September 13, 2021 • 46 mins
Mir was the first modular space station in orbit. It was simultaneously a scientific and engineering triumph and a chaotic mess. We look at the good, the bad and the on fire in this episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, y'all, it's Jonathan, and before we get to today's episode,
I've got something I want to say, and that's there
are a lot of Russian names in this episode that
I absolutely butcher, but none do I butcher as much
as I do one that's spelled k v, A and T,
because I forgot while recording the episode that in Russian
(00:24):
v is essentially like a double you type sound like
vodka is vodka. So through the entire episode I pronounced
it as kvant when it should be quant, which makes
way more sense because it does reference quantum. So just
be prepared to hear me mispronounced quant as kvant a
(00:47):
billion times, as well as pretty much every other Russian
term and name that's in this My apologies, it's my fault,
but rather than go back and re record everything, I
thought I would warn you up front. And now let's
get to this interesting, if not correctly pronounced episode. Welcome
(01:13):
to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and a
love of all things tech, and in this episode, we
are continuing our history about space stations. We are going
(01:34):
to focus on mirror. So in the last episode, I
talked about the first space station, the Salut one UH
that was from the Soviet Union, plus other stations in
the Saliot line, some of which were secretly military reconnaissance
space stations that were masquerading as civilian science stations. Pretty sneaky,
(01:55):
those Soviets. I also talked about the sky Lab space station,
which was inhabited for just one seventy one days but
had been in orbit for two thousand, two hundred forty
nine days, and I touched on this in the last episode.
But the reason sky Lab was unoccupied for most of
the time it was orbiting Earth is that NASA no
longer really had access to launch vehicles and space capsules
(02:18):
that could, you know, visit the station. They didn't. They
physically didn't have the equipment or the budget needed to
send more missions to sky Lab, and was essentially waiting
on the Space Shuttle program to come online to go
back to sky Lab. But the Space Shuttle program was
delayed to the point where sky Lab could no longer
maintain orbit, and it re entered Earth's atmosphere in the
(02:40):
summer of seventy nine. But we've got a lot more
to talk about when it comes to space stations, and
now we're going to pop back over to the then
Soviet Union. So sky Lab came down in seventy nine,
and the last of the Saliot stations, Saliot seven, entered
orbit in nine two and would remain in orbit until now.
(03:01):
While sal Yot seven was an orbit, a new Soviet
space station would take form in space, and that station
was Mirror M I R. Now, just as a reminder,
before Mirror, all space stations were what we call monolithic
in form. Now that means that they went up fully
assembled in in one big piece, you know, kind of
(03:24):
like they were a one piece space station, even though
if you break it down, they're actually made up of
many many pieces, but it's all, you know, pre assembled.
Mirror would take the next step forward. It would be
the first modular space station, meaning the station would ultimately
be made up of multiple modules which would then connect
to a core module out in space. Uh. There's a
(03:47):
lot of benefits to this particular approach, but the big
one is that you're not as limited on internal space
inside your station, and you're not limited by mass the
way you would be with a monolithic design line. So
let's get into physics for a second to really understand
why this is a big deal. So Isaac Newton that
smarty Pants mathematically demonstrated the concept of an exchange of
(04:10):
momentum in the sixteen hundreds, and a few centuries later
a Russian scientist named Konstantine Soolkovski applied the idea of
conservational momentum to rockets. This was in nineteen o three,
and that became the basis of all of our rocketry
moving forward. And there are three big things you have
to keep in mind when you're trying to launch something
(04:33):
into space using a rocket. Those three things are the
energy that you need to generate in order to work
against gravity, which in most rocket equations we represent with
the delta V to indicate rocket velocity. The value of
this depends on where you're planning on going. If you're
going to Mars, then you'll need to exert more energy
(04:55):
than if you were just going into low Earth orbit.
Once you've selected where you're going and where you're starting from,
the value of this variable solidifies. There's nothing we can
do to change that number. This is literally physics. It's
the amount of energy needed to get into that part
from wherever you are. Also, it takes about twice the
(05:16):
amount of energy to go from Earth to Mars as
it would take to go from Earth to Earth orbit. However,
what's really interesting to me is just getting into orbit
is about half of that total energy to get to Mars,
because just overcoming Earth's gravity and not falling back to
the planet requires a lot of energy. So while it
(05:38):
takes more energy to get to Mars that it does
to get to low Earth orbit, just getting to lower
Earth orbit is hard. Then you've got how much energy
is available in your propellant, right, how much potential energy
is stored in the fuel you are using. Not all
propellants are equal in this, Some are more dense in
energy than others. But again we're limited here. The rockets
(06:02):
we use rely on chemical reactions. There is a limit
to how much energy we can release out of these
chemical reactions. Physics dictates it we can't go beyond that,
so again reality has limited us. And finally, you've got
the propellant mass fraction, which is how much propellant you
need in comparison with the total mass of the stuff
(06:24):
you're sending off into space. Your rocket. So we've decided
where we want to go, you know, like low Earth orbit,
and we've decided which propellant we're going to use to
get there. And those two factors tell us the limitations
we face in getting a spacecraft to that point, because
it sets the ratio we have to hit between the
amount of fuel and the total mass of the rocket.
(06:44):
And obviously, as you add more fuel, you add more mass,
so you start hitting some fundamental limitations there too. We
can't just keep, you know, building more massive rockets. You
start to run into an issue with that ratio, or
at least, you know, we start to bump up against
tough restrictions if we try to do that. And so
(07:05):
if we want to build sizeable structures in space rather
than just like creating a truly monstrous rocket, the solution
is to make those structures modular and then to launch
large sections of the structures and individual launches and then
assemble them in space. That's what Mirror would do. Now,
(07:25):
as I'm sure anyone listening to these episodes understands, the
road to developing, constructing, and deploying any sort of spacecraft
tends to be a pretty long one. While the first
Mirror module would launch in February nine six. The planning
for the station began a decade earlier, in the middle
of the Saliot program, so Mirror got an official approval
(07:47):
from the Soviet government in nineteen seventy six, But that
didn't mean it was a straight path from planning to execution.
A lot was going on in the Soviet Union, including
a lot of citical battles within the Soviet space program.
Different leaders within different departments were scrabbling for funding and
(08:08):
for authority, and it meant that budgets were shifted around
multiple times, which honestly is not that different from how
things happen in NASA if we're, you know, really being critical.
During the span of years between nineteen seventy six and
nineteen eighty six, changes in the Soviet space program meant
that funds were pulled from Mirror and redirected towards a
(08:30):
different space project, that of the Barran spacecraft. Now I'm
not sure that I could do a full tech stuff
episode about the Barran, but it does merit mentioned. Also, again,
apologies for my pronunciation. It's going to be terrible and
that's all on me. But the Barran bu R A
(08:51):
n was essentially the Soviet equivalent of the Space Shuttle,
a reusable space plane style spacecraft designed to go into
low Earth orbit and then to act as kind of
a plane upon return to Earth, and most importantly, it
would be reusable. Now, that project began in the seventies,
with construction starting in nineteen eighty, and here in America
(09:15):
we had the space Shuttle program in development at this
same time. The Soviets couldn't afford to go full steam
ahead both with Mir and Barran, so in nineteen eighty four,
the administrators redirected Mer's budget towards Brand's test flights. Now,
that could have spelled doom for Mere, but then Valentine Glushko,
(09:36):
a Soviet engineer in charge of the entire space program
who had been part of some of those political fights
within the Soviet space program I mentioned earlier. Anyway, he
had committed to getting Mire in orbit by the mid eighties,
so he managed to redirect some funds back into the
Mir space station program. Brand, by the way, would go
(09:57):
on to conduct an unscrewed test flight, so no one
was aboard, but it was successful. It happened without really
a hitch in, but it didn't really do anything else.
And uh, the big reason for that had nothing to
do with the technology. It had everything to do with
the collapse of the Soviet Union. But a few years
(10:19):
after getting the thumbs up, the Soviets planned to merge
Mirror with the Almah's program. Now, if you listen to
our previous episode in this series, you know that Almah's
was the designation for a Soviet military space station project.
Alma's had previously merged, you know, with Saliot stations to
(10:39):
three and five. In the Saliot program, we're all meant
to act as military reconnaissance stations. Now, Saliott too had
had multiple technical problems that led to it re entering
their atmosphere just a couple of weeks after it first
attained orbit. Fortunately, there were no people aboard. No crew
had visited the space station at that point, so no
(11:03):
one was lost as a result of that. Sellot three
and saw It five had a little more success, though
very little is known about those stations because the Soviets
were not super eager to share military secrets with the
rest of the world. That's not to say that there
aren't resources out there. There are. I just find a
lot of them to be questionably reliable. Anyway, as part
(11:27):
of the Alma's program, engineers designed a spacecraft with the
designation d O s so d OS one was actually
used to serve as the Saliot one space station. D
OS two, three, and four were Saliot two, three and
five respectively, Salut six and seven were DUS five and
US six, and then the core of the Mirror module
(11:50):
would be DOS seven. So this was a case of
the engineers taking the designs for an earlier space station
and then involving them to allow for that modular approach.
DOES or d OS seven would be the core module,
the heart and soul of Mirror. This core module would
also serve as crew quarters. In fact, for a while,
(12:12):
this would be the entirety of the space station. It
actually had six docking ports, which allowed not just Soya's
capsules to dock, but also cargo ships. Or they would
serve as the connection point for other Mirror modules, and
each module could focus on the specific type of science.
For example, the Kavant one module had equipment to study
(12:34):
astrophysics from the station, and we'll talk more about that
in a in a little bit. So as for the
name Mirror, you might wonder what that means. Well, because
you know salute means salute for example, So what does
mirror mean. It's actually a little tricky to translate into English.
Now you could say it translates to the English word
for world, or that it translates into the word for peace,
(12:57):
but it's actually more specific than that. So prior or
to eighteen sixty one, Russia operated under a serfdom structure
with lots of Russians as surfs, and approximately one third
of all Russians were serfs. But Czar Alexander the Second
decreed that all surfs were freed. That that also meant
(13:18):
they were free to pay rent to their landlords. Uh,
the word mirror means a peasant community that owned its
own land, when previously it did not have that ownership.
So there are a few contextual, subtle things going on
with that name that are difficult to capture with a
single word in English. So, despite all the obstacles, the
(13:42):
U S s R launched Mir's core module on February twenty,
nineteen eighties six. This was an unscrewed mission to get
the core into orbit and it was successful, so no
cosmonauts were aboard at this point, but it did deploy
from its launch vehicle and enter a bit. The core
module resembled the monolithic space stations of the Saliot era.
(14:05):
I mean, after all, they were both based off the
same seed, the Alma's military platform. And it measured about
forty three ft or thirteen meters in length, and the
widest part of the stepped cylinder, you know, some parts
of the cylinder were wider than the others, but the
widest part was thirteen point eight feet in diameter or
four point two meters. On either end of the station
(14:28):
were docking points, and at the forward end. There were
four more docking points around the circumference of the station,
so six in total. As I said, just a couple
of weeks after the core module innered orbit, a space craft,
a Soyu spacecraft carrying Vladimir Solovyov and Leonard Kidzen docked
(14:48):
with the station. Actually first it docked with Mirror for
fifty five days. So they docked with me Or for
fifty five days. Then they left Mirror and they went
to dock with Saliot seven, which allowed the cosmonauts to
load equipment from Saliot seven into their soyus T spacecraft,
and then they carried that back to Mirror after spending
(15:11):
about two months aboard Saliot seven. And each of these
trips between space stations took about twenty nine hours to travel,
so more than a full day to get from one
to the other, and they did it a couple of times. Uh.
It was the first time the spacecraft had docked with
two space stations during a single mission. The two cosmonauts
became the first residence of the Mirror space station. And
(15:33):
again this version of Mirror was just the core module,
so it was a lot like the Saliott stations. In fact,
the first module to join Mere and expand the station
wouldn't come online until that first module was the Cavant one,
which I mentioned earlier, and it was an astrophysics module. Now,
if you look at illustrations is a Mirror when it was,
(15:55):
you know, complete, when all the modules had attached to it,
you would see how complicated this modular approach could become.
Some folks kind of likened it to tinker toys. The
Kvan one module connected to the aft end of the
core module, so opposite where the Soyuz capsule would dock.
The Soyuz capsule docked in the forward side of the station,
(16:19):
the Cavant one was attached to the aft side. The
kan one module had its own extra docking port in
the aft of its module, and it also had a
pair of very long solar panels, as did the mir Core.
I should also add that while that's the configuration I
saw on one illustration, the Russians frequently rearranged the modules
(16:41):
of the Mirror space station, so I don't know if
that was how it was configured throughout the entire history
of Mirror, because it did move some modules around at
different times in order to prep space for new modules
joining the station. The kvant one module was built on
top of an earlier acecraft design, the t K S spacecraft.
(17:03):
The original purpose for that type of spacecraft was to
serve as a resupply cargo ship for those Alma's military stations,
but the Cavant one was all decked out with scientific gear.
It had two pressurized compartments in which cosmonauts could work safely,
and it also had an unpressurized compartment where specific experiments
could take place and in an airlock. According to a
(17:25):
few different sources I found, the Cavant one was supposed
to dock not with Mirror originally but with the Saliot
seven space station, and if it had that would have
made Saliot seven the first modular space station in orbit.
But the development of Kalant one was a rocky journey
and of itself, and in the process the decision was
made to switch it over to Mirror instead of Saliot seven.
(17:48):
The scientific instruments uh aboard the Cavant one included X
ray telescopes, spectrometers and ultra violet telescope and more. The
Cavant one would study stuff like quasars and neutron stars
and any of those solar panels. Because the equipment aboard
the vont one required a lot of electricity to use,
more than what the Mirror core would be able to
(18:11):
generate on its own and still provide, you know, important
stuff like life support. It also didn't have its own
propulsion system, and that made me wonder how the heck
didn't manage to dock with Mirror if Cavanton one didn't
have propulsion, how did that work? Well, the answer to
that question will be coming up right after we take
this break, all right, So, how did Cavant one doc
(18:40):
with Mirror if it didn't have a propulsion system of
its own well. It relied on a special spacecraft called
an f g B tug like a tug boat. Essentially,
the tug docked with the cavant One and then act
as the propulsion unit and moved it to dock with
Mirror before it would disengage fly off. The cavat one
(19:01):
itself was a variation of the f g B, so
both of these were spacecraft that were based on the
earlier t K S spacecraft. That meant that with f
g B and the cavanton One together, it was too
spacecraft joined and one of them was just acting as
the propulsion system for the joint spacecraft. The docking a
(19:23):
Cavat one Demir did not go as planned. First there
was a failure of the control system that delayed everything. Then,
after fixing that, there was an issue with the two
spacecraft actually forming a solid seal as they docked together.
Something was preventing him from locking in. So the cosmonauts
(19:44):
a board mir donned space suits and had an emergency
e v A or spacewalk, and on that space walk
they found out what the problem was. There was a
trash bag in the docking ring on Mirror that was
preventing a seal with the Cavat one. That kind of
raises more questions, but I don't have any answers to them,
(20:05):
so I'm not gonna bother to ask them anyway. The
cosmonauts removed the trash bag, and then the two spacecraft
were finally able to dock together securely. The tug then
disengage from Cavat one, but the whole process meant that
it no longer really had sufficient propellant to enter into
a controlled de orbiting path, which was what the plan
(20:26):
had been, so instead, the Soviets decided that they would
use a shorter boost to push the f GB tug
up into a higher orbit so that it would become
a later Earth problem and it would eventually undergo orbital
decay and it would re enter Earth's atmosphere on August
in an uncontrolled re entry. That those are words that
(20:48):
you don't ever like to read. Uncontrolled re entry is
not good. Cavanton one would get a lot of upgrades
over the years, with cosmonauts adding solar arrays or taking
a raise from other parts of Mirror and then installing
them in Cavant one, but by the mid nineties most
of the instrumentation aboard CAVAT one had long since failed,
(21:09):
gone beyond its useful life, and the module was used
for and I quote, rubbish storage, which that kind of stings,
doesn't it. But before it became a trash pit in space,
Cavant one was an active lab and expanded the living
space of the space station. It also had some impressive
(21:29):
mechanical stabilizers. They used flywheel mechanisms that would allow the
space station to reorient in space without having to use
propellant and thrusters. Now, the space station did have thrusters
and it did have propellant, but obviously you want to
be really judicious with how you use that stuff because
you have a limited amount on board and it's not
(21:51):
easy to bring more up to you. So using these
mechanical systems and sparing the fuel meant that you know,
you're being much more efficient. It's pretty darn cool. So
just using physics instead of propellant really interesting. But the
Cavanton one was just one of the modules that attached
to MERE. The second one was Prepare Yourself Cavant to
(22:14):
this happened. Now this one would provide more power to
the station. It also included additional flywheel mechanisms for orientation,
and it also had a large airlock, and unlike Cavant one,
it had a propulsion system. So to get into the
whole development of this about why the Soviets decided okay,
after Cavat one, this whole f g B tug thing
(22:36):
is a bad idea. It would take way too long
to get into all the stuff about that, but essentially
it boils down to them saying, well, if we have
a propulsion system attached to the modules, we can actually
make more use of more space, which makes way more
sense than to use a tug to push it into
(22:56):
place and then jettison it. So the Cavant Too would
be on the first of those types of modules. The
cavant To docked with Mer on December at the axial
forward port, and then subsequently a manipulator arm on the
space station unplugged Cavat Too and then plugged it into
(23:17):
its new home, which was on a radio port on
the Mere Core module. And this is pretty much standard
operating procedure. When modules would join, they would first dock
with one part of the station. Then the manipulator arm
would end up moving them to its you know, new home.
In some cases it was a permanent home. In some cases,
(23:38):
you know, they would rearrange later on. The Covant too
had shower facilities not too different from what I described
aboard sky Lab. Also had a water regeneration system. Water
on space stations is a truly precious commodity, and I'll
talk about how space stations managed that a little bit later.
We'll really talk about it more in the I S.
(23:59):
S episode coming up later on down the line. It
also had life science and material science experiments aboard the
Cavant to and it expanded the space cosmonauts could occupy
once again. It gave folks more room in the space station. Now,
the next module to join the party was Crystal or Crystal,
(24:19):
I guess it's k R I S T A L
L THO. I've also seen spelled with just the one L.
This happened in now. Originally it carried the designation of
Kant three, but they decided to change it up. And
this is the module that had one of its solar
arrays removed and then later installed in Cavant one. This
would be a few years after it had, you know,
(24:42):
merged with Mirror. It also incorporated some docking mechanisms that
were meant to work with the Barrand spacecraft. So, as
I mentioned, the brand program would get the acts before
any such space plane could visit Mirror. However, it would
come in handy when the Space Shuttle, the United States
Space Shuttle, would visit Mirror. We'll get there like vant
(25:03):
to Crystal or crystal doctor. I can't say crystal without laughing.
But it docked at a forward axial port on Mirror
and then got shifted around by the manipulator arm. And
it was a module that moved a couple of times
during the lifetime of year, usually to allow for some
other module to join the party. And it included a
(25:23):
resupply of food, so it had you know, food storage
aboard this module. It also had industrial processing equipment, so
think of something like a space furnace, something that falls
into the materials science category. And these experiments would be
important for the pursuit of long term space exploration. The
idea being that humans in the future might gather raw
(25:46):
materials from various sources and outer space, such as asteroids,
and then they might process those materials to make useful
stuff that they could you know, take advantage of onboard
as spacecraft. The module also had had an Earth observation camera,
gamma ray telescope and several spectrometers. And then the fourth
(26:07):
extension of Mirror was Specter, which isn't just a villainous
organization in James Bond movies, and it's actually spelled differently.
Specter is spelled spe k t R. It launched in
nine But that is skipping over some really important stuff
that happened in between the launch of Crystal and Specter.
(26:29):
So in n when Crystal launched and the know when
Specter launched, in in between that you had a really
important event take place. This was the dissolution of the
Soviet Union. That process really began in the late eighties
with various territories within the then USSR declaring independence from
(26:51):
the federation, and by late ninety one the situation had
escalated to the point that the Soviet Union was no
longer a union and it ceased to be Gorbachev, the
president of the USSR, resigned and things were thrown into
uncertainty across all aspects of the various nations, including the
(27:12):
Soviet era space program. Now, the original purpose of Specter
was to be military in nature. It was to be
a counterpart to the proposed US project of Star Wars,
and boy, haudy, I'm gonna have to do a full
episode about Star Wars, I think, because that was a
heck of a thing. I remember it as being a
(27:33):
really big deal when I was growing up and in
the eighties, and it was a really controversial subject. It
was also a massive failure in many respects, including as
a means to deter the Soviet Union from developing long
range nuclear weapons, the idea being, oh, if we have
a system that can shoot down your nuclear weapons, there's
(27:53):
no need for you to keep building more. That logic
ended up not being effective anyway. Specter was supposed to
be part of a program that would serve as a
platform for space based weaponry, presumably to shoot down I
C b M s from the United States headed towards
Soviet targets, but the collapse of the Soviet Union left
(28:13):
the program in limbo. So the partially completed module was
left sitting in a shop, and the same was true
for the following module called Paroda. Former Soviet leaders had
lots of stuff to worry about well outside the space program,
and so both of these modules were effectively mothballed for
a few years. Then the Americans chimed in. Once the
(28:36):
Soviet Union fell apart, America was like, hey, we can
help you out. So in ninete, NASA reached out to
Russian leadership and offered to foot the bill to complete
both Specter and Paroda on the American dime, provided that
NASA would also be allowed to incorporate several hundred pounds
worth of scientific experiments on the two modules. The military
(28:59):
platforms gave way to scientific experiments, including one that would
allow scientists to expose experiments to the vacuum of space
using manipulator arms attached to the station, and much of
the rest of the station got retooled to study atmospheric
science on Earth. The Russians agreed to this plan, and
they decided they were going to launch Specter in but
(29:22):
there were some delays, and this time the delay was because,
and I am not kidding about this, the American equipment
destined to be installed Inspector got held up in customs.
As such, the module was not ready for launch until
the spring of nine, and it took off on May
twenty of that year. The final module to join Mere
(29:45):
was called pi Roda, and it was also meant to
at least be partly a military platform for mere serving
in a surveillance function, and some of the states in
the USSR had provided instruments meant to further scientific studies,
but upon the dis aolution of the Soviet Union, Russia
was left solely in charge of Mirror, and the other
(30:06):
former Soviet states saw their experiments withdrawn from the module.
A German multi spectral scanner was added to it, but
then all the funding for the program got the Axe
and Paroda joined Specter in storage until the Yanks came
along and offered to pay for the rest of the
construction and development costs. The additional weight of the American
(30:26):
experiments on board Paroda necessitated a change in the spacecraft.
Originally it was going to carry an additional solar array
in the forward section of the craft, but they Russians
removed that in order to conserve mass, and it would
the solar array would launch on a later cargo vessel
and cosmonauts would install it during a spacewalk. The experiments
(30:48):
that did make it aboard Paroda concentrated on stuff like
studying the relationship between Earth's atmosphere and its oceans, measuring
land characteristics from space, measuring the roughness of the sea surface,
measuring optical effects through the atmosphere as well as measuring
trace elements in the atmosphere, and finally studying how the
(31:09):
surface of the sea reflects microwave radiation. And with Paroda
mirror was complete. You had the core module and you
had the other six modules attached to it. As I
mentioned earlier, occasionally the Russians would use the manipulator arm
on the outside of the station to kind of rearrange
(31:30):
where the modules were. Those aboard the space station would
inhabit the core module. They would seal off whichever modules
were being moved. And like I said, if you look
in illustration to mirror, you'll see how the pieces all
connected in various ways to one another to create the
full station. It's pretty nifty. I also like that you
could be working in an orientation that's ninety degrees from
(31:51):
someone else in another part of the station. But because
there's not really an up or down when you're in
microgravity from your own perspective, it would like the other
person was, you know, at a ninety degree angle from you,
so their sideways, but they would feel the same way
about you, because again up and down a relative. Paroda
would dock with Mirror on April twenty six nine and
(32:14):
it got to its final location quote unquote final location
on the te So something else happened before Mirror was
made complete with the addition of Specter and Paroda. And
that's the Shuttle Mirror missions. At least some of them
happened before that. Now. I mentioned earlier that under Soviet control,
mir had a special airlock system, sometimes called the androgynous
(32:38):
peripheral assembly system or a PASS a p a S.
After the dissolution of the U S s R, there
was an interest in building a stronger link between Russian
and American space programs, with the US proposing links with
Mirror using the newly launched space Shuttle program. So Russia
sent an a PASS to NASA, and NASA resaw its
(33:00):
incorporation into the payload bay of Space Shuttle Atlantis. The
Shuttle Mirror mission had three parts to it. One was
that a cosmonaut would join an American crew aboard a
space shuttle. That happened when Saragei Krikalev joined Space Shuttle
Mission STS sixty that was on board Space Shuttle Discovery.
(33:20):
That mission lasted eight days. The second component was that
an American astronaut would visit mir That honor fell to
Norman E. Thaggard, who boarded a Saya's spacecraft in Russia
to rendezvous with Mirror in March of nineteen. His mission
lasted one fifteen days total and included the arrival of
(33:42):
both the Specter module as well as a visit from
Space Shuttle Atlantis. And that was the third part of
the Shuttle Mirror program, the docking of an American space
shuttle with the Russian space station. I'll explain more after
we take this quick break. You know, one thing I
(34:04):
haven't covered yet about Mirror is that the crew aboard
the space station could fluctuate over time. You could have
cruise from one Soyuz capsule mixed with cruise from the
previous capsule. Uh, and so there were times where the
space station was hosting more people than other times. When
Thaggard and his crewmates joined the station in n it
(34:27):
brought the total population up to thirteen thirteen folks and
only two toilets. Don't worry, We'll be sure to cover
the toilet situation in this episode. Before long, however, members
of the Mere seventeen crew because they were all numbered
by how many missions were visiting the station, so Mere
seventeen that crew left the station to return home, and
(34:50):
the cosmonauts assigned to the Mirror eighteen mission stayed aboard Mirror.
One of those to return home was Valerie Vladimirovich Poliakov.
He had been a board Near for an astounding fourteen months,
one year, two months, setting a world record that has
yet to be beaten. When he joined Mire, he was
(35:10):
part of the fifteen crew of that space station, and
he left as part of the seventeenth crew, so he
was parts of Cruise fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen, so he
had been there for a while. Also. That was his
second trip of Tamir. His first one was back in
Night when he was part of Cruise Mirror three and
Mirror four. He had stayed up there for two forty
(35:31):
days on that first go round. Atlantis launched on June
twenty nine and carried two cosmonauts, Anatoly Solovyev and Nikolai Buderin,
who would transfer to Mirror and stay on as members
of Mirror nineteen. The Shuttle docked with Mirror two days
after the launch, and it went smoothly. It connected through
(35:54):
the Crystal Module and the rest of the station, and
all ten cosmonauts and astronauts aboard other th in the
Core module to celebrate the occasion. The Shuttle remained docked
with Mirror for several days, leaving with the Mirror eighteen
crew as part of the Shuttle crew on July four,
and the Mirror nineteen crew boarded their Saya's capsule and
(36:14):
disengaged from Mirror temporarily in order to record the process
of the Shuttle departing the station. So we actually have
pictures and video of the Space Shuttle departing Mirror because
some cosmonauts got into the Saya's capsule and blasted off
for a little ways to get those pictures. Once that
was all done, the Saya's capsule returned to dock with Miror,
(36:35):
and the Shuttle then moved off to conduct a few
more experiments before it ultimately returned to Earth. Atlantis would
take return trips to Mirror six more times, so Space
Shuttle Atlantis visited me Or seven times total. That included
a mission that brought astronaut Shannon Lucid to the station
as part of STS seventy six. Lucid would set a
(36:56):
record for the longest stay in space by an American
up to that point, and also the longest stay for
a woman. During her stay at Mirror, Paroda would end
up joining the station and complete it. Lucid would also
plant a crop of wheat, and they would ultimately go
from being a seedling to producing seeds of its own.
(37:16):
It was the first example of someone taking a crop
through the full life cycle in space. The wheat would
return to Earth aboard another Atlantis mission STS one. Space
shuttles Discovery and Endeavor would also dock with Mirror once
each before the space station would be retired. All missions
(37:36):
took place between n and During that time, Mirror experienced
a major and potentially catastrophic emergency, a couple of them,
actually so. In February, a backup oxygen generating device caught
fire on the station. Now, as you might imagine, a
fire on the space station is incredibly dangerous. According to
(37:58):
Russian authorities, the fire only lasted less than two minutes,
but those aboard Mirror said it was more like fourteen minutes.
He generated a lot of smoke, and those aboard had
to put on respirators in order to breathe. Also, they
found out that some of the respirators proved to be nonfunctional.
Not great. The smoke blocked an exit path to the
(38:18):
Soya's capsule, so there was no escape from the station.
It made an escape impossible because your pathway was blocked
to your one way home. Ultimately, the crew was able
to extinguish the fire using like a wet towel and
a fire extinguisher, but they had to continue to wear
respirators for like forty five minutes or so in order
for the smoke to clear out. Another serious accident happened
(38:41):
on June twenty seven. A cargo spaceship collided with the
Specter module during docking procedures, and the collision created a
small hole in the exterior of Specter, which caused Spector
to de pressurize. Michael Fole, and American artist inside Specter
at the time of this crash, felt the pressure in
(39:03):
his ears change. That was his warning to get the
heck out of a dodge or Specter, and he exited
the module and the Mirror crew sealed Specter off from
the rest of the station. The collision also caused damage
to some of the station's solar panels, so the crew
ended up turning off some of the experiments in order
to conserve power. Fortunately, in neither of those accidents was
(39:26):
there any loss of life, and the experiences really drove
home the need to develop efficient and effective emergency procedures
for cosmonauts and astronauts to follow should the worse happen.
The last crew to visit Mirror did so in April
two thousand, journeying to an empty Space Shuttle, So the
previous crew, which had left in August of actually ended
(39:51):
a nearly ten years streak of continuous occupation of the
space station. Not continuous with the same people. Obviously you
had different cruise coming in and relieving others, but I
think it was like a week and one day short
of a full ten years of continuous occupation when the
(40:12):
last crew had left. Then this space station remained empty
and dormant for a good long while until April two
thousand and This was from a private space company. Mere
Corps was the name of the company. Because funding had
run out in Russia to have a state backed space
(40:34):
agency focusing on Mirror. At this point, attention was turning
towards a different space station, the I S S, the
International Space Station, which we'll talk about in the next episode.
So the mission that flew up to Mirror in April
two thousand was, as I said, a privately funded mission
from mir Corps. The two cosmonaut crew was to conduct
repairs and reactivate the station, with the hope that private
(40:59):
company could keep Mirror in operation. However, mir had already
lived well beyond its expected lifespan. The station was going
to need a lot of repairs and the investment would
be considerable, and with the I S S taking form,
it was just too hard to sell, and mire Core
could not get the funds to pay for anything more
than the first mission in two thousand. So Mirror had
(41:20):
run out of time and money, and in two thousand
one it would d orbit like sky Lab. There was
some worry here on Earth that Mirror might end up
crashing down on some populated area, and Mirror was much
much bigger than sky Lab, but Russian engineers took steps
to have a controlled d orbit, and the station ultimately
(41:41):
broke apart above the South Pacific. All Right, I also
promised that I would talk about pooping on Mirror. I
mentioned that mir had two toilets. One was in the
core module, which is good news because you know, it
was a while before cavant One joined Mirror and made
it a modular space station, and the second toilet was
lowcated in covant to Now, if you look at pictures
(42:03):
of a mere toilet, you had best prepare yourself for
some psychological trauma. It does not look much like a
toilet at all. It looks like a canister that has
some sort of tube thing in the front of the
canisters opening. So to use the facilities, you would position
yourself on. The toilet had a fastening system or straining
system with restraining bars to keep you sealed to the seat.
(42:25):
Very important. You don't want stuff, you know, floating around.
We had already had experiences with that in previous space missions.
The toilet had a fan to create airflow to help
with feces collection, and so the feces would go into
collection bags, which in turn would go into an aluminum
container for storage. But urine was different. This is where
(42:46):
that tube comes in. It was a hose and you
had urine funnel adapters that you would attach to the
end of the hose, and unlike other space toilets in
the past, this one had adapters designed so that both
men and women could make use of the toilet. No
more of that sexist male only stuff here. It was
not a no girls allowed kind of thing, which you know,
(43:10):
it was refreshing really Now. The hose would collect the
urine and would send it on to a watery recovery system.
And you might think, what the what, but yeah, water
recovery was a big part of Mirror, and it remains
an important part of space travel in general. We need
water to survive and there's no easy way to get
(43:30):
additional water when you're in space, so you have to
make the most with what you have. You want to
use what you have as much as you can, and
that means you need systems in place to collect wastewater,
treat it, and then recycle it for further use, including
as drinking water. Now, another use of water on board
(43:50):
Mirror was to run an electric current through water. This
is a process called electrolysis. The result is that electricity
breaks the molecular bonds between hydrogen and oxygen. Now, this
is one way to generate oxygen in space, though it
does mean relying on water in order to do that.
Water recycling involves moving wastewater through a series of filters
(44:11):
to remove all the contaminants, leaving pure water behind, and
the I S S would use a similar approach, creating
a closed loop system to capture water not just from urine,
but also from sweat and even water vapor from breathing.
We'll talk about that in the I S S episode. Well,
the Mirror space station would come hurtling down in two
thousand one, part of it lives on in our next episode,
(44:33):
when we do talk about the International Space Station, we'll
learn about a module very similar to Mirror's core module
that serves as the heart of the I S S.
As for what we learned from here, well, apart from
all the secret stuff that got buried in Soviet files,
we learned a lot about the long term effects that
being in space can have on the human body. We
(44:54):
observed how the body can change over time in microgravity,
including stuff like bone and muscle loss. The things we
learned will be crucial should we ever take the step
toward establishing long term space habitats on the Moon or
on Mars. Not to mention just you know, handling the
effects of space travel between Earth and Mars, because that
journey alone takes around, you know, more than half a year.
(45:18):
So we learned a lot from mirror even beyond, like
all the the super shady stuff that the Soviets were doing,
or at least the semi shady stuff. Um and and
obviously a lot of that learning continues on with the
International Space stations. So in our next episode we will
turn our our thoughts and eyes and ears towards the
(45:40):
I S S and we'll also talk about a couple
of other space stations and uh and talk about what
the future holds. Oh and I'll also cover the space
station that never was a k A Freedom, but that's
in the next one. If you have suggestions for topics
I should cover in tech Stuff, reach out to me.
The best way to do that is over on Twitter.
(46:00):
The handle we use for the show is called tech
Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again
really soon. Yeah. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production.
For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
(46:22):
your favorite shows.
Hey, y'all, it's Jonathan, and before we get to today's episode,
I've got something I want to say, and that's there
are a lot of Russian names in this episode that
I absolutely butcher, but none do I butcher as much
as I do one that's spelled k v, A and T,
because I forgot while recording the episode that in Russian
(00:24):
v is essentially like a double you type sound like
vodka is vodka. So through the entire episode I pronounced
it as kvant when it should be quant, which makes
way more sense because it does reference quantum. So just
be prepared to hear me mispronounced quant as kvant a
(00:47):
billion times, as well as pretty much every other Russian
term and name that's in this My apologies, it's my fault,
but rather than go back and re record everything, I
thought I would warn you up front. And now let's
get to this interesting, if not correctly pronounced episode. Welcome
(01:13):
to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and a
love of all things tech, and in this episode, we
are continuing our history about space stations. We are going
(01:34):
to focus on mirror. So in the last episode, I
talked about the first space station, the Salut one UH
that was from the Soviet Union, plus other stations in
the Saliot line, some of which were secretly military reconnaissance
space stations that were masquerading as civilian science stations. Pretty sneaky,
(01:55):
those Soviets. I also talked about the sky Lab space station,
which was inhabited for just one seventy one days but
had been in orbit for two thousand, two hundred forty
nine days, and I touched on this in the last episode.
But the reason sky Lab was unoccupied for most of
the time it was orbiting Earth is that NASA no
longer really had access to launch vehicles and space capsules
(02:18):
that could, you know, visit the station. They didn't. They
physically didn't have the equipment or the budget needed to
send more missions to sky Lab, and was essentially waiting
on the Space Shuttle program to come online to go
back to sky Lab. But the Space Shuttle program was
delayed to the point where sky Lab could no longer
maintain orbit, and it re entered Earth's atmosphere in the
(02:40):
summer of seventy nine. But we've got a lot more
to talk about when it comes to space stations, and
now we're going to pop back over to the then
Soviet Union. So sky Lab came down in seventy nine,
and the last of the Saliot stations, Saliot seven, entered
orbit in nine two and would remain in orbit until now.
(03:01):
While sal Yot seven was an orbit, a new Soviet
space station would take form in space, and that station
was Mirror M I R. Now, just as a reminder,
before Mirror, all space stations were what we call monolithic
in form. Now that means that they went up fully
assembled in in one big piece, you know, kind of
(03:24):
like they were a one piece space station, even though
if you break it down, they're actually made up of
many many pieces, but it's all, you know, pre assembled.
Mirror would take the next step forward. It would be
the first modular space station, meaning the station would ultimately
be made up of multiple modules which would then connect
to a core module out in space. Uh. There's a
(03:47):
lot of benefits to this particular approach, but the big
one is that you're not as limited on internal space
inside your station, and you're not limited by mass the
way you would be with a monolithic design line. So
let's get into physics for a second to really understand
why this is a big deal. So Isaac Newton that
smarty Pants mathematically demonstrated the concept of an exchange of
(04:10):
momentum in the sixteen hundreds, and a few centuries later
a Russian scientist named Konstantine Soolkovski applied the idea of
conservational momentum to rockets. This was in nineteen o three,
and that became the basis of all of our rocketry
moving forward. And there are three big things you have
to keep in mind when you're trying to launch something
(04:33):
into space using a rocket. Those three things are the
energy that you need to generate in order to work
against gravity, which in most rocket equations we represent with
the delta V to indicate rocket velocity. The value of
this depends on where you're planning on going. If you're
going to Mars, then you'll need to exert more energy
(04:55):
than if you were just going into low Earth orbit.
Once you've selected where you're going and where you're starting from,
the value of this variable solidifies. There's nothing we can
do to change that number. This is literally physics. It's
the amount of energy needed to get into that part
from wherever you are. Also, it takes about twice the
(05:16):
amount of energy to go from Earth to Mars as
it would take to go from Earth to Earth orbit. However,
what's really interesting to me is just getting into orbit
is about half of that total energy to get to Mars,
because just overcoming Earth's gravity and not falling back to
the planet requires a lot of energy. So while it
(05:38):
takes more energy to get to Mars that it does
to get to low Earth orbit, just getting to lower
Earth orbit is hard. Then you've got how much energy
is available in your propellant, right, how much potential energy
is stored in the fuel you are using. Not all
propellants are equal in this, Some are more dense in
energy than others. But again we're limited here. The rockets
(06:02):
we use rely on chemical reactions. There is a limit
to how much energy we can release out of these
chemical reactions. Physics dictates it we can't go beyond that,
so again reality has limited us. And finally, you've got
the propellant mass fraction, which is how much propellant you
need in comparison with the total mass of the stuff
(06:24):
you're sending off into space. Your rocket. So we've decided
where we want to go, you know, like low Earth orbit,
and we've decided which propellant we're going to use to
get there. And those two factors tell us the limitations
we face in getting a spacecraft to that point, because
it sets the ratio we have to hit between the
amount of fuel and the total mass of the rocket.
(06:44):
And obviously, as you add more fuel, you add more mass,
so you start hitting some fundamental limitations there too. We
can't just keep, you know, building more massive rockets. You
start to run into an issue with that ratio, or
at least, you know, we start to bump up against
tough restrictions if we try to do that. And so
(07:05):
if we want to build sizeable structures in space rather
than just like creating a truly monstrous rocket, the solution
is to make those structures modular and then to launch
large sections of the structures and individual launches and then
assemble them in space. That's what Mirror would do. Now,
(07:25):
as I'm sure anyone listening to these episodes understands, the
road to developing, constructing, and deploying any sort of spacecraft
tends to be a pretty long one. While the first
Mirror module would launch in February nine six. The planning
for the station began a decade earlier, in the middle
of the Saliot program, so Mirror got an official approval
(07:47):
from the Soviet government in nineteen seventy six, But that
didn't mean it was a straight path from planning to execution.
A lot was going on in the Soviet Union, including
a lot of citical battles within the Soviet space program.
Different leaders within different departments were scrabbling for funding and
(08:08):
for authority, and it meant that budgets were shifted around
multiple times, which honestly is not that different from how
things happen in NASA if we're, you know, really being critical.
During the span of years between nineteen seventy six and
nineteen eighty six, changes in the Soviet space program meant
that funds were pulled from Mirror and redirected towards a
(08:30):
different space project, that of the Barran spacecraft. Now I'm
not sure that I could do a full tech stuff
episode about the Barran, but it does merit mentioned. Also, again,
apologies for my pronunciation. It's going to be terrible and
that's all on me. But the Barran bu R A
(08:51):
n was essentially the Soviet equivalent of the Space Shuttle,
a reusable space plane style spacecraft designed to go into
low Earth orbit and then to act as kind of
a plane upon return to Earth, and most importantly, it
would be reusable. Now, that project began in the seventies,
with construction starting in nineteen eighty, and here in America
(09:15):
we had the space Shuttle program in development at this
same time. The Soviets couldn't afford to go full steam
ahead both with Mir and Barran, so in nineteen eighty four,
the administrators redirected Mer's budget towards Brand's test flights. Now,
that could have spelled doom for Mere, but then Valentine Glushko,
(09:36):
a Soviet engineer in charge of the entire space program
who had been part of some of those political fights
within the Soviet space program I mentioned earlier. Anyway, he
had committed to getting Mire in orbit by the mid eighties,
so he managed to redirect some funds back into the
Mir space station program. Brand, by the way, would go
(09:57):
on to conduct an unscrewed test flight, so no one
was aboard, but it was successful. It happened without really
a hitch in, but it didn't really do anything else.
And uh, the big reason for that had nothing to
do with the technology. It had everything to do with
the collapse of the Soviet Union. But a few years
(10:19):
after getting the thumbs up, the Soviets planned to merge
Mirror with the Almah's program. Now, if you listen to
our previous episode in this series, you know that Almah's
was the designation for a Soviet military space station project.
Alma's had previously merged, you know, with Saliot stations to
(10:39):
three and five. In the Saliot program, we're all meant
to act as military reconnaissance stations. Now, Saliott too had
had multiple technical problems that led to it re entering
their atmosphere just a couple of weeks after it first
attained orbit. Fortunately, there were no people aboard. No crew
had visited the space station at that point, so no
(11:03):
one was lost as a result of that. Sellot three
and saw It five had a little more success, though
very little is known about those stations because the Soviets
were not super eager to share military secrets with the
rest of the world. That's not to say that there
aren't resources out there. There are. I just find a
lot of them to be questionably reliable. Anyway, as part
(11:27):
of the Alma's program, engineers designed a spacecraft with the
designation d O s so d OS one was actually
used to serve as the Saliot one space station. D
OS two, three, and four were Saliot two, three and
five respectively, Salut six and seven were DUS five and
US six, and then the core of the Mirror module
(11:50):
would be DOS seven. So this was a case of
the engineers taking the designs for an earlier space station
and then involving them to allow for that modular approach.
DOES or d OS seven would be the core module,
the heart and soul of Mirror. This core module would
also serve as crew quarters. In fact, for a while,
(12:12):
this would be the entirety of the space station. It
actually had six docking ports, which allowed not just Soya's
capsules to dock, but also cargo ships. Or they would
serve as the connection point for other Mirror modules, and
each module could focus on the specific type of science.
For example, the Kavant one module had equipment to study
(12:34):
astrophysics from the station, and we'll talk more about that
in a in a little bit. So as for the
name Mirror, you might wonder what that means. Well, because
you know salute means salute for example, So what does
mirror mean. It's actually a little tricky to translate into English.
Now you could say it translates to the English word
for world, or that it translates into the word for peace,
(12:57):
but it's actually more specific than that. So prior or
to eighteen sixty one, Russia operated under a serfdom structure
with lots of Russians as surfs, and approximately one third
of all Russians were serfs. But Czar Alexander the Second
decreed that all surfs were freed. That that also meant
(13:18):
they were free to pay rent to their landlords. Uh,
the word mirror means a peasant community that owned its
own land, when previously it did not have that ownership.
So there are a few contextual, subtle things going on
with that name that are difficult to capture with a
single word in English. So, despite all the obstacles, the
(13:42):
U S s R launched Mir's core module on February twenty,
nineteen eighties six. This was an unscrewed mission to get
the core into orbit and it was successful, so no
cosmonauts were aboard at this point, but it did deploy
from its launch vehicle and enter a bit. The core
module resembled the monolithic space stations of the Saliot era.
(14:05):
I mean, after all, they were both based off the
same seed, the Alma's military platform. And it measured about
forty three ft or thirteen meters in length, and the
widest part of the stepped cylinder, you know, some parts
of the cylinder were wider than the others, but the
widest part was thirteen point eight feet in diameter or
four point two meters. On either end of the station
(14:28):
were docking points, and at the forward end. There were
four more docking points around the circumference of the station,
so six in total. As I said, just a couple
of weeks after the core module innered orbit, a space craft,
a Soyu spacecraft carrying Vladimir Solovyov and Leonard Kidzen docked
(14:48):
with the station. Actually first it docked with Mirror for
fifty five days. So they docked with me Or for
fifty five days. Then they left Mirror and they went
to dock with Saliot seven, which allowed the cosmonauts to
load equipment from Saliot seven into their soyus T spacecraft,
and then they carried that back to Mirror after spending
(15:11):
about two months aboard Saliot seven. And each of these
trips between space stations took about twenty nine hours to travel,
so more than a full day to get from one
to the other, and they did it a couple of times. Uh.
It was the first time the spacecraft had docked with
two space stations during a single mission. The two cosmonauts
became the first residence of the Mirror space station. And
(15:33):
again this version of Mirror was just the core module,
so it was a lot like the Saliott stations. In fact,
the first module to join Mere and expand the station
wouldn't come online until that first module was the Cavant one,
which I mentioned earlier, and it was an astrophysics module. Now,
if you look at illustrations is a Mirror when it was,
(15:55):
you know, complete, when all the modules had attached to it,
you would see how complicated this modular approach could become.
Some folks kind of likened it to tinker toys. The
Kvan one module connected to the aft end of the
core module, so opposite where the Soyuz capsule would dock.
The Soyuz capsule docked in the forward side of the station,
(16:19):
the Cavant one was attached to the aft side. The
kan one module had its own extra docking port in
the aft of its module, and it also had a
pair of very long solar panels, as did the mir Core.
I should also add that while that's the configuration I
saw on one illustration, the Russians frequently rearranged the modules
(16:41):
of the Mirror space station, so I don't know if
that was how it was configured throughout the entire history
of Mirror, because it did move some modules around at
different times in order to prep space for new modules
joining the station. The kvant one module was built on
top of an earlier acecraft design, the t K S spacecraft.
(17:03):
The original purpose for that type of spacecraft was to
serve as a resupply cargo ship for those Alma's military stations,
but the Cavant one was all decked out with scientific gear.
It had two pressurized compartments in which cosmonauts could work safely,
and it also had an unpressurized compartment where specific experiments
could take place and in an airlock. According to a
(17:25):
few different sources I found, the Cavant one was supposed
to dock not with Mirror originally but with the Saliot
seven space station, and if it had that would have
made Saliot seven the first modular space station in orbit.
But the development of Kalant one was a rocky journey
and of itself, and in the process the decision was
made to switch it over to Mirror instead of Saliot seven.
(17:48):
The scientific instruments uh aboard the Cavant one included X
ray telescopes, spectrometers and ultra violet telescope and more. The
Cavant one would study stuff like quasars and neutron stars
and any of those solar panels. Because the equipment aboard
the vont one required a lot of electricity to use,
more than what the Mirror core would be able to
(18:11):
generate on its own and still provide, you know, important
stuff like life support. It also didn't have its own
propulsion system, and that made me wonder how the heck
didn't manage to dock with Mirror if Cavanton one didn't
have propulsion, how did that work? Well, the answer to
that question will be coming up right after we take
this break, all right, So, how did Cavant one doc
(18:40):
with Mirror if it didn't have a propulsion system of
its own well. It relied on a special spacecraft called
an f g B tug like a tug boat. Essentially,
the tug docked with the cavant One and then act
as the propulsion unit and moved it to dock with
Mirror before it would disengage fly off. The cavat one
(19:01):
itself was a variation of the f g B, so
both of these were spacecraft that were based on the
earlier t K S spacecraft. That meant that with f
g B and the cavanton One together, it was too
spacecraft joined and one of them was just acting as
the propulsion system for the joint spacecraft. The docking a
(19:23):
Cavat one Demir did not go as planned. First there
was a failure of the control system that delayed everything. Then,
after fixing that, there was an issue with the two
spacecraft actually forming a solid seal as they docked together.
Something was preventing him from locking in. So the cosmonauts
(19:44):
a board mir donned space suits and had an emergency
e v A or spacewalk, and on that space walk
they found out what the problem was. There was a
trash bag in the docking ring on Mirror that was
preventing a seal with the Cavat one. That kind of
raises more questions, but I don't have any answers to them,
(20:05):
so I'm not gonna bother to ask them anyway. The
cosmonauts removed the trash bag, and then the two spacecraft
were finally able to dock together securely. The tug then
disengage from Cavat one, but the whole process meant that
it no longer really had sufficient propellant to enter into
a controlled de orbiting path, which was what the plan
(20:26):
had been, so instead, the Soviets decided that they would
use a shorter boost to push the f GB tug
up into a higher orbit so that it would become
a later Earth problem and it would eventually undergo orbital
decay and it would re enter Earth's atmosphere on August
in an uncontrolled re entry. That those are words that
(20:48):
you don't ever like to read. Uncontrolled re entry is
not good. Cavanton one would get a lot of upgrades
over the years, with cosmonauts adding solar arrays or taking
a raise from other parts of Mirror and then installing
them in Cavant one, but by the mid nineties most
of the instrumentation aboard CAVAT one had long since failed,
(21:09):
gone beyond its useful life, and the module was used
for and I quote, rubbish storage, which that kind of stings,
doesn't it. But before it became a trash pit in space,
Cavant one was an active lab and expanded the living
space of the space station. It also had some impressive
(21:29):
mechanical stabilizers. They used flywheel mechanisms that would allow the
space station to reorient in space without having to use
propellant and thrusters. Now, the space station did have thrusters
and it did have propellant, but obviously you want to
be really judicious with how you use that stuff because
you have a limited amount on board and it's not
(21:51):
easy to bring more up to you. So using these
mechanical systems and sparing the fuel meant that you know,
you're being much more efficient. It's pretty darn cool. So
just using physics instead of propellant really interesting. But the
Cavanton one was just one of the modules that attached
to MERE. The second one was Prepare Yourself Cavant to
(22:14):
this happened. Now this one would provide more power to
the station. It also included additional flywheel mechanisms for orientation,
and it also had a large airlock, and unlike Cavant one,
it had a propulsion system. So to get into the
whole development of this about why the Soviets decided okay,
after Cavat one, this whole f g B tug thing
(22:36):
is a bad idea. It would take way too long
to get into all the stuff about that, but essentially
it boils down to them saying, well, if we have
a propulsion system attached to the modules, we can actually
make more use of more space, which makes way more
sense than to use a tug to push it into
(22:56):
place and then jettison it. So the Cavant Too would
be on the first of those types of modules. The
cavant To docked with Mer on December at the axial
forward port, and then subsequently a manipulator arm on the
space station unplugged Cavat Too and then plugged it into
(23:17):
its new home, which was on a radio port on
the Mere Core module. And this is pretty much standard
operating procedure. When modules would join, they would first dock
with one part of the station. Then the manipulator arm
would end up moving them to its you know, new home.
In some cases it was a permanent home. In some cases,
(23:38):
you know, they would rearrange later on. The Covant too
had shower facilities not too different from what I described
aboard sky Lab. Also had a water regeneration system. Water
on space stations is a truly precious commodity, and I'll
talk about how space stations managed that a little bit later.
We'll really talk about it more in the I S.
(23:59):
S episode coming up later on down the line. It
also had life science and material science experiments aboard the
Cavant to and it expanded the space cosmonauts could occupy
once again. It gave folks more room in the space station. Now,
the next module to join the party was Crystal or Crystal,
(24:19):
I guess it's k R I S T A L
L THO. I've also seen spelled with just the one L.
This happened in now. Originally it carried the designation of
Kant three, but they decided to change it up. And
this is the module that had one of its solar
arrays removed and then later installed in Cavant one. This
would be a few years after it had, you know,
(24:42):
merged with Mirror. It also incorporated some docking mechanisms that
were meant to work with the Barrand spacecraft. So, as
I mentioned, the brand program would get the acts before
any such space plane could visit Mirror. However, it would
come in handy when the Space Shuttle, the United States
Space Shuttle, would visit Mirror. We'll get there like vant
(25:03):
to Crystal or crystal doctor. I can't say crystal without laughing.
But it docked at a forward axial port on Mirror
and then got shifted around by the manipulator arm. And
it was a module that moved a couple of times
during the lifetime of year, usually to allow for some
other module to join the party. And it included a
(25:23):
resupply of food, so it had you know, food storage
aboard this module. It also had industrial processing equipment, so
think of something like a space furnace, something that falls
into the materials science category. And these experiments would be
important for the pursuit of long term space exploration. The
idea being that humans in the future might gather raw
(25:46):
materials from various sources and outer space, such as asteroids,
and then they might process those materials to make useful
stuff that they could you know, take advantage of onboard
as spacecraft. The module also had had an Earth observation camera,
gamma ray telescope and several spectrometers. And then the fourth
(26:07):
extension of Mirror was Specter, which isn't just a villainous
organization in James Bond movies, and it's actually spelled differently.
Specter is spelled spe k t R. It launched in
nine But that is skipping over some really important stuff
that happened in between the launch of Crystal and Specter.
(26:29):
So in n when Crystal launched and the know when
Specter launched, in in between that you had a really
important event take place. This was the dissolution of the
Soviet Union. That process really began in the late eighties
with various territories within the then USSR declaring independence from
(26:51):
the federation, and by late ninety one the situation had
escalated to the point that the Soviet Union was no
longer a union and it ceased to be Gorbachev, the
president of the USSR, resigned and things were thrown into
uncertainty across all aspects of the various nations, including the
(27:12):
Soviet era space program. Now, the original purpose of Specter
was to be military in nature. It was to be
a counterpart to the proposed US project of Star Wars,
and boy, haudy, I'm gonna have to do a full
episode about Star Wars, I think, because that was a
heck of a thing. I remember it as being a
(27:33):
really big deal when I was growing up and in
the eighties, and it was a really controversial subject. It
was also a massive failure in many respects, including as
a means to deter the Soviet Union from developing long
range nuclear weapons, the idea being, oh, if we have
a system that can shoot down your nuclear weapons, there's
(27:53):
no need for you to keep building more. That logic
ended up not being effective anyway. Specter was supposed to
be part of a program that would serve as a
platform for space based weaponry, presumably to shoot down I
C b M s from the United States headed towards
Soviet targets, but the collapse of the Soviet Union left
(28:13):
the program in limbo. So the partially completed module was
left sitting in a shop, and the same was true
for the following module called Paroda. Former Soviet leaders had
lots of stuff to worry about well outside the space program,
and so both of these modules were effectively mothballed for
a few years. Then the Americans chimed in. Once the
(28:36):
Soviet Union fell apart, America was like, hey, we can
help you out. So in ninete, NASA reached out to
Russian leadership and offered to foot the bill to complete
both Specter and Paroda on the American dime, provided that
NASA would also be allowed to incorporate several hundred pounds
worth of scientific experiments on the two modules. The military
(28:59):
platforms gave way to scientific experiments, including one that would
allow scientists to expose experiments to the vacuum of space
using manipulator arms attached to the station, and much of
the rest of the station got retooled to study atmospheric
science on Earth. The Russians agreed to this plan, and
they decided they were going to launch Specter in but
(29:22):
there were some delays, and this time the delay was because,
and I am not kidding about this, the American equipment
destined to be installed Inspector got held up in customs.
As such, the module was not ready for launch until
the spring of nine, and it took off on May
twenty of that year. The final module to join Mere
(29:45):
was called pi Roda, and it was also meant to
at least be partly a military platform for mere serving
in a surveillance function, and some of the states in
the USSR had provided instruments meant to further scientific studies,
but upon the dis aolution of the Soviet Union, Russia
was left solely in charge of Mirror, and the other
(30:06):
former Soviet states saw their experiments withdrawn from the module.
A German multi spectral scanner was added to it, but
then all the funding for the program got the Axe
and Paroda joined Specter in storage until the Yanks came
along and offered to pay for the rest of the
construction and development costs. The additional weight of the American
(30:26):
experiments on board Paroda necessitated a change in the spacecraft.
Originally it was going to carry an additional solar array
in the forward section of the craft, but they Russians
removed that in order to conserve mass, and it would
the solar array would launch on a later cargo vessel
and cosmonauts would install it during a spacewalk. The experiments
(30:48):
that did make it aboard Paroda concentrated on stuff like
studying the relationship between Earth's atmosphere and its oceans, measuring
land characteristics from space, measuring the roughness of the sea surface,
measuring optical effects through the atmosphere as well as measuring
trace elements in the atmosphere, and finally studying how the
(31:09):
surface of the sea reflects microwave radiation. And with Paroda
mirror was complete. You had the core module and you
had the other six modules attached to it. As I
mentioned earlier, occasionally the Russians would use the manipulator arm
on the outside of the station to kind of rearrange
(31:30):
where the modules were. Those aboard the space station would
inhabit the core module. They would seal off whichever modules
were being moved. And like I said, if you look
in illustration to mirror, you'll see how the pieces all
connected in various ways to one another to create the
full station. It's pretty nifty. I also like that you
could be working in an orientation that's ninety degrees from
(31:51):
someone else in another part of the station. But because
there's not really an up or down when you're in
microgravity from your own perspective, it would like the other
person was, you know, at a ninety degree angle from you,
so their sideways, but they would feel the same way
about you, because again up and down a relative. Paroda
would dock with Mirror on April twenty six nine and
(32:14):
it got to its final location quote unquote final location
on the te So something else happened before Mirror was
made complete with the addition of Specter and Paroda. And
that's the Shuttle Mirror missions. At least some of them
happened before that. Now. I mentioned earlier that under Soviet control,
mir had a special airlock system, sometimes called the androgynous
(32:38):
peripheral assembly system or a PASS a p a S.
After the dissolution of the U S s R, there
was an interest in building a stronger link between Russian
and American space programs, with the US proposing links with
Mirror using the newly launched space Shuttle program. So Russia
sent an a PASS to NASA, and NASA resaw its
(33:00):
incorporation into the payload bay of Space Shuttle Atlantis. The
Shuttle Mirror mission had three parts to it. One was
that a cosmonaut would join an American crew aboard a
space shuttle. That happened when Saragei Krikalev joined Space Shuttle
Mission STS sixty that was on board Space Shuttle Discovery.
(33:20):
That mission lasted eight days. The second component was that
an American astronaut would visit mir That honor fell to
Norman E. Thaggard, who boarded a Saya's spacecraft in Russia
to rendezvous with Mirror in March of nineteen. His mission
lasted one fifteen days total and included the arrival of
(33:42):
both the Specter module as well as a visit from
Space Shuttle Atlantis. And that was the third part of
the Shuttle Mirror program, the docking of an American space
shuttle with the Russian space station. I'll explain more after
we take this quick break. You know, one thing I
(34:04):
haven't covered yet about Mirror is that the crew aboard
the space station could fluctuate over time. You could have
cruise from one Soyuz capsule mixed with cruise from the
previous capsule. Uh, and so there were times where the
space station was hosting more people than other times. When
Thaggard and his crewmates joined the station in n it
(34:27):
brought the total population up to thirteen thirteen folks and
only two toilets. Don't worry, We'll be sure to cover
the toilet situation in this episode. Before long, however, members
of the Mere seventeen crew because they were all numbered
by how many missions were visiting the station, so Mere
seventeen that crew left the station to return home, and
(34:50):
the cosmonauts assigned to the Mirror eighteen mission stayed aboard Mirror.
One of those to return home was Valerie Vladimirovich Poliakov.
He had been a board Near for an astounding fourteen months,
one year, two months, setting a world record that has
yet to be beaten. When he joined Mire, he was
(35:10):
part of the fifteen crew of that space station, and
he left as part of the seventeenth crew, so he
was parts of Cruise fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen, so he
had been there for a while. Also. That was his
second trip of Tamir. His first one was back in
Night when he was part of Cruise Mirror three and
Mirror four. He had stayed up there for two forty
(35:31):
days on that first go round. Atlantis launched on June
twenty nine and carried two cosmonauts, Anatoly Solovyev and Nikolai Buderin,
who would transfer to Mirror and stay on as members
of Mirror nineteen. The Shuttle docked with Mirror two days
after the launch, and it went smoothly. It connected through
(35:54):
the Crystal Module and the rest of the station, and
all ten cosmonauts and astronauts aboard other th in the
Core module to celebrate the occasion. The Shuttle remained docked
with Mirror for several days, leaving with the Mirror eighteen
crew as part of the Shuttle crew on July four,
and the Mirror nineteen crew boarded their Saya's capsule and
(36:14):
disengaged from Mirror temporarily in order to record the process
of the Shuttle departing the station. So we actually have
pictures and video of the Space Shuttle departing Mirror because
some cosmonauts got into the Saya's capsule and blasted off
for a little ways to get those pictures. Once that
was all done, the Saya's capsule returned to dock with Miror,
(36:35):
and the Shuttle then moved off to conduct a few
more experiments before it ultimately returned to Earth. Atlantis would
take return trips to Mirror six more times, so Space
Shuttle Atlantis visited me Or seven times total. That included
a mission that brought astronaut Shannon Lucid to the station
as part of STS seventy six. Lucid would set a
(36:56):
record for the longest stay in space by an American
up to that point, and also the longest stay for
a woman. During her stay at Mirror, Paroda would end
up joining the station and complete it. Lucid would also
plant a crop of wheat, and they would ultimately go
from being a seedling to producing seeds of its own.
(37:16):
It was the first example of someone taking a crop
through the full life cycle in space. The wheat would
return to Earth aboard another Atlantis mission STS one. Space
shuttles Discovery and Endeavor would also dock with Mirror once
each before the space station would be retired. All missions
(37:36):
took place between n and During that time, Mirror experienced
a major and potentially catastrophic emergency, a couple of them,
actually so. In February, a backup oxygen generating device caught
fire on the station. Now, as you might imagine, a
fire on the space station is incredibly dangerous. According to
(37:58):
Russian authorities, the fire only lasted less than two minutes,
but those aboard Mirror said it was more like fourteen minutes.
He generated a lot of smoke, and those aboard had
to put on respirators in order to breathe. Also, they
found out that some of the respirators proved to be nonfunctional.
Not great. The smoke blocked an exit path to the
(38:18):
Soya's capsule, so there was no escape from the station.
It made an escape impossible because your pathway was blocked
to your one way home. Ultimately, the crew was able
to extinguish the fire using like a wet towel and
a fire extinguisher, but they had to continue to wear
respirators for like forty five minutes or so in order
for the smoke to clear out. Another serious accident happened
(38:41):
on June twenty seven. A cargo spaceship collided with the
Specter module during docking procedures, and the collision created a
small hole in the exterior of Specter, which caused Spector
to de pressurize. Michael Fole, and American artist inside Specter
at the time of this crash, felt the pressure in
(39:03):
his ears change. That was his warning to get the
heck out of a dodge or Specter, and he exited
the module and the Mirror crew sealed Specter off from
the rest of the station. The collision also caused damage
to some of the station's solar panels, so the crew
ended up turning off some of the experiments in order
to conserve power. Fortunately, in neither of those accidents was
(39:26):
there any loss of life, and the experiences really drove
home the need to develop efficient and effective emergency procedures
for cosmonauts and astronauts to follow should the worse happen.
The last crew to visit Mirror did so in April
two thousand, journeying to an empty Space Shuttle, So the
previous crew, which had left in August of actually ended
(39:51):
a nearly ten years streak of continuous occupation of the
space station. Not continuous with the same people. Obviously you
had different cruise coming in and relieving others, but I
think it was like a week and one day short
of a full ten years of continuous occupation when the
(40:12):
last crew had left. Then this space station remained empty
and dormant for a good long while until April two
thousand and This was from a private space company. Mere
Corps was the name of the company. Because funding had
run out in Russia to have a state backed space
(40:34):
agency focusing on Mirror. At this point, attention was turning
towards a different space station, the I S S, the
International Space Station, which we'll talk about in the next episode.
So the mission that flew up to Mirror in April
two thousand was, as I said, a privately funded mission
from mir Corps. The two cosmonaut crew was to conduct
repairs and reactivate the station, with the hope that private
(40:59):
company could keep Mirror in operation. However, mir had already
lived well beyond its expected lifespan. The station was going
to need a lot of repairs and the investment would
be considerable, and with the I S S taking form,
it was just too hard to sell, and mire Core
could not get the funds to pay for anything more
than the first mission in two thousand. So Mirror had
(41:20):
run out of time and money, and in two thousand
one it would d orbit like sky Lab. There was
some worry here on Earth that Mirror might end up
crashing down on some populated area, and Mirror was much
much bigger than sky Lab, but Russian engineers took steps
to have a controlled d orbit, and the station ultimately
(41:41):
broke apart above the South Pacific. All Right, I also
promised that I would talk about pooping on Mirror. I
mentioned that mir had two toilets. One was in the
core module, which is good news because you know, it
was a while before cavant One joined Mirror and made
it a modular space station, and the second toilet was
lowcated in covant to Now, if you look at pictures
(42:03):
of a mere toilet, you had best prepare yourself for
some psychological trauma. It does not look much like a
toilet at all. It looks like a canister that has
some sort of tube thing in the front of the
canisters opening. So to use the facilities, you would position
yourself on. The toilet had a fastening system or straining
system with restraining bars to keep you sealed to the seat.
(42:25):
Very important. You don't want stuff, you know, floating around.
We had already had experiences with that in previous space missions.
The toilet had a fan to create airflow to help
with feces collection, and so the feces would go into
collection bags, which in turn would go into an aluminum
container for storage. But urine was different. This is where
(42:46):
that tube comes in. It was a hose and you
had urine funnel adapters that you would attach to the
end of the hose, and unlike other space toilets in
the past, this one had adapters designed so that both
men and women could make use of the toilet. No
more of that sexist male only stuff here. It was
not a no girls allowed kind of thing, which you know,
(43:10):
it was refreshing really Now. The hose would collect the
urine and would send it on to a watery recovery system.
And you might think, what the what, but yeah, water
recovery was a big part of Mirror, and it remains
an important part of space travel in general. We need
water to survive and there's no easy way to get
(43:30):
additional water when you're in space, so you have to
make the most with what you have. You want to
use what you have as much as you can, and
that means you need systems in place to collect wastewater,
treat it, and then recycle it for further use, including
as drinking water. Now, another use of water on board
(43:50):
Mirror was to run an electric current through water. This
is a process called electrolysis. The result is that electricity
breaks the molecular bonds between hydrogen and oxygen. Now, this
is one way to generate oxygen in space, though it
does mean relying on water in order to do that.
Water recycling involves moving wastewater through a series of filters
(44:11):
to remove all the contaminants, leaving pure water behind, and
the I S S would use a similar approach, creating
a closed loop system to capture water not just from urine,
but also from sweat and even water vapor from breathing.
We'll talk about that in the I S S episode. Well,
the Mirror space station would come hurtling down in two
thousand one, part of it lives on in our next episode,
(44:33):
when we do talk about the International Space Station, we'll
learn about a module very similar to Mirror's core module
that serves as the heart of the I S S.
As for what we learned from here, well, apart from
all the secret stuff that got buried in Soviet files,
we learned a lot about the long term effects that
being in space can have on the human body. We
(44:54):
observed how the body can change over time in microgravity,
including stuff like bone and muscle loss. The things we
learned will be crucial should we ever take the step
toward establishing long term space habitats on the Moon or
on Mars. Not to mention just you know, handling the
effects of space travel between Earth and Mars, because that
journey alone takes around, you know, more than half a year.
(45:18):
So we learned a lot from mirror even beyond, like
all the the super shady stuff that the Soviets were doing,
or at least the semi shady stuff. Um and and
obviously a lot of that learning continues on with the
International Space stations. So in our next episode we will
turn our our thoughts and eyes and ears towards the
(45:40):
I S S and we'll also talk about a couple
of other space stations and uh and talk about what
the future holds. Oh and I'll also cover the space
station that never was a k A Freedom, but that's
in the next one. If you have suggestions for topics
I should cover in tech Stuff, reach out to me.
The best way to do that is over on Twitter.
(46:00):
The handle we use for the show is called tech
Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again
really soon. Yeah. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production.
For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
(46:22):
your favorite shows.
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