sort of became a container
for floating rubbish after the various instruments in that in
that UH module went to put and there was no
real need to use it anymore. But that's not to
say that garbage just continued to accumulate over the fifteen
(01:31):
years span that Mirror was in service. The crew would
actually unpack incoming cargo ships that would dock with Mer.
Then they would shove garbage into the cargo ships that
went back to re enter Earth's atmosphere and then break
apart on re entry, so that garbage was sent hurtling
back to Earth. But you know it's okay because most
(01:52):
of it just burnt up on the way back. At
least I guess it's okay. And in the last episode,
I mentioned that a cargo ship once I did with
the Specter module on Mirror. As the cargo ship was
going through this experimental docking procedure with the Quant one
module nearby, that collision punctured Specter's hole, forcing the crew
(02:14):
to seal the Specter module off from the rest of
the station in order to prevent the full station from
depressurizing the Specter module's power. Generation capabilities were similarly cut off.
That had some solar arrays. But you know, sealing it
off meant that the astronauts, the cosmonauts, I should say,
had no more access to it. However, uh, there were
(02:37):
some some e v A s some spacewalks that the
cosmonauts conducted in order to restore at least some connectivity
with Specter's power generation, though the module itself remained sealed off.
Specter had been where American astronauts had lived up to
that point. Obviously, it could no longer serve that function.
(02:58):
It had been in service for just two years when
this collision brought it offline. There was speculation that the
whole reason that this happened may have been that that
cargo ship that collided with Specter had actually been overpacked
with garbage ahead of that experimental docking procedure, and that
the problem was that because of all that extra garbage,
(03:20):
the ship had more mass than the control crew thought
it was gonna have, so they weren't able to bring
it to a stop the way they thought they would.
Because it's remember that it's you know, it's pretty hard
to judge how much to pack into a ship because
it's really hard to figure out how much stuff weighs
(03:41):
in microgravity because you can't, you know, put it on
a scale or anything. So you you could easily pack
too much mass in a cargo ship and not realize
it when you're in microgravity because there's no easy way
to keep track of that with precision. And as we know,
you know, the more massive something is, the harder it
is to change that object's momentum. A heavy object needs
(04:04):
more energy to get it to start moving than a
lighter object needs, and a heavier object also needs more
energy to bring it to a stop than a lighter
object would. So that might have been why the cargo
ship failed to use enough thrust to avoid the collision
during that docking procedure. That the ship itself was just
loaded down with garbage. Jean Pierre Agnier and I know
(04:26):
I've butchered his name, so I'll just call him Jean
Pierre from now on, a French astronaut and pilot, spoke
with New scientists about what it was like to live
and work aboard Mirror. He said that the station smelled
kind of like burnt coffee and that the fans on
board the ship the fans that you know, we're circulating
the air aboard the ship generated sixty seven decibel's worth
(04:49):
of noise on average, making it sound like a noisy
engine room all the time. He said it was actually
hard for him to get used to silence when he
left the station. He said there was no privacy aboard
the station, that the crew were required to engage in
two exercise sessions a day to counteract the effects that
microgravity can have on the human body, and that on
(05:12):
average they would get two sessions of five minute daily
contacts with Earth and otherwise they were just stuck with
each other. Jean Pierre said that he felt Mirror was
error resistant, that the station itself was resistant to serious errors,
and pointed out that while the station had experienced two
separate emergencies like real emergencies, and one was the onboard
(05:37):
fire and the other was the cargo ship collision, no
one was harmed in either of those, and so while
these accidents happened, the ship or the space station itself
was resistant to catastrophe. He did criticize the procedures that
were followed by the Russian Space Agency, said they weren't
really sufficiently careful or detail oriented and that things could
(05:59):
have been much worse had the tech not been as
a you know, tough. Also, towards the end of Mirror's service,
the crew aboard the station conducted a study on the
microbes that were inhabiting the station. The climate control system
had been leaking slightly, and the crew found that behind
an inspection panel they found orbs of water floating back there,
(06:23):
murky water. Each orb was about the size of a
soccer ball. So these are pretty sizable, you know, groups
of water. And the microbes inside included fun guy mites
and bacteria. And along with that, the crew found that
there were microbes that were feeding off the rubberized seals
around the windows. Now, when you have to be in
(06:43):
a pressurized station in outer space, that's a serious risk.
And it's not just like these microbes hitched a ride
aboard all the equipment. The station had come together in
clean rooms on Earth. So clean rooms are facilities that
use powerful air filtration systems to remove particulates and contaminants
from you know, the atmosphere and not have them interfere
(07:05):
when you're building the stuff. So all the grossy stuff
didn't come from the equipment. It came up courtesy of
the cosmonauts and astronauts who visited the Mere space station.
You know, because people are gross. All people are gross,
You are gross, I'm gross. Tari is gross grossness. Aside,
(07:27):
Mirror served many purposes. There were a lot of scientific
studies and experiments on Mirror, including mostly the effects of uh,
what it's like for human beings to be in space
for extended stays. That was really important. It also served
as a test bed for international cooperation with regard to
space science and exploration. You know, a lot of visiting
(07:48):
cosmonauts were from different countries who got to stay aboard Mirror,
and this was an important stepping stone. And now for
one last Mirror story. But it's a heck of a story.
So let's talk a bit more about cosmonaut Saragei Krikolev.
I mentioned him in the previous episode, but this is
(08:09):
a big part of his story. He had joined the
Soviet space program in the nineteen eighties. He was selected
to be a cosmonaut in nineteen eighty five and he
completed his training the following year and he was assigned
originally to the Brand program that was the Soviet equivalent
of the Space station. Ultimately, the brand never flew beyond
(08:29):
an unmanned test flight, but later he was selected to
fly to Mirror, which he actually did a couple of times.
The first time he did it was in nineteen eighty eight.
He was up there for a hundred fifty two days,
but it was during his second visit that I really
want to you know, cover here. He returned to Mirror
on the mission in May of nineteen one with Anatoly
(08:53):
arts Sabarski and Britain's first astronaut, Helen Sharman. Now, the
way Mirror missions were is that you would have cruise
come up and intermingle with cruise from previous missions, so
there would be you know, some some carry over and
some of the folks who were previously a board Mire
(09:14):
would then board the Saya's capsule that had just docked
with the station and then they would leave, they would
go back to Earth and others would stay aboard. And
you couldn't just leave Mere unattended, so there was always
you know, a crew aboard there. Soya's capsules had very
limited capacity, so there wasn't any real way to get
everyone back unless you were to abandoned ship and take
(09:36):
the one escape capsule that was docked with the station
and take that back to Earth, but that would leave
Miror unattended. So Kricolev found himself in a tricky situation
because he was up on Mirror when the Soviet Union
ceased to be. The space program responsible for taking cosmonauts
to and retrieving them from the space station no longer existed,
(10:01):
and there wasn't space in the capsules that were scheduled
to go up and come back for a Crica left
to go along with it. So he was left in
limbo on this space station, not knowing when or even
if he would ever be able to come back to Earth.
And he got the nickname the last Soviet Citizen because
when he went up the Soviet Union was still a thing.
(10:23):
He was a flight engineer. He was stuck keeping Mirror
and working order, and he did ask that one crew
that was going to visit him, but they weren't going
to be able to take him back because again the
says capsule didn't have the capacity for it. He asked
them if they could maybe bring him some honey which
could help lift his spirits. They weren't able to get
hold of any honey, so instead they brought him lemons
(10:44):
and horseradish, which I think is insult to injury personally. Now,
fortunately rescue did come and after more than three hundred
thirty days in space, which was twice the length of
his planned stay, he was able to return and to Earth.
His landing spot was originally part of the U S.
S R, and his space suit even still had USSR
(11:07):
stitched on it, but now that same landing spot was
part of Kazakhstan. Uh. In fact, his hometown had changed names.
When he went up it was called Leningrad. When he
came back down it had a new name St. Petersburg,
and because of massive inflation issues with Russian currency, his
(11:27):
salary for being a cosmonaut was now about half of
what a bus driver would have made. Yawsa he would
later serve as the guest cosmonaut on the Space Shuttle
program that was part of the Shuttle mirror missions. I
mentioned that in the last episode, and he wasn't even
done with space after that, Like, even after all that,
(11:48):
he was still going to go up into space again,
because he was the first Russian cosmonaut to be a
crew member aboard the International Space Station, which we're going
to talk about more in the next episode, but his
is a really cool story. Okay, So let's switch over
and briefly talk about the space Shuttle program in the
United States because that program would in turn shape the
(12:08):
development of future space stations and have massive effects on
the progress of space station development as well. After the
Apollo missions, with the exception of the Apollo Soyo's mission,
in which an Apollo capsule and a Soyo's capsule docked
in orbit in n well, NASA was looking at what
the future of space flight would be all about. There
(12:29):
was this desire to develop a spacecraft that could go
up into orbit, returned to Earth in a way that
would allow pilots to guide the spacecraft to a landing strip,
then land safely, and then be you know, repaired and
prepared for a subsequent launch so you could reuse it.
A reusable spacecraft would cut way back on expenses because
NASA wouldn't have to commission a brand new spacecraft for
(12:52):
every single mission, although the launch system was a different story.
But anyway, this program got started in eighteen seventy two.
But developing a new spacecraft takes a lot of time.
You have to design things, you have to propose things,
you have to settle on which proposal is best. You
have to you know, award contracts. It's a whole thing.
(13:13):
And as we're covering the in this series, NASA regularly
changes as well due to lots of different reasons from Congress,
you know, shifting budgets year over year, two changes in
presidential administrations that affect the leadership in NASA. So the
hope was to have the Shuttle program up and running
in time to dock with sky Lab and boost the
(13:34):
orbiting laboratory to a higher orbit and extend its useful lifespan.
But the space Shuttle program delays meant that that just
wasn't gonna happen. That's why NASA had no choice but
to allow sky Labs orbit to decay to the point
where it re entered our atmosphere and then broke apart
into pieces, some of which hit Australia. By ninety seven,
(13:55):
NASA was testing a glider called Enterprise to verify that
the basic designs for the space plane would work, but
it wouldn't be until nineteen eighty one that the agency
would have a space Shuttle capable of going into orbit
and returning, and that space Shuttle was Columbia, and it
launched for the first time in April of nineteen one.
(14:17):
Sky Lab, by the way, had already come crashing down
in nineteen seventy nine. Now, the reason I even bring
up the space Shuttle is that this would become the
primary means of bringing astronauts up to the space station
and back down again. The Russians would continue to rely
on the Soyuz capsule to take cosmonauts up to Mirror,
but the Space Shuttle would be the main vehicle used
(14:38):
to you know, shuttle crews and experiments to and from
space stations. And that meant that the design of the
Shuttle itself would inform the design of future space stations.
You want your station to be compatible with your method
of transportation. Makes sense anyway. In nineteen seventy nine, plans
had begun in NASA for a new space station like me.
(15:00):
This one was planned to be modular, with pieces brought
up on separate Space Shuttle missions and then constructed in orbit.
And as a stepping stone toward that, NASA formed a
strategic partnership with the European Space Agency. One of the
early examples of this in the Space Shuttle era were
these things called space labs. The e s A, the
(15:20):
European Space Agency, created these laboratories which would be loaded
into the payload cargo bay of the Space Shuttle, and
they would serve as lab space for specific experiments. There
were lots of different space lab missions. In fact, there
were more than twenty of them throughout the Space Shuttle program. Now,
the space labs were not space stations themselves. They remained
(15:43):
connected to the shuttle, but their development would lead to
advancements in the E s A, and they would serve
as the foundation for space station modules down the line
in the future. There were also plans to have the
Space Shuttle visit Saliott stations in partnership with the then
Soviet Union. This gets into politics a bit so. Beginning
(16:04):
in the late sixties, the U s s R. And
USA started to work toward more cooperation and everything from
space exploration to pumping the brakes on the arms race
around the world. It wasn't always a super happy, fun friendship,
but it wasn't as adversarial a relationship as the two
(16:25):
had experienced in the nineteen fifties and early sixties. This period,
called the Detante, lasted from nineteen sixty nine to nineteen
seventy nine, but it ended right around the time the
Space Shuttle program was making real progress. We'll pick up
with more about how the political situation affected the space
exploration industry after we take this quick break. The reasons
(16:56):
for the breakdown and dissolution of the Detant are pitty
complicated and obviously well beyond the parameters of this show.
But things were already tense before the Soviet Union invaded
Afghanistan in nineteen seventy nine. What followed would be increased
tension between the two nations, with a resurgence in arms
development and deployment to follow. So, yeah, that was my childhood.
(17:21):
That was a childhood in which there was this omnipresent,
vague thread of nuclear annihilation simpler times, man. Now what
this means for our podcast is just that any plans
to have the Space She will be part of the
Saliot program. We're put on ice and by then the
USSR was focusing on Mirror as well. Things would change
later after Gorbachev worked to re establish a more friendly
(17:44):
relationship with Europe and the United States. So in nineteen two,
NASA formed a special group, the Space Station Task force.
This group started to put together a plan for a
space station. Further, the plan was to involve the international community,
opening up the whole process, from development to construction to
operation to other nations. In nineteen three, NASA hosted a
(18:08):
workshop focusing on space stations. The following year, US President
Ronald Reagan specifically called for the development of a space
station during his State of the Union address. NASA subsequently
created the Space Station Program Office to go from the
kind of brainstorming phase and the buy in phase to
(18:28):
a more formal planning phase. NASA also issued an RFP
that's a request for proposal, and this RFP went out
to various companies in the aerospace industry to submit proposals
as to the design of space station components like modules
and such. The plan for what the space station would
look like and thus how designers would arrange all the
(18:50):
components changed a few times. One of the early designs
got the nickname the Power Tower, which makes me think
of like a pro wrestling team. But the power Tower
space station design was a pretty darn long one. The
main structure would have measured one twos once fully assembled,
that's around four feet. That is a long space station. Now,
(19:14):
not all of that length was habitable. It wasn't all
like modules where astronauts could you know, float around. The
design actually included a truss or scaffolding from which components
like radio telescopes and solar arrays could hang. In fact,
extending out to either side from the center mass of
(19:35):
this power tower would be forty one worth of solar
arrays on either side. That's about a hundred thirty four
and a half feet of solar rays sticking out to
either side of this thing. The structure would have articulated
attachment points for various payloads, allowing NASA and the E
s A and other partners to create scientific experiments that
(19:56):
could do all sorts of different kinds of research, from
Earth's studies to astronomical observations. It would be a massive undertaking,
or I should say it would have been a massive undertaking.
Assembly would have required twelve separate shuttle flights, as estimated
by NASA in order to get all the components into
(20:16):
orbit and then connected to one another. NASA's projected schedule
for doing that would span nineteen nine two to nine.
Not keep in mind, this is a plan that's being
proposed in Night and parts of the station, according to
this plan, would be ready for astronauts actually inhabited by three,
So while the station would not be complete till starting
(20:40):
in ninety three, there would be enough there for astronauts
to go there and work and live aboard the space station. However,
there were some external issues that would mean that this would,
you know, be the space station that never was, and
the reason for that was primarily related to budget. Even
go into a decade before the station would have been
(21:03):
completed if things had gone as planned, Reductions in NASA's
budget meant there just was no viable way for the
agency to stay on target with a plan to go
this direction. But in addition to budgets, there were criticisms
about the design. Oliver Harwood, who had been a space
station engineer, said that he felt the various contractors had
(21:25):
all submitted pretty similar designs for the station, and that
these designs showed that the contractors weren't actually looking to
find the best way to solve engineering problems. Instead, they
were trying to make sure that their design looked a
lot like NASA's original proposed design, just in an effort
to win a contract. So, in other words, he's he
(21:46):
was saying that these companies were saying, this is not
necessarily the best way, but it might be the best
way to get paid. And that's not necessarily great if
you're looking to build something that's supposed supposed to support
people in space and you know, be a platform on
which you do a lot of science. Another criticism was
that the sections of the inhabited power tower depended upon
(22:06):
a construction approach in which modules were stacked one on
top of another in a linear fashion, but some engineers
worried that this could lead to dangerous situations. So imagine
you've got a space station made out of you know,
like seven modules, and they're all arranged in a line
end to end. So you have module one on one end,
(22:27):
you've got modules seven on the opposite end, and you
know two through six are in between. Now, let's say
there's a point where maybe module modules four and six
catch on fire, and someone happens to be in module five.
So you seal off modules four and six so that
the fire doesn't spread. But now you've got an astronaut
(22:49):
stuck in module five. They have no way of getting
out because one end of the station seven is on
the other side. Of the sealed off five and or
six rather and the other end of the station is
on the other side of sealed off module four, so
you'd have this dead end situation. It could be castrophic
at any rate. By the time we were actually into
(23:11):
the power tower, design was abandoned, and in the fall
of eighty five, NASA studied a different design called a
dual keel station. That's keel as k e e L.
It's you know, a boat term. The design had a
massive trust, sort of like a long rectangle of scaffolding
and a length of scaffold going across the middle halfway
(23:32):
down the length of the rectangle. NASA plan to mount
modules on this trust connected to one another, and also
have solar arrays attached to either side, extending outward from
the edges of this rectangle, and modules amounted along the interior.
It's kind of hard to describe, so if you want
to get an image of this, you can search dual
(23:53):
Keel spaceship and there are a lot of illustrations and
models of it. And it's kind of a moot point
because NASA would later abandon this design too, But the
idea was that the design would provide stability in micro
gravity for the entire station, that it would keep things
stable so you didn't have to worry about too much
mechanical stress being placed on any point of the space station,
(24:16):
which could then lead to failure. The size and complexity
of the design also meant the NASA increased the crew
complement to eight astronauts. The earlier designs had focused on
a crew of six, but there was this concern that
six astronauts wouldn't be enough to both get the station
up and running and keep it running while also doing
(24:36):
experiments like the station would be so complicated that astronauts
would be spending all of their time assembling things, empowering
them on and maintaining them, and never getting around to science.
NASA estimated that it could get all the parts of
this space station up into orbit in eleven Shuttle missions,
so even one fewer than the power Tower version, and
(24:57):
that the added cost of the change in in the
design would be quote unquote just four hundred million dollars.
And uh I say that because the Power Tower space
station cost and estimated around eight point one billion dollars
when it was all said and done, like that was
how much it was estimated to cost had we gone forward.
(25:18):
So in that sense, four million is just kind of
a drop in the bucket if you're talking about eight
point one billion dollars. But there were critics who were
worried that NASA was being super conservative with those estimates,
that it was actually gonna cost way more than that,
and the tendency for projects to go over budget was
well established. Now again I want to stress that this
(25:39):
tendency for NASA projects to go over budget, I don't
think that's necessarily an inherent flaw in NASA, or that
people are being dishonest or something. Rather, I think this
is something we should expect because NASA's tied to politics,
So changes in the political landscape, like changes in how
much Congress budgets towards ASSA, not to mention who happens
(26:02):
to be leading NASA after presidential administration's change, all of
that can have a massive effect on the agency itself,
and it's beyond the project leader's control. Now, in the
design process, engineers found it necessary to deviate from the
initial you know, design in order to meet all the
parameters of the mission. And this is where they ran
(26:23):
into some serious problems. Now, maybe you've heard a phrase
similar to this. You can have it done fast, you
can have it done right, and you can have it
done under budget, but you can only pick two of
those three things. Well, NASA was trying very hard to
do everything, and there are actually more requirements than just three,
(26:43):
and it was proving to just be too big of
a challenge. Complicating matters was the tragedy of the Space
Shuttle Challenger disaster that happened in and the loss of
all hands aboard was a huge blow to both the
nation and the space program in particular, and NASA grounded
the Shuttle program for more than two and a half
years while investigating the causes of that explosion. Obviously, that's
(27:07):
going to have an impact on plans for a space station.
Towards the end of the project, NASA estimated it might
take more than thirty missions, not eleven, in order to
complete the station, with it being suitable for occupation after
twenty one missions. Meanwhile, astronauts with experience in space, you know,
they critiqued the design of the station. They called out
(27:28):
flaws that would make it, you know, more difficult for
astronauts to do their jobs in space, and budget cuts
meant that NASA would have to look to eliminate certain
modules and reduce the capacity and thus usefulness of the
station in an effort to meet new budget constraints. In
NASA submitted a cost assessment for building the dual keel design,
(27:50):
and the new cost was figured to be at least
fourteen point five billion dollars. Congress flipped out, and several
politicians at expressed doubt that the station would ever actually
go into orbit. Because of all the various delays and
changes in design. The whole possibility of a modular space
station with the US taking a lead role was in
(28:10):
jeopardy now. Eventually, NASA and several representatives from the government
were able to hash out a compromise. NASA would abandon
the dual keel design, not entirely. Some elements of the
project would actually find their way into a new proposal,
but the majority of it would be put on indefinite
hold until it was effectively just gone, and NASA would
(28:34):
instead design, build, and deploy what was being called a
Phase one space station, something to serve as kind of
an interim step toward establishing a permanent space station in orbit.
After all, that was the goal to create a space
station that could stay in orbit indefinitely, serving as a
scientific platform and a stepping stone toward future space exploration
(28:54):
missions to places like Mars. The new design, NASA estimated,
would need either to in or eleven missions to get
everything into orbit. It would omit lots of stuff from
the previous designs, including half of the power generators, so
its capacity would also be limited. The Reagan administration gave
the new design the name of space Station Freedom, so
(29:15):
at least this version got as far as getting a name,
which is more than I can say about Power Tower
and Dual Keel. However, like those unnamed stations, Freedom would
also never become a real station. Parts of Freedom would
evolve to become components for the International Space Station. But
that's further down the line. Let's talk a little bit
(29:36):
more about what Freedom was supposed to be. So this
was still going on in the late nineteen eighties when
these conversations were going The Soviet Union was still a
thing at that point, so Mirror was still a thing.
It had been nearly a decade since sky Lab had
come crashing back down to Earth, and more than a
decade since the United States had astronauts aboard a U
(29:58):
S space station. Now AASA continued to receive criticism for
the proposed station design. To meet the lower budget requirements
that Congress set, NASA had simplified freedom so that it
would have just two connecting points for additional modules. The
dual keel design had had five of those. This prompted
(30:19):
some critics to suggest that the station wouldn't actually support
enough scientific work to be a good return on investment.
There were calls to abandon the modular approach entirely and
then send up something more like the monolithic stations of
the Saliot and sky Lab eras. Meanwhile, the European Space
Agency was at loggerheads with NASA because the two agencies
(30:42):
couldn't come to an agreement regarding module design and purpose,
and the e s A was growing frustrated that NASA
was blocking some of their proposals and thus bringing the
international project into jeopardy. Then on the home front, here
in the US, there was another adversary. There was the
Department of Defense. The d D wanted to have full
military access to the station for the purposes of military research.
(31:06):
Now that would already be a complication if the station
were purely an American project, because scientists would be forced
to surrender space to researchers conducting experiments for the military.
But since Freedom was supposed to have international cooperation, this
was even more complicated. After all, Europe wasn't likely to
grant full access to any es A modules to US
(31:29):
military researchers, and that got Congress involved, with members of
the d O D and Congress people getting into some
pretty heated battles over the whole thing. Station Freedom was
starting to take on a pretty ugly context, and there's
probably something allegorical to be said about that, but I'm
going to leave that to the poets out there. Despite
all these issues, Freedom did get initial approval to move
(31:52):
forward before it would ultimately dissolve and morphintic contributions towards
the International Space Station. More on that after this quick
break so to find a lot of drama and disagreements,
NASA got approval from the National Research Council in ven
(32:17):
to go forward with the construction of space Station Freedom. However,
that approval did not come with a lot of enthusiasm,
but it did give NASA the ability to start securing
development contracts with various vendors, thus moving from this sort
of theoretical planning stage to something a bit more concrete,
with companies actually manufacturing hardware. Critics continued to complain about
(32:40):
the station plan in general, with some saying that it
was putting way too much emphasis on material science experiments.
A big part of the original station plan was to
pursue the possibility of bringing commercial manufacturing to space, but
then folks figured that that didn't make a whole lot
of sense unless you were just building stuff meant to
we're in space, like to fly off to the Moon
(33:02):
or Mars or something, because otherwise, the cost of getting
raw materials to space and then bringing finished products back
to Earth is just I mean, it's astronomical to use
a pun. The plan was that the US would take
the lead on this station. It would have majority ownership,
like vast majority ownership of the station. Canada would have
(33:24):
like three percent ownership of the station, and then the E,
s A, and Japan would each have fifty one percent
ownership of their individual modules that connected to the station.
The crew would consist of eight astronauts, six of whom
were to be American and the other two being International astronauts.
Each crew was expected to serve a ninety day tour
(33:47):
of duty. But then NASA leader said, you know what,
we changed our minds. Let's make it a hundred twenty
days for a tour of duty instead. UH. That was
because they were trying to figure out a way to
reduce the number of space Shuttle missions they would need
to send in order to you know, keep up that
particular schedule. Uh. And there were a lot of people
(34:09):
on Earth calling for NASA to explore alternatives to the
space shuttle program, including the use of heavy lift rockets
to bring stuff up to a proposed station. This was
largely because of that Challenger disaster. There were people saying,
we need to have a different alternative to just space shuttles.
On the political front, NASA saw it's budget slashed a
(34:31):
few times, including massive cuts to the Space station budget.
And as you can imagine, when you're trying to complete
a very challenging project, it does not get easier to
do when support for your project goes away. NASA had
originally hoped to begin launching components by but at this
stage that had slipped to with them, you know, estimating
(34:53):
that astronauts could potentially begin to occupy the space station
starting in UH. Even that decision was met with criticism,
namely from NASA's partners, because Japan and Europe were both
upset that NASA did not first consult with them before
announcing this pushed back launch date. The international participation meant
(35:14):
that all these agencies are dependent upon one another to
at least some extent, and so a delay with one
obviously affects the others. And I suppose they weren't really mad,
they're just very disappointed by space station Freedom whimpered to
a halt. The project had pretty much failed in every metric,
(35:34):
and audit showed that the station design was more massive
than originally planned. It was heavier in fact, and that
would put more strain on making sure that NASA could
keep the thing in orbit and not have it decay
and re enter the atmosphere. It would mean, you know,
more mass means again that you have to keep on
pushing to keep that momentum going or else you know,
(35:57):
it'll slow down gradually and come crashing to Earth. The
design was also extremely complex for Freedom. Some critics felt
that in fact, it was overly complicated, and that meant
that it was both driving up the cost and also
it would make it harder to actually build and operate
the ding dang thing. On top of that, the you know,
(36:19):
in order to meet the budget needs, NASA was starting
to make some pretty massive cuts on the design, including
cuts to the power generation. Now, that prompted scientists to say,
you might not even be able to generate enough power
to run all the different experiments, and that would be
an issue too, Like, if you can't actually run the
(36:40):
experiments you need to run, then why are we even
building the thing. The findings of the you know reports
showed that there would be a thirty four percent shortfall
in power supply, and so you know, you have a
third of the power you need is just not there.
That's not great. Essentially, the conclusion was that the state
was going to be too expensive and not actually do
(37:03):
what scientists needed it to do. So the whole thing
kind of fizzled out. Now, NASA still wanted to build
a space station, and folks in the government still wanted
that too, at least some of them did, but the
agency was told it would be getting less money than
and it would also require another redesign. They weren't going
to be able to go with station freedom. Now, if
(37:24):
this episode has nailed any point home, I think it's
that this whole process is laborious to the extreme. But
the engineers went back to the drawing board and NASA
created a new design. In the news station, we use
prefabricated trust segments that would not require assembly in space,
and that would reduce the number of e v A
(37:45):
s or extra vehicular activities or spacewalks that would be
necessary to bring the station together, which had been a
criticism of the previous designs. They would have required thousands
of hours of spacewalks, and the goal was to aim
for more like a few hun hours of spacewalks per year. Uh,
the station would be smaller, and it would have fewer
(38:05):
modules and fewer power generators to boot. Crew quarters would
get smaller. Crew capacity would go from eight astronauts to four.
The life support system was simplified. It also meant that
NASA would have to fly more resupply missions to the
station to bring up more water and oxygen because the
(38:25):
simplified version of life support would not be able to
reclaim and recycle oxygen and water as effectively, So that
would be an additional burden, right, You would have to
keep bringing more supplies up, and that's expensive. Scientists worried
that a crew of four would be too small to
do anything really useful aboard the station, and that any
(38:48):
experiments would be so limited as to be a terrible
return on investment. So politicians began to question the viability
of this project. Now I feel a lot of sympathy
for NASA, because here there's an agency trying desperately to
put together a working plan for a space station, but
with all the different pressures and components in place, the
task was next to impossible. At one point, in House
(39:12):
Appropriations Subcommittee actually voted determinate all funding for the space station,
which at that point had received the derisive nickname space
Station Fred because it was a fraction of the size
and capability of the proposed space station Freedom Freedom got
shortened to Fred. Now. Despite the vote to terminate support,
(39:36):
Congress as a whole decided to continue providing funding for
the station, particularly after NASA made some deep cuts elsewhere
in its various programs. The following year, Congress held a
vote to cancel the project, but that vote was defeated
and it kept the station alive for the time being.
And this whole time there were companies working on building
(39:56):
that actual hardware that would make up the modules on
the space station. So NASA had kept tweaking designs, but
doing so while trying to maintain compatibility with older plans
so that the pieces that were already in motion would
still be usable. By the time, you know, they were
ready to launch the space station, some of the hardware
(40:17):
was actually nearing the point where NASA was going to
need to do some flight testing. So like stuff was
coming together, It's just that the overall space station project
itself was at risk. Then the USSR fell apart, and
the Cold War effectively came to an end. At least
that Cold War came to an end. I would argue,
(40:37):
we have other Cold Wars going on right now, including
one with Russia. Now there were there was no longer
an adversary in the form of the U S s
R that was gone. This also meant that Congress started
to look at reducing budgets for things like military budgets
as well as the space budget. And this reinforces the
(40:58):
fact that the space program was in part fueled by
the rivalry that the United States had with the Soviet Union,
and without that rivalry, a lot of politicians just didn't
see the expense of a space station as being justifiable,
the Clinton administration gave NASA a new order to come
up with three different proposals for a space station that
(41:19):
would honor the international commitments that NASA had made with
partners like the European Space Agency, and they had three
different budget caps. There was a budget cap of five
billion dollars, seven billion dollars, or nine billion dollars. So
in other words, hey, NASA, propose space stations. These are
the three categories. They can't go over nine billion, and
(41:42):
then we'll decide which one we're gonna go with. Considering
that even Station Fred was projected to cost nearly seventeen
billion dollars, this was a huge request. However, you could
say that NASA had already done some of this work, right,
Some of those contracts that had made had already started
to produce components for a space station, so at least
(42:04):
some of it had already been paid for. Now, as
it would turn out, the collapse of the USSR would
mean that Russia, once considered a great enemy to the
United States, could join in this international project. This finally
sets the stage for the International Space Station, and that
is what we will talk about in the next episode
in this series, but for now let us say goodbye.
(42:27):
If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in
future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me.
I greatly appreciate it. The best way to do that
is on Twitter. The handle for the show is text
Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again, really Sion.
(42:48):
Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more
podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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TechStuff News
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Karah Preiss
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