September 22, 2021 • 50 mins
We finish up our series about space stations and talk about the most recent modules to join the ISS, the private citizens who visited the ISS as tourists, what life is like aboard the space station and what the future holds.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
He there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host
job in Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart
Radio and love all things tech. And today we are
going to try and finally wrap up our look at
the International Space Station and this series of episodes about
(00:27):
space stations in general. Though you know there's going to
be some stuff that obviously I just won't touch on,
because I mean, you could do a full mini series
that lasts half a year talking about this and only
barely scratch the surface. Anyway. In our previous episode in
this series, I talked about how the International Space Station
(00:49):
or I s S formed out of both the struggling
Russian space program and NASA's attempts to create a US
led space station along with Europe, Japan and the contributing
toward that, and we learned about some of the modules
that bake up the space station. We also talked about
how the construction on the I S S was put
(01:10):
on hold in the wake of the Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy,
and how the station has two main sections. There's one
that's the Russian Orbital Segment or R O S and
the other is the U s Orbital Segment or U
S O S. Alright, so just a few more modules
to talk about before we get up to date. So
(01:30):
in NASA sent up a module called Leonardo aboard the
Space Shuttle Discovery. Leonardo is primarily used as a storage module.
And you might say, well, storage for what, And it's
pretty much everything from spare parts to rubbish too, you know, waste.
(01:50):
Oh and in case you're wondering if this is the
only Ninja turtle to be associated with the I S S,
it is not. The Italian Space Agency built through multi
purpose Logistics modules or mp l ms, and they were
named Leonardo, Donna Tello, and Rafaelo. And these were designed
(02:10):
to be pressurized containers that would be nestled in the
Space Shuttle cargo bay and they would be used to
transmit you know, cargo like scientific experiments and supplies to
the I S S. But Leonardo got modified to become
a permanent storage module attached to the International Space Station
and the Donna Tello one never launched at all. Rafaello, however,
(02:35):
was used in the final Shuttle mission to the Space station.
Leonardo originally docked with Unity you know, the node on
the earth facing port, the Nadier Point UH In late
February two eleven and the crew of the space station
relocated Leonardo and connected it to the forward facing port
(02:56):
of Tranquility. Because keep in mind, the space station as modular,
so you can do that. You can undock certain modules
and redock them elsewhere in order to make room for
new stuff. Now, at that point, Leonardo also became a
place where astronauts can go to take you know, sponge baths.
The main toilet facilities for the U S O S
(03:17):
part of the station are in Tranquility, the Tranquility node,
and now Leonardo is attached to Tranquility, so it kind
of was expanding their area where they could do, you know,
personal hygiene. So Leonardo went up in the winter of
that summer. In July, NASA retired the space Shuttle program.
(03:37):
The final mission was STS one five that was with
the Space Shuttle Atlantis. This was the one that carried
rafael O to the I S S and delivered supplies
and parts up to the space station, and that would
be the end of the shuttle bringing major components up.
But there's still a couple of things we can mention
before we wrap up on modules. So in the spa
(04:00):
ACEX unscrewed Dragon space capsule, so in other words, you know,
no people aboard this one. This was called by NASA
a Commercial Orbital Transportation Services UH spacecraft or a COTS
spacecraft c o t S. It docked with the International
Space Station. Space X would become an alternative to relying
(04:20):
solely on the Russians to get materials up to the
I S S. And I've done several episodes either directly
about SpaceX or involving SpaceX in the past, so we're
not going to go down the entire rabbit hole here.
It's it's enough for you know, another series of episodes.
But the important part is that NASA now was able
(04:40):
to have an alternative because otherwise they had to rely
on Russian spacecraft at that point, because NASA no longer
had the crew spacecraft or launch vehicles that would be
necessary to make trips up to the station. Now that
wasn't necessarily according to plan. I should add NASA had
a different space flight program that was in plans UH,
(05:02):
and it was meant to pick up where the Space
Shuttle program would leave off, plus go a bit further.
This was called the Constellation program, and the program had
a couple of different important goals. One was to complete
the construction of the International Space Station, so you know,
build launch vehicles capable of bringing payloads up to space
that would help complete the I s S. But another
(05:24):
was to send a human crew to the Moon by
and the third was to eventually send human astronauts to Mars. Well,
you know, that goal should tell you that things did
not go as planned, because obviously we have not gone
back to the Moon and um. Anyway, the Constellation program
included plans for a few different launch vehicles. Uh These
(05:45):
were the Areas one, which was meant to launch payloads
mostly into orbit, and then the Arias five, which it
was a heavy lift launch vehicle design capable of sending
stuff much further out than just you know, low Earth orbit.
And the journey to this plan in itself was a
bumby one for reasons that I've talked about in this
series before. Namely, you know, NASA's big projects are somewhat
(06:08):
subjected to the whims of whomever happens to be in
charge at the time, and that changes fairly regularly with
changes in presidential administrations. And that is not great for stability.
NASA is also subject to budgets that are awarded to
the agency by Congress, and in fact, just the selection
(06:28):
of the aria's design in itself involves the story of
different people coming into the picture and tossing out what
had come before and saying no, no, no, no, no,
let's do it this way instead. Now, in addition to
to those launch vehicles, NASA planned a new spacecraft that
could carry crew members up to the I S S.
(06:48):
This would be a capsule style spacecraft, not a shuttle,
but a capsule in some ways similar to the old
Apollo capsules in the late sixties and early seventies, but
this wouldn't be larger. It would be able to hold
more crew up to six people in fact, compared to Apollos,
you know three. And it was called the Crew Exploration Vehicle,
(07:09):
and later on it would evolve into the spacecraft called Oriyan. Now,
the Constellation program would end up getting the ACTS under
the administration of President Barack Obama. Obama cited lots of
issues like the fact that the the program wasn't on
schedule and it was over budget. Pretty much always happens
(07:29):
in the space industry. You know, there are a lot
of political reasons for this, that it was not his
administration that proposed the Constellation program, so there were a
lot of different factors that led into this, but ultimately
admit that Constellation was no more. However, the Orion spacecraft
survived that and it still remains part of NASA's Artemus program,
(07:52):
you know, the one that is supposed to take astronauts
back to the Moon by but probably no earlier than
at the point. Three Orion spacecraft have been built so far,
with a planned test flight to happen later this year
December potentially, though we'll quite possibly see that get pushed
to two. Also, part of that test is to test
(08:16):
out a new launch vehicle a k a. A new rocket.
This one is called the Space Launch System or s
L S now. After the cancelation of Constellation, which is
a fun thing to say, but not a fun thing
in general, NASA went back to the drawing board and
began to focus on a super heavy lift launch vehicle.
This would become the s L S which replaced not
(08:38):
just the Areas one in Areas five rockets, but it
also replaced a separate super heavy lift vehicle proposal that
was called Jupiter. Uh. That one was not technically part
of Constellation, it was part of a separate, parallel program.
But yeah, that one got the AX too, So SLS
(09:00):
would effectively replace areas in Jubiter and this, you know,
all this bit I'm talking about here is a bit
of a tangent from the Space Station, I realized, but
I figured it was important to talk about how NASA
was attempting to close the gap in operations once they
got to the end of the Space Shuttle program. The
plan was to have a continuous means of accessing the
(09:22):
I S S without relying on the Russians, but it
just didn't work out. There are some critics, including people
who previously worked on the SLS design, who say that
NASA is going to have to just accept that the
future is one in which the agency depends upon commercial
launch vehicles like SpaceX's Falcon heavy rockets and UH and
(09:45):
to to do that instead of trying to operate their
own because it's going to be less expensive in the
long run, and these budget issues are going to continue
to be a barrier for NASA, and that perhaps even
continuing to develop the sl S is um not wise
(10:06):
in other words, like like it's just you just can't
fund it so that it doesn't make sense to keep
doing it. But so far NASA is still on that track.
And also, I should add that's just what those critics say.
I'm not saying that that's definitively the case. I certainly
can't speak with any level of expertise over whether or
(10:27):
not it makes sense. In the the there were new
materials being sent up to the space station, including an
experimental inflatable module called the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module or
BEAM b E a M. Yeah, this is a space module.
(10:49):
On the I S s that it's it's made of fabric,
it's got a fabric hull, and it's from the Bigelow
Aerospace Company, which was named after its founder, Robert Bigelow.
He as a multimillionaire sometimes billionaire depending on you know,
the time, and he made most of his money in
commercial real estate, but he really wanted to create an
(11:10):
aerospace company. He has this, you know, big interest in
space travel. He also has a big interest in things
like UFOs. Anyway, the BEAM module is part of Bigelow's
bigger plan to create an inflatable habitats for various space missions,
including habitats that could be used on the Moon or
on Mars. Now, the beam module hitched a ride on
(11:33):
a SpaceX capsule or SpaceX launch vehicle, i should say,
and it made it into orbit and crews connected it
to the I S S on a port on the
Tranquility module. Then they tried to inflate it, but they
found the first time that was taking more pressure to
do so than they were expecting. Uh, and the module
(11:53):
was not expanding at the right rate, and they figured
that maybe the problem was that it had been folded
up in its compact shape a little longer than was expected.
There were delays in launch, which meant that this this
uh inflatable habitat was compressed longer than it was intended
(12:14):
to be. And uh so they tried a second time
and they got it working, and they later were able
to pressurize it and reach equilibrium with the internal space
station pressure, which is right around one atmosphere. And yeah,
astronauts have actually gone into this inflated module and they've
done work there which blows my mind. I mean, it's
(12:35):
a fabric module, but clearly it's an air tight fabric module,
and lots of tests were done before anyone set foot
figuratively speaking, inside of it. Now. The company has also
made a mock up of an inflatable space station called
B three three zero. That's a reference to the fact
that it expands out to allow for an internal volume
(12:59):
of three cubic meters um, and it starts off with
a volume of fifty cubic meters so it has quite
a bit of expansion. Now. Obviously, an inflatable space station
would have some really incredible advantages because you could design
much larger modules and not worry about it not fitting
(13:19):
on a launch vehicle because you know, on Earth you
could have this as a deflated module, so it's really
compact and ready to go up in space. Once in space,
you inflate it just like the beam did and expand
it out to its full volume in space, and using
special materials like kevlar, you can create a fabric hull
(13:39):
that is resistant to stuff like micro meteoroids. You know,
those impacts can be disastrous if you don't have, you know,
armor against them. They also can be effective to shield
against stuff like cosmic radiation. The B three three zero
mock up does have a disadvantage. There are no windows
in it, because creating a transparent material with the right
(14:02):
structural integrity that can also be compressed along with this
fabric habitat is really tricky, and so the mock up
instead has curved displays mounted on the inside walls of
the space station. So presumably, if you were to have
a real deployment of one of these in orbit, you
would mount cameras on the exterior of your space station
(14:25):
and then feed that camera view into displays that are
mounted on the interior walls. So you don't have a window,
you would have a view screen kind of like you know,
the bridge of the Enterprise. Now, while we do not
yet have inflatable moon habitats or space stations, the beam
module showed that the concept works. Astronauts have tested the
(14:47):
air quality in the module. They've installed various components inside it.
Uh NASA says it's monitored a few likely micro meteoroid
collisions with the whole of the beam module. The whole
has weathered those admirably simil early. It appears to be
at least as effective as the rest of the station
with regard to protecting against cosmic radiation, So that's good.
(15:07):
It was intended to be a relatively short term experiment,
but it's still up there today and it might remain
there for the foreseeable future. The I s S crew
actually accessed Beam as recently as September one. The crew
had a few things to do with Beam, including prepping
cargo for a return trip to Earth aboard a future
(15:28):
cargo Dragon mission from SpaceX, and they also tried but
failed to fix some malfunctioning wireless temperature sensors that were
part of Beam, but they couldn't get them working now. Sadly,
Bigelow Aerospace may have already seen its last days before
we could ever get an inflatable space station, at least
(15:49):
from that company. In the company shut down its production
facilities due to COVID, and Robert Bigelow has subsequently said
that it is unlikely to reopen. So Beam might be
the first and only Bigelow inflatable space module, But the
concept has been proven to be at least viable, so
(16:09):
whether Bigelow comes back and continues that work or someone
else does, um that might be a future space station mainstay.
In late twenty SpaceX brought an airlock called Bishop up
to the I S S. It is now attached to
tranquility and rather than provide astronauts a way to conduct
(16:30):
extra vehicular activities you know spacewalks like other airlocks, this
one is really meant to allow the crew to deploy
stuff like small satellites like CubeSats and stuff, and maybe
even rubbish to jettison rubbish in the future. The airlock
received commercial funding, and you know, it really was a
necessity because the company that funded it, called nano Rax,
(16:54):
had this agreement with NASA to use the I S
S to deploy satellites. But the I S S is
a pretty busy place and there are a lot of
different countries using the I S S as a test
bed for numerous experiments, and so the busy schedule meant
that the limited airlocks were already busy with all these experiments.
(17:16):
So if nano Rex wanted to deploy these satellites, that
really needed another airlock. So they made one and then
send it up to the I S S. And finally,
for now, at least we have Naka in a u
k that's a Russian word that means science. This long
delayed module was supposed to go up before, like way
(17:37):
back in two thousand seven, but various delays forced that
date to slip all the way up to this year.
Those delays included some serious technical issues, such as the
discovery in that the fuel system aboard Knaka had contamination
in it in the form of metallic dust, and also
(17:57):
they found leaks in the fuel system, which necess citated
lengthy repairs. And later still they found more fuel system
leaks in and that meant more delays. Plus there are
all those delays due to budgetary and political issues in Russia.
But Russia finally launched it on July one. It would
take the place of the old Piers docking module, the
(18:20):
p I R S Russian docking module, the one that
was originally opposite the Poisk module so birthed to the
Vezda module, and that means that components on Naka were
already pretty old before it ever saw service as part
of the I S S, which might have contributed to
a scary situation which we will talk about after this
(18:42):
quick break. So the I S S crew undocked the
Piers module from the Vesta after a few delays, and
then the old module would enter it's the orbiting path
and would eventually re enter the atmosphere and break apart
over the Pacific Ocean. The NAKA module docked in the
(19:08):
place that Pierce had been, and it did so on
July using an automatic docking procedure, and all that went,
you know, fairly well, despite some delays and a couple
of technical glitches, but nothing critical. But then a few
hours later NAKA had a software glitch, and that glitch
gave a direct command to the modules thrusters to fire,
(19:28):
which caused the I S S to rotate like a lot.
It flipped one and a half times, and effectively it
ended up upside down over Earth in the process. I
guess you could say the I S S developed a
bit of an attitude problem, kind of like a surly teenager.
According to Zebulin Scoville, who apart from having an amazing name,
(19:53):
is also a NASA engineer. He was present when this happened.
Naka is apparently trying to pull away from the station
that it had just docked with. He didn't know that immediately.
In fact, when he first saw an alert come in,
it was just a couple of lines, and he thought
it was perhaps just a sensor error, But then he
(20:15):
checked the video monitors and saw that the thrusters were
active and that this was the real deal now. Initially,
as NASA was getting a handle on what was going on,
the agency reported that the attitude of the I S
shifted only by about forty five degrees, which is already
a lot, but it was incorrect. It was more like
five hundred forty degrees. Kind of crazy. NASA engineers had
(20:38):
no control over knockas thrusters. Only Russian ground control had
the ability to send a direct command to the knock
A module, and unfortunately, the space station was not in
line of sight with Russia. It would take another hour
before the I S S could potentially be in communication
range with Russian ground control. So NASA engineers responded by
(20:59):
working with the I S S crew and using other
thrusters on the International Space Station, specifically on this Vezda
module and on a progress cargo ship that was docked
with the I S S. In order to counteract naka's error.
The station needed to flip a hundred eighty degrees to
get back into the correct attitude, and it took a
(21:19):
lot of work to get it all done. At The
final orbital correction took place on August twenty one. Remember,
the initial uh thrust R misfire was at the end
of July, and fortunately no disaster occurred, but it must
have been pretty darn tense. Now that being said, Scoville
asserted that the crew were never really in danger, that
(21:40):
the situation, while unusual, was not catastrophic, and that the
process of turning the station back to its normal attitude
was so gradual that the crew aboard the I S
S couldn't even detect that the station was was turning,
that it was moving like that. Naka's main purpose is
to serve as a science lab for the Russians, and
this is interesting because it's the first Russian module that's
(22:02):
actually really dedicated to scientific experiments beyond stuff like E
V A S and it just became part of the
I S S. So, after more than twenty years of
being an orbit, the r OS finally has its primary
laboratory in place. Uh NACA is also going to serve
as the docking port for another module in the near future,
(22:23):
assuming everything goes as planned. This is the us Lavoy
Module or Pretty Shell Module. It's scheduled to launch in
November of this year, and dockwood. Naka's other port you know,
the port that's not connected to the Selvezda and the
uh OS. Lavoy is also another docking module. This one
(22:44):
has the ability to dock with up to five other spacecraft,
so it increases the station's docking capacity. One important component
of NAKA came not from Russia but from the European
Space Agency or e s A. This is the European
Robotic Arm or e r A. This will be used
to help the docking procedures with Oslavoy once that connects
(23:08):
to NACO later this year. Again, assuming everything goes well,
potentially NAKA and Oslavoy might see some continued use beyond
the lifespan of the I S S, but I'll talk
about that more towards the end of this episode. Then
we have some other proposed modules that are supposed to
join the I S S in the near future. These
(23:29):
modules come not from NASA but from a commercial space
company called Axiom Space. So you've no doubt heard many
times in this series. Budget issues are a constant challenge
with NASA. It's also a big challenge in Russia. The
agency has thus chosen to partner with commercial space companies,
not just to provide transportation to and from the I
(23:51):
S S, but also to build onto the existing space
station itself. The plan is for Axiom to build and
deploy several modules that will connect to the Harmony node
aboard the I S S. These include a node module
so very similar to Harmony and Unity and Tranquility. This
will act as kind of an adapter between the U
(24:12):
S O S part of the space station and the
Axiom Space part of it. Other modules will include one
with large windows to allow for spectacular views of Earth,
a crew habitat module, and a module dedicated to researching
manufacturing processes in space. And like Nauka and us LaVoi,
these Axiom modules could potentially have a life beyond that
(24:35):
of the I S S. Also, Axiom is planning on
sending non astronauts or commercial astronauts up into space, including
a reality TV series winner. I guess because Discovery has
planned a reality series called Who Wants to Be an Astronaut,
and the winner of that series will go up in
(24:56):
a future space X Dragon Cruel crew vessel up to
the Axiom section of the I S S. UH. They're
already taking applications for that, so you can check that
out if you're interested. I Uh, I did not apply. Now,
this is not the first time that non astronauts will
have visited the space station. In fact, that has happened
in the past already, only a handful of times, but
(25:19):
it has happened. So to talk about this we have
to dial the clock back quite a bit. Now. It's
the late nineteen nineties and the Soviet Union had collapsed,
the Russia was having trouble funding its space agency, and
it was having a lot of trouble maintaining the Mere
space station. A private company called Mere Core took shape
(25:41):
and took charge of the space station. So this one
had private funding and was trying to turn Mere into
a commercial space station instead of a state backed one.
It even flew a mission up there after. Mir had
already been left unoccupied for several months, and the idea
was that Mere Corps would sell trips to the space
station to wealthy people who wanted to go to space,
(26:01):
and then use some of that money to offset the
maintenance and operation costs of Mirror uh be. But that
didn't really work out because those costs of operation proved
to be considerable and there just weren't enough investors jumping
on board to make this a viable business, so the
company really had no choice but to allow mir to
(26:22):
de orbit. However, the company had sold a ticket to
a guy named Dennis Tito to go up to Mirror,
and rather than you know, refund that money, Miracorps was
able to partner with a company in the United States
called Space Adventures Limited to secure permission for Tito to
instead visit the International Space Station if he went up
(26:44):
on a Soyo's Russian space capsule. Now, Tito himself was
no stranger to the space industry. He had worked for
the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that's a NASA field center, but
he also was not a trained astronaut. However, the deal
meant he could board a Soyo's spacecraft, and in late
April of two thousand one, he traveled to the I
(27:05):
S S and became the first person to pay for
a ticket to visit the I S S. And as such,
he is sometimes referred to as a space tourist. I
am told that they hate this title. They don't like
space tourists because a lot of them had to go
through training and had to actually be participants in various
experiments and stuff, so they were working up there too.
(27:28):
But they're widely referred to as space tourists, and he
was the first. The reported cost of the trip was
a whopping twenty million dollars. But you know, the only
other way to get up there would be to be
an official astronaut or cosmonaut or maybe be selected as
a payload specialist, which required a you know, less intense
training period. So it's a pretty small and elite group
(27:52):
that he joined. Mark Shuttleworth a South African businessman who
also has connections to tech and that his company, Canonical,
is responsible for developing the Ubuntu operating system. Uh he
followed suit. He also visited the I S S in
two thousand two, also aboard a Soyo's capsule. But then
(28:12):
in two thousand three we had the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.
The United States put the entire space Shuttle program on
hold for more than two years, and at that point,
the Soyo's capsules became the only way up and back
from the I S S. So Russia thus put a
hold on space tourism for that time. Since the capsule space,
(28:33):
you know, the space inside the capsule was critical for
servicing the I S S. The tourism program came back
on track in two thousand five with Gregory Olsen, and
then in two thousand six, uh A Neuche and sorry
went up to become a space tourist. Next up was
Charles Simoni, who actually went up twice. He went up
(28:53):
once in two thousand seven, and he did it again
in two thousand nine, so you must have loved it.
In between those visits was guy. I actually know someone
I've talked to several times, Richard Garriott. Now, if you've
been listening to this series from the beginning, you know
that Richard's father, Owen Garriott, was an astronaut who was
part of the sky Lab missions. So Owen Garriott had
(29:15):
been aboard Space Station's back in the seventies. Richard Garriott,
known to a lot of gamers as Lord British, spent
a good deal of his personal fortune to visit the
space station, um, you know, without going through the entire
astronaut process. The seventh and last of the space tourists
of that era was Guy Lalleberte, who visited the I
(29:41):
S S in two thousand nine, And this was towards
the end of the Space Shuttle program, and that meant
that once again the Saya's capsule would become the only
way that astronauts and cosmonauts could go to and from
the I S S. And because of that, Russia once
again put an end to its space tourism business. So
for many years that is the end of that. In
(30:01):
twenty nineteen, NASA announced it would entertain the idea of
tourism to the I S S, using you know, commercial
UH space companies to take people to and from the
space station. UH And, as I mentioned, the axiom section
of the I S S once it becomes reality, will
(30:21):
include tourism as part of the commercial activities aboard that
part of the space station. But the vast majority of
visitors the I S S have either been trained astronauts, cosmonauts,
or what NASA calls payload specialists. Now, as that name implies,
the people who fit the category of payload specialists are
those who have expertise with a specific experiment or a
(30:42):
piece of equipment that is sent up to the I
S S. They might be employees of some of the
private companies that NASA contracts with, or they might be
leading scientists in a specific field. They typically have a
much shorter stay aboard the I S S than you know,
other crew members, and they don't have to train quite
as much before they joined the International Space Station. In total,
(31:07):
more than two d forty people have been to the
I S S since it came online. More than a
hundred fifty of those came from the United States, so
the US is in the lead by far. Hack Only
nine other people from the America continents have been to
the I S S. Eight of them were from Canada
(31:27):
and one of them was from Brazil. Every other person
from this part of the world, from the America's both
north and south, came from the United States. Russia is
in second place, with fifty people from Russia and going
to the I S S, and then fewer than twenty
came from Europe. Some of those folks have actually been
multiple times. In fact, a lot of them have visited
(31:49):
the I S S at least twice, not quite as
many have been three times. A few like Mark Kelly,
have been there four times, and there are two cause
minots who have been to the International Space Station five times.
Those two are Yuri Malenchinko and Fyodor your Chicken. So
Malanchinko's career was truly astronomical pun intended He visited mir
(32:14):
as part of the MERE sixteen crew in nine. He
was part of the STS one oh six Space Shuttle
Atlantis crew in two thousand, which marked his first visit
to the I S. S. In two thousand three, he
went back to the I S. S. And while he
was there he got married to his fiancee at Katarina Dimitrieva.
(32:35):
It was a long distance ceremony because she happened to
be in Texas while he was in orbit. Malanchinko's time
in space collectively amounts to an astonishing eight hundred twenty
seven days, with nearly thirty five hours of that time
being spent in extra vehicular activities or space walks. Now,
that is incredible, but it's still more than fifty days
(32:58):
shy of the career wreck that's held by UH Gennedy Padalka,
And I apologize. I know I'm butchering these names and
that's on me. But anyway, Padalka has more than eight
d seventy eight days logged in space in total. UH
and he's also been to the International Space Station, but
only four times. Right, he hasn't been the five times
(33:21):
UH as for Fyodor. He's also had a stellar career also,
pun intended. His time in space amounts to nearly six
seventy three days total across multiple missions, including some aboard
Space Shuttle missions, and he racked up more spacewalk hours
than Malinchiko. He had fifty nine hours of spacewalks. That's incredible. Now,
(33:42):
when we come back, we'll talk a bit about life
aboard the I S S and what the future holds
for the station, and maybe a couple of other bits
of information. But first let's take this quick break. So
let's talk about what a typical day would be like
(34:03):
aboard the International Space Station. First of all, the space
station climate control keeps the station at about seventy two
degrees fahrenheit, which is twenty two point to celsius, and
that's all year round, winter, summer, spring, and fall. The
atmosphere aboard the I S S is very much like
that on Earth, and that it's mostly nitrogen around and
(34:24):
then oxygen at around. A mineral called zeolite acts as
a carbon dioxide scrubber uh c O two gets trapped
in poores that are in the zero lite mineral, and
then you just expose the zeolite to outer space and
all the carbon dioxide gets vented out into space, and
then you can use the zeolite again, so that keeps
(34:45):
the station habitable. You also have a water reclamation system
that can reclaim water from pretty much any waste source
and then filter it to the point where it becomes
drinkable water. Again, that includes everything from you know, the
water vapor you breathe out when you are breathing too,
(35:05):
the water you pee out when you're peeing, to the
water that is you know, used for a shower. All
of the sources of water get reclaimed, filtered, and reused. Okay,
so let's say that you are on the I S S.
You're in the U s OS segment the United States
(35:25):
run section for this example. You wake up. We'll talk
more about sleeping quarters in a second, and it's time
to tend to hygiene. Maybe the first thing you want
to do is visit the little Astronauts room. In other words,
you know you want to go to the toilet. Well,
space toilets are a little bit weird. For one thing,
they have restraints built into them so that you can
remain you know, attached to what is effectively the toilet seat.
(35:51):
After all, your in microgravity, so you need something to
keep you in place so that you know, you don't
have stuff floating around you. So the toilet has leg
restraints and it also has a fan system that creates
suction to pull waste away. As you go to the bathroom,
you position your posterior over a hole in the toilet seat.
(36:13):
Some of the astronauts actually prefer to lift the toilet
seat and position themselves directly over the hole that leads
down into a bag. So there is a bag set
down in the waist system. The fan draws the waist
into the bag, and after you're done, you seal the
bag shut and then you push the sealed bag into
the waist container that is below the toilet. And then,
(36:36):
you know, to be nice, you should put a brand
new bag in place uh in the toilet so that
the next person to use it doesn't have to, you know,
prepare it first. And then if for urine, you actually
have a hose and each astronaut has their own personal
little urine funnel that they attached to the hose and
the funnel goes, you know, over the relevant equipment and
(37:00):
of the astronaut that is, and then you get your
own little urine funnel. You know, it's a collector's item. Anyway,
this helps you get the p to go the right
way into the hose. And again you've got a fan
system that is sucking that you're in down the hose
into a wastewater tank where then it can go through
the reclamation system and get filtered and turned back into water. Now,
(37:23):
let's say that after you do this, you might want
to take a shower. Well, the Skylab space station had
an experimental shower in it, but using it was a
real hassle and it could take more than an hour
to do it, and so a lot of astronauts aboard
the Skylab space station chose not to use it. So
the crew aboard the I s S instead of a shower,
they use a rentless shampoo for their hair, and they
(37:47):
use a little bit of liquid soap and some water
to do a simple sort of sponge bath and use
towels to wipe off the larger globules of water, and
and air flow system evaporate rates excess water. That also
makes it really cold when you're done with your shower.
By the way, it's like when you're sweating and your
sweat evaporates and it cools you down. Well, the air
(38:09):
flow system cools you down pretty quickly because the water
is evaporating off your skin and pulling heat from your body. Well,
that water then gets collected by the water reclamation system
to Some crew might also use disposable tallet's as part
of their hygiene to help, you know, clean themselves, and
that also means that you have to attend to brushing
your teeth. Astronauts typically get to take whatever brand of
(38:33):
toothpaste they prefer, although depending on the time, sometimes they
just end up sharing a communal toothpaste. So you're kind
of stuck with whatever happens to be up there. But
there are no faucets or taps or running water aboard
the I s S. So two brush your teeth, you
would get a pouch that would you could fill with water.
The pouch has a straw extending out from the pouch,
(38:57):
and the straw has a clamp on it, so you
would open up the clamp and squeeze out a little
ball of water. Because again you're in microgravity, so the
water forms a little ball. You could wet your toothbrush.
Toothbrush just sucks that water right into the bristles, put
a little toothpaste on your toothbrush, and then you would
brush your teeth as normal. But where do you spit
the toothpaste when you're done, Well, you don't you swallow it?
(39:20):
Maybe then you want some breakfast, and you would go
over to the kitchen area of the galley area UH
in one of the crew habitats, and you would grab
your food and heat it up. You might do this
with a pouch of food that you then insert into
a system that injects hot water into the pouch and
thus rehydrates otherwise dehydrated food. There's other types of food
(39:43):
where you don't need to do the rehydration. Instead, you
use a warmer, a food warmer, a little oven essentially
that heats the food up. And there's a decent variety
of food up there, from eggs to waffles to oatmeal.
Food tends to stick to the utensils you use, and
because you're in microgravity, you don't have to worry about
the food falling off of them, so even if you
(40:04):
turn your spoon upside down, the oatmeal typically stays in
the spoon. UH. There's also no actual bread because bread
has a tendency to form crumbs, which would float around
and potentially gum stuff up aboard the I s s.
So generally speaking, rather than bread, the crew typically uses tortillas. Uh.
Some foods like fruits can be eaten just as they
are on Earth, and others, like I said, have to
(40:26):
have the special preparation. If you need salt or pepper,
you apply that in liquid form because again you have
no gravity, so you can't sprinkle a little particles anywhere
that would just float around and get into stuff. So
salt and pepper come in liquid condiment form, kind of
like ketchup and mustard, And after eating you would need
to toss your rubbish away so that doesn't just float around.
(40:49):
Now you would likely start your work day, so you
would likely work on one of several active experiments aboard
the station. Some of these might be controlled from the ground,
but you might need to endure them to see how
they're doing. Others might need your active involvement. You might
also spend some time taking part in medical experiments, all
of which are meant to gather more information about the
(41:10):
effects of space on the human body, obviously stuff we
need to know for the future of space travel. You
might also perform some maintenance tasks aboard the station in
order to keep it operational and clean. That can include
stuff like replacing filters or loading up a cargo ship
with rubbish to offload it from the station, that kind
of thing. In that work day, you would also have
(41:31):
two and a half hours of exercise scheduled. UH. This
is needed to counteract the effects of space that can
lead to stuff like muscle and bone loss. Your body
would actually reabsorb those tissues in a way. Your body
is eating your muscle and bone, so you have to
have exercise to counteract those effects. This exercise includes stuff
(41:52):
like running on a treadmill, or using an exercise bike,
or lifting weights. But Jonathan, I hear you say you
and have gravity to deal with. How does a treadmill
or weights? How do those work well? With the treadmill,
you're held in place by essentially bungee cords, like you
have a harness that holds you down against the treadmill. Uh.
(42:13):
And the treadmill, at least one of them is on
the wall of one of the modules, and you're typically
facing earth as you run, which is kind of neat.
The weights are more like pneumatic systems where you've got
like a platform and a bar almost like a weight bar,
and you have these pneumatic tubes that end up creating resistance.
(42:34):
So you do various exercises. Some of them are like squats,
some of them are like curls, uh, And it's all
in how you're positioning yourself on this platform and using
this bar and using the pneumatic resistance so that you're
working against that, because obviously weights and micro gravity wouldn't
mean much. They would have a lot of mass, but
(42:56):
you know, they wouldn't quote unquote way anything you would
have moment intem to deal with because you have mass
and acceleration, but you wouldn't have weight, so resistance is
more important in that sense. Of course, then you would
have lunch during the day and at the evening you
would have dinner. You would also have some free time
worked into your schedule. NASA learned early on that if
(43:18):
they did not allow astronauts free time, that their performance
and morale quickly deteriorated, and free time was absolutely necessary.
So that gets worked into your schedule so that you're
not just constantly tending to you know, your hygiene or
working out or working at an experiment. Okay, we're just
about ready to wrap up on space stations. But before
(43:39):
we get to that, let's take one more quick break.
Lots of the crew have said over the years that
their favorite thing to do in their free time would
be to look out a window back at Earth and
the space station orbits are fast enough that crew can
watch a sunset or unrise every forty five minutes or so,
(44:02):
which is pretty amazing. Astronauts also get weekends off, though
you know, they might have to do some maintenance stuff
here and there on weekends, but otherwise they get to
be a little leisurely. They can watch movies, they can
read books, they might play games, they might play with toys,
they might play pranks on each other. Uh. Apparently they
occasionally do prank phone calls back down to Earth from
(44:24):
the space station, which I think is awesome. Uh. And
they do talk to their families. They get about once
a week they get a chance to chat with folks
back on Earth besides the you know, regular communications with
like ground control. Now, at the end of the day,
it's time to go to bed, except there aren't actually beds.
It's more like little sleeping chambers. They kind of look
(44:46):
like padded phone booths. If you happen to remember what
phone booths look like. Uh. And inside these booths, there's
like a sleeping bag tied to the wall. Typically the
bag has a little arm slits worked into it, so
you would get into your pj's, you go into your
sleeping chamber, you know, your phone booth thing, and you
would climb into your little sleeping bag and zip it
(45:06):
up and put your arms through the arm slits, and
like I said, you're tethered to the wall so that
you don't just bump around as you sleep. The chamber
also has little doors, so you can close the doors.
You've got privacy and your little tiny you know phone
booth of a bed bedroom. Uh, you can have like
a computer in there, so you could do a little work,
or you could watch something on the computer if you liked,
(45:29):
or you could just drift off to sleep, where upon
your arms would lift up in front of you, kind
of like your Frankenstein's monster, and you can totally just
you know, relax, and you don't have to worry about anything, Like,
you don't need anything to support you because again you're
in microgravity, so you don't need a pillow, you don't
need anything like that. You just you're just floating in place, sleeping.
(45:50):
Crew get eight hours scheduled for sleep on each mission day. Now,
let's talk about the future of the I S S.
While Russia has just had no could join the r
OS section of the station, and there's another module that's
scheduled to launch before the end of this year. The
current agreement for the I S S between Russia and
the other partners, in fact between all the partners expires
(46:13):
in twenty twenty four. Now, there have been some talks
from Russia that have indicated that the country is prepared
to cease participation in the space station upon citing, in
part sanctions that Americans, you know, the American government has
leveled against Russia as one of the reasons for that. Subsequently, however,
(46:35):
Russia has backed off from that kind of rhetoric, so
the future of the I S S remains uncertain. There's
also been some concern that some sections of the I
S S, particularly the original modules, the Russian ones, are
well beyond their projected lifespan and they're getting a little
too old to rely upon. Russian engineer Vladimir Solovyov has
(46:58):
said that around eight of the in flight systems in
the r OS are at the end of their service period,
and he has warned that there could be irreparable failures
to follow now. As I mentioned in the previous episode,
the oldest modules in the r O S followed a
Soviet design that directly incorporated equipment into the station structure itself,
(47:21):
meaning it's impossible to replace those components. They are part
of the station, so when they break, you have to
repair them or you gotta do without. You can't replace them.
The US takes a much different approach. The U S
takes a if it breaks, we can replace it kind
of approach. Meanwhile, various parties in the International Agreement are
hoping to extend the I S S experiment to eight now.
(47:44):
Whether or not the station will make it that far
remains to be seen, but there are a lot of
engineers who have said that they believe they can make
the goal of operating into eight maybe even a little
bit further, maybe as far as twenty uh maybe even
more than that. The Axiom modules that are proposed to
connect to the I S S starting next year could
(48:06):
potentially separate from the I S S at the end
of the older space station's service, and then the Axiom
station could operate as its own standalone commercial space station. Likewise,
there's been talk that the Knaka module could detach from
the I S S and reposition to join a new
Russian space station. The other plans for a Russian Russian
(48:29):
space stations say that all components would be made specifically
for that station. That seems to be contradictory. At the
end of the I S S service, the station will
be cleared out and then de orbited. It will likely
be the last US backed space station, with future stations
being commercial enterprises. The NASA will likely form partnerships with
so that the agency can make use of the facilities
(48:51):
for future experiments. And there's one other space station I
need to quickly mention before we sign off. This year,
China launched a module called tiaton a h the first
of three modules for a space station named tian Gong.
This module is a habitation module a crew habitat module.
The other two are lab modules, which China plans to
(49:12):
launch and join to tian Hay next year. One crew
has already visited tian Hay. They did so earlier this summer.
Three Chinese astronauts visited briefly and uh, yeah, they prepared
it for future missions that will build it out as
a full space station. So we do have another one
up there, and there's some plans for different commercial ones
(49:33):
potentially in the future, but obviously I can't really say
much about them now. They're in the planning stages. And
as we have learned in this series, if nothing else,
you can't plan on anything as being absolute. There's always
wiggle room in these things. And that's it. That's it
for this this round up about space stations. I'm gonna
move on to different topics. So I hope you've enjoyed
(49:55):
this series of episodes about the evolution of space station
over the years. It's really interesting. It's a lot more
haphazard than I originally thought, Like I just didn't realize
how delicate the whole process is. Like the station itself
is incredibly resilient, but the path to getting there was
(50:19):
fraught with challenges. And uh, if you have suggestions for
topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff,
please reach out to me. The best way to do
that is over on Twitter. The handle we use is
text stuff h s W and I'll talk to you
again really soon. Text Stuff is an i heart Radio production.
(50:46):
For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
He there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host
job in Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart
Radio and love all things tech. And today we are
going to try and finally wrap up our look at
the International Space Station and this series of episodes about
(00:27):
space stations in general. Though you know there's going to
be some stuff that obviously I just won't touch on,
because I mean, you could do a full mini series
that lasts half a year talking about this and only
barely scratch the surface. Anyway. In our previous episode in
this series, I talked about how the International Space Station
(00:49):
or I s S formed out of both the struggling
Russian space program and NASA's attempts to create a US
led space station along with Europe, Japan and the contributing
toward that, and we learned about some of the modules
that bake up the space station. We also talked about
how the construction on the I S S was put
(01:10):
on hold in the wake of the Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy,
and how the station has two main sections. There's one
that's the Russian Orbital Segment or R O S and
the other is the U s Orbital Segment or U
S O S. Alright, so just a few more modules
to talk about before we get up to date. So
(01:30):
in NASA sent up a module called Leonardo aboard the
Space Shuttle Discovery. Leonardo is primarily used as a storage module.
And you might say, well, storage for what, And it's
pretty much everything from spare parts to rubbish too, you know, waste.
(01:50):
Oh and in case you're wondering if this is the
only Ninja turtle to be associated with the I S S,
it is not. The Italian Space Agency built through multi
purpose Logistics modules or mp l ms, and they were
named Leonardo, Donna Tello, and Rafaelo. And these were designed
(02:10):
to be pressurized containers that would be nestled in the
Space Shuttle cargo bay and they would be used to
transmit you know, cargo like scientific experiments and supplies to
the I S S. But Leonardo got modified to become
a permanent storage module attached to the International Space Station
and the Donna Tello one never launched at all. Rafaello, however,
(02:35):
was used in the final Shuttle mission to the Space station.
Leonardo originally docked with Unity you know, the node on
the earth facing port, the Nadier Point UH In late
February two eleven and the crew of the space station
relocated Leonardo and connected it to the forward facing port
(02:56):
of Tranquility. Because keep in mind, the space station as modular,
so you can do that. You can undock certain modules
and redock them elsewhere in order to make room for
new stuff. Now, at that point, Leonardo also became a
place where astronauts can go to take you know, sponge baths.
The main toilet facilities for the U S O S
(03:17):
part of the station are in Tranquility, the Tranquility node,
and now Leonardo is attached to Tranquility, so it kind
of was expanding their area where they could do, you know,
personal hygiene. So Leonardo went up in the winter of
that summer. In July, NASA retired the space Shuttle program.
(03:37):
The final mission was STS one five that was with
the Space Shuttle Atlantis. This was the one that carried
rafael O to the I S S and delivered supplies
and parts up to the space station, and that would
be the end of the shuttle bringing major components up.
But there's still a couple of things we can mention
before we wrap up on modules. So in the spa
(04:00):
ACEX unscrewed Dragon space capsule, so in other words, you know,
no people aboard this one. This was called by NASA
a Commercial Orbital Transportation Services UH spacecraft or a COTS
spacecraft c o t S. It docked with the International
Space Station. Space X would become an alternative to relying
(04:20):
solely on the Russians to get materials up to the
I S S. And I've done several episodes either directly
about SpaceX or involving SpaceX in the past, so we're
not going to go down the entire rabbit hole here.
It's it's enough for you know, another series of episodes.
But the important part is that NASA now was able
(04:40):
to have an alternative because otherwise they had to rely
on Russian spacecraft at that point, because NASA no longer
had the crew spacecraft or launch vehicles that would be
necessary to make trips up to the station. Now that
wasn't necessarily according to plan. I should add NASA had
a different space flight program that was in plans UH,
(05:02):
and it was meant to pick up where the Space
Shuttle program would leave off, plus go a bit further.
This was called the Constellation program, and the program had
a couple of different important goals. One was to complete
the construction of the International Space Station, so you know,
build launch vehicles capable of bringing payloads up to space
that would help complete the I s S. But another
(05:24):
was to send a human crew to the Moon by
and the third was to eventually send human astronauts to Mars. Well,
you know, that goal should tell you that things did
not go as planned, because obviously we have not gone
back to the Moon and um. Anyway, the Constellation program
included plans for a few different launch vehicles. Uh These
(05:45):
were the Areas one, which was meant to launch payloads
mostly into orbit, and then the Arias five, which it
was a heavy lift launch vehicle design capable of sending
stuff much further out than just you know, low Earth orbit.
And the journey to this plan in itself was a
bumby one for reasons that I've talked about in this
series before. Namely, you know, NASA's big projects are somewhat
(06:08):
subjected to the whims of whomever happens to be in
charge at the time, and that changes fairly regularly with
changes in presidential administrations. And that is not great for stability.
NASA is also subject to budgets that are awarded to
the agency by Congress, and in fact, just the selection
(06:28):
of the aria's design in itself involves the story of
different people coming into the picture and tossing out what
had come before and saying no, no, no, no, no,
let's do it this way instead. Now, in addition to
to those launch vehicles, NASA planned a new spacecraft that
could carry crew members up to the I S S.
(06:48):
This would be a capsule style spacecraft, not a shuttle,
but a capsule in some ways similar to the old
Apollo capsules in the late sixties and early seventies, but
this wouldn't be larger. It would be able to hold
more crew up to six people in fact, compared to Apollos,
you know three. And it was called the Crew Exploration Vehicle,
(07:09):
and later on it would evolve into the spacecraft called Oriyan. Now,
the Constellation program would end up getting the ACTS under
the administration of President Barack Obama. Obama cited lots of
issues like the fact that the the program wasn't on
schedule and it was over budget. Pretty much always happens
(07:29):
in the space industry. You know, there are a lot
of political reasons for this, that it was not his
administration that proposed the Constellation program, so there were a
lot of different factors that led into this, but ultimately
admit that Constellation was no more. However, the Orion spacecraft
survived that and it still remains part of NASA's Artemus program,
(07:52):
you know, the one that is supposed to take astronauts
back to the Moon by but probably no earlier than
at the point. Three Orion spacecraft have been built so far,
with a planned test flight to happen later this year
December potentially, though we'll quite possibly see that get pushed
to two. Also, part of that test is to test
(08:16):
out a new launch vehicle a k a. A new rocket.
This one is called the Space Launch System or s
L S now. After the cancelation of Constellation, which is
a fun thing to say, but not a fun thing
in general, NASA went back to the drawing board and
began to focus on a super heavy lift launch vehicle.
This would become the s L S which replaced not
(08:38):
just the Areas one in Areas five rockets, but it
also replaced a separate super heavy lift vehicle proposal that
was called Jupiter. Uh. That one was not technically part
of Constellation, it was part of a separate, parallel program.
But yeah, that one got the AX too, So SLS
(09:00):
would effectively replace areas in Jubiter and this, you know,
all this bit I'm talking about here is a bit
of a tangent from the Space Station, I realized, but
I figured it was important to talk about how NASA
was attempting to close the gap in operations once they
got to the end of the Space Shuttle program. The
plan was to have a continuous means of accessing the
(09:22):
I S S without relying on the Russians, but it
just didn't work out. There are some critics, including people
who previously worked on the SLS design, who say that
NASA is going to have to just accept that the
future is one in which the agency depends upon commercial
launch vehicles like SpaceX's Falcon heavy rockets and UH and
(09:45):
to to do that instead of trying to operate their
own because it's going to be less expensive in the
long run, and these budget issues are going to continue
to be a barrier for NASA, and that perhaps even
continuing to develop the sl S is um not wise
(10:06):
in other words, like like it's just you just can't
fund it so that it doesn't make sense to keep
doing it. But so far NASA is still on that track.
And also, I should add that's just what those critics say.
I'm not saying that that's definitively the case. I certainly
can't speak with any level of expertise over whether or
(10:27):
not it makes sense. In the the there were new
materials being sent up to the space station, including an
experimental inflatable module called the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module or
BEAM b E a M. Yeah, this is a space module.
(10:49):
On the I S s that it's it's made of fabric,
it's got a fabric hull, and it's from the Bigelow
Aerospace Company, which was named after its founder, Robert Bigelow.
He as a multimillionaire sometimes billionaire depending on you know,
the time, and he made most of his money in
commercial real estate, but he really wanted to create an
(11:10):
aerospace company. He has this, you know, big interest in
space travel. He also has a big interest in things
like UFOs. Anyway, the BEAM module is part of Bigelow's
bigger plan to create an inflatable habitats for various space missions,
including habitats that could be used on the Moon or
on Mars. Now, the beam module hitched a ride on
(11:33):
a SpaceX capsule or SpaceX launch vehicle, i should say,
and it made it into orbit and crews connected it
to the I S S on a port on the
Tranquility module. Then they tried to inflate it, but they
found the first time that was taking more pressure to
do so than they were expecting. Uh, and the module
(11:53):
was not expanding at the right rate, and they figured
that maybe the problem was that it had been folded
up in its compact shape a little longer than was expected.
There were delays in launch, which meant that this this
uh inflatable habitat was compressed longer than it was intended
(12:14):
to be. And uh so they tried a second time
and they got it working, and they later were able
to pressurize it and reach equilibrium with the internal space
station pressure, which is right around one atmosphere. And yeah,
astronauts have actually gone into this inflated module and they've
done work there which blows my mind. I mean, it's
(12:35):
a fabric module, but clearly it's an air tight fabric module,
and lots of tests were done before anyone set foot
figuratively speaking, inside of it. Now. The company has also
made a mock up of an inflatable space station called
B three three zero. That's a reference to the fact
that it expands out to allow for an internal volume
(12:59):
of three cubic meters um, and it starts off with
a volume of fifty cubic meters so it has quite
a bit of expansion. Now. Obviously, an inflatable space station
would have some really incredible advantages because you could design
much larger modules and not worry about it not fitting
(13:19):
on a launch vehicle because you know, on Earth you
could have this as a deflated module, so it's really
compact and ready to go up in space. Once in space,
you inflate it just like the beam did and expand
it out to its full volume in space, and using
special materials like kevlar, you can create a fabric hull
(13:39):
that is resistant to stuff like micro meteoroids. You know,
those impacts can be disastrous if you don't have, you know,
armor against them. They also can be effective to shield
against stuff like cosmic radiation. The B three three zero
mock up does have a disadvantage. There are no windows
in it, because creating a transparent material with the right
(14:02):
structural integrity that can also be compressed along with this
fabric habitat is really tricky, and so the mock up
instead has curved displays mounted on the inside walls of
the space station. So presumably, if you were to have
a real deployment of one of these in orbit, you
would mount cameras on the exterior of your space station
(14:25):
and then feed that camera view into displays that are
mounted on the interior walls. So you don't have a window,
you would have a view screen kind of like you know,
the bridge of the Enterprise. Now, while we do not
yet have inflatable moon habitats or space stations, the beam
module showed that the concept works. Astronauts have tested the
(14:47):
air quality in the module. They've installed various components inside it.
Uh NASA says it's monitored a few likely micro meteoroid
collisions with the whole of the beam module. The whole
has weathered those admirably simil early. It appears to be
at least as effective as the rest of the station
with regard to protecting against cosmic radiation, So that's good.
(15:07):
It was intended to be a relatively short term experiment,
but it's still up there today and it might remain
there for the foreseeable future. The I s S crew
actually accessed Beam as recently as September one. The crew
had a few things to do with Beam, including prepping
cargo for a return trip to Earth aboard a future
(15:28):
cargo Dragon mission from SpaceX, and they also tried but
failed to fix some malfunctioning wireless temperature sensors that were
part of Beam, but they couldn't get them working now. Sadly,
Bigelow Aerospace may have already seen its last days before
we could ever get an inflatable space station, at least
(15:49):
from that company. In the company shut down its production
facilities due to COVID, and Robert Bigelow has subsequently said
that it is unlikely to reopen. So Beam might be
the first and only Bigelow inflatable space module, But the
concept has been proven to be at least viable, so
(16:09):
whether Bigelow comes back and continues that work or someone
else does, um that might be a future space station mainstay.
In late twenty SpaceX brought an airlock called Bishop up
to the I S S. It is now attached to
tranquility and rather than provide astronauts a way to conduct
(16:30):
extra vehicular activities you know spacewalks like other airlocks, this
one is really meant to allow the crew to deploy
stuff like small satellites like CubeSats and stuff, and maybe
even rubbish to jettison rubbish in the future. The airlock
received commercial funding, and you know, it really was a
necessity because the company that funded it, called nano Rax,
(16:54):
had this agreement with NASA to use the I S
S to deploy satellites. But the I S S is
a pretty busy place and there are a lot of
different countries using the I S S as a test
bed for numerous experiments, and so the busy schedule meant
that the limited airlocks were already busy with all these experiments.
(17:16):
So if nano Rex wanted to deploy these satellites, that
really needed another airlock. So they made one and then
send it up to the I S S. And finally,
for now, at least we have Naka in a u
k that's a Russian word that means science. This long
delayed module was supposed to go up before, like way
(17:37):
back in two thousand seven, but various delays forced that
date to slip all the way up to this year.
Those delays included some serious technical issues, such as the
discovery in that the fuel system aboard Knaka had contamination
in it in the form of metallic dust, and also
(17:57):
they found leaks in the fuel system, which necess citated
lengthy repairs. And later still they found more fuel system
leaks in and that meant more delays. Plus there are
all those delays due to budgetary and political issues in Russia.
But Russia finally launched it on July one. It would
take the place of the old Piers docking module, the
(18:20):
p I R S Russian docking module, the one that
was originally opposite the Poisk module so birthed to the
Vezda module, and that means that components on Naka were
already pretty old before it ever saw service as part
of the I S S, which might have contributed to
a scary situation which we will talk about after this
(18:42):
quick break. So the I S S crew undocked the
Piers module from the Vesta after a few delays, and
then the old module would enter it's the orbiting path
and would eventually re enter the atmosphere and break apart
over the Pacific Ocean. The NAKA module docked in the
(19:08):
place that Pierce had been, and it did so on
July using an automatic docking procedure, and all that went,
you know, fairly well, despite some delays and a couple
of technical glitches, but nothing critical. But then a few
hours later NAKA had a software glitch, and that glitch
gave a direct command to the modules thrusters to fire,
(19:28):
which caused the I S S to rotate like a lot.
It flipped one and a half times, and effectively it
ended up upside down over Earth in the process. I
guess you could say the I S S developed a
bit of an attitude problem, kind of like a surly teenager.
According to Zebulin Scoville, who apart from having an amazing name,
(19:53):
is also a NASA engineer. He was present when this happened.
Naka is apparently trying to pull away from the station
that it had just docked with. He didn't know that immediately.
In fact, when he first saw an alert come in,
it was just a couple of lines, and he thought
it was perhaps just a sensor error, But then he
(20:15):
checked the video monitors and saw that the thrusters were
active and that this was the real deal now. Initially,
as NASA was getting a handle on what was going on,
the agency reported that the attitude of the I S
shifted only by about forty five degrees, which is already
a lot, but it was incorrect. It was more like
five hundred forty degrees. Kind of crazy. NASA engineers had
(20:38):
no control over knockas thrusters. Only Russian ground control had
the ability to send a direct command to the knock
A module, and unfortunately, the space station was not in
line of sight with Russia. It would take another hour
before the I S S could potentially be in communication
range with Russian ground control. So NASA engineers responded by
(20:59):
working with the I S S crew and using other
thrusters on the International Space Station, specifically on this Vezda
module and on a progress cargo ship that was docked
with the I S S. In order to counteract naka's error.
The station needed to flip a hundred eighty degrees to
get back into the correct attitude, and it took a
(21:19):
lot of work to get it all done. At The
final orbital correction took place on August twenty one. Remember,
the initial uh thrust R misfire was at the end
of July, and fortunately no disaster occurred, but it must
have been pretty darn tense. Now that being said, Scoville
asserted that the crew were never really in danger, that
(21:40):
the situation, while unusual, was not catastrophic, and that the
process of turning the station back to its normal attitude
was so gradual that the crew aboard the I S
S couldn't even detect that the station was was turning,
that it was moving like that. Naka's main purpose is
to serve as a science lab for the Russians, and
this is interesting because it's the first Russian module that's
(22:02):
actually really dedicated to scientific experiments beyond stuff like E
V A S and it just became part of the
I S S. So, after more than twenty years of
being an orbit, the r OS finally has its primary
laboratory in place. Uh NACA is also going to serve
as the docking port for another module in the near future,
(22:23):
assuming everything goes as planned. This is the us Lavoy
Module or Pretty Shell Module. It's scheduled to launch in
November of this year, and dockwood. Naka's other port you know,
the port that's not connected to the Selvezda and the
uh OS. Lavoy is also another docking module. This one
(22:44):
has the ability to dock with up to five other spacecraft,
so it increases the station's docking capacity. One important component
of NAKA came not from Russia but from the European
Space Agency or e s A. This is the European
Robotic Arm or e r A. This will be used
to help the docking procedures with Oslavoy once that connects
(23:08):
to NACO later this year. Again, assuming everything goes well,
potentially NAKA and Oslavoy might see some continued use beyond
the lifespan of the I S S, but I'll talk
about that more towards the end of this episode. Then
we have some other proposed modules that are supposed to
join the I S S in the near future. These
(23:29):
modules come not from NASA but from a commercial space
company called Axiom Space. So you've no doubt heard many
times in this series. Budget issues are a constant challenge
with NASA. It's also a big challenge in Russia. The
agency has thus chosen to partner with commercial space companies,
not just to provide transportation to and from the I
(23:51):
S S, but also to build onto the existing space
station itself. The plan is for Axiom to build and
deploy several modules that will connect to the Harmony node
aboard the I S S. These include a node module
so very similar to Harmony and Unity and Tranquility. This
will act as kind of an adapter between the U
(24:12):
S O S part of the space station and the
Axiom Space part of it. Other modules will include one
with large windows to allow for spectacular views of Earth,
a crew habitat module, and a module dedicated to researching
manufacturing processes in space. And like Nauka and us LaVoi,
these Axiom modules could potentially have a life beyond that
(24:35):
of the I S S. Also, Axiom is planning on
sending non astronauts or commercial astronauts up into space, including
a reality TV series winner. I guess because Discovery has
planned a reality series called Who Wants to Be an Astronaut,
and the winner of that series will go up in
(24:56):
a future space X Dragon Cruel crew vessel up to
the Axiom section of the I S S. UH. They're
already taking applications for that, so you can check that
out if you're interested. I Uh, I did not apply. Now,
this is not the first time that non astronauts will
have visited the space station. In fact, that has happened
in the past already, only a handful of times, but
(25:19):
it has happened. So to talk about this we have
to dial the clock back quite a bit. Now. It's
the late nineteen nineties and the Soviet Union had collapsed,
the Russia was having trouble funding its space agency, and
it was having a lot of trouble maintaining the Mere
space station. A private company called Mere Core took shape
(25:41):
and took charge of the space station. So this one
had private funding and was trying to turn Mere into
a commercial space station instead of a state backed one.
It even flew a mission up there after. Mir had
already been left unoccupied for several months, and the idea
was that Mere Corps would sell trips to the space
station to wealthy people who wanted to go to space,
(26:01):
and then use some of that money to offset the
maintenance and operation costs of Mirror uh be. But that
didn't really work out because those costs of operation proved
to be considerable and there just weren't enough investors jumping
on board to make this a viable business, so the
company really had no choice but to allow mir to
(26:22):
de orbit. However, the company had sold a ticket to
a guy named Dennis Tito to go up to Mirror,
and rather than you know, refund that money, Miracorps was
able to partner with a company in the United States
called Space Adventures Limited to secure permission for Tito to
instead visit the International Space Station if he went up
(26:44):
on a Soyo's Russian space capsule. Now, Tito himself was
no stranger to the space industry. He had worked for
the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that's a NASA field center, but
he also was not a trained astronaut. However, the deal
meant he could board a Soyo's spacecraft, and in late
April of two thousand one, he traveled to the I
(27:05):
S S and became the first person to pay for
a ticket to visit the I S S. And as such,
he is sometimes referred to as a space tourist. I
am told that they hate this title. They don't like
space tourists because a lot of them had to go
through training and had to actually be participants in various
experiments and stuff, so they were working up there too.
(27:28):
But they're widely referred to as space tourists, and he
was the first. The reported cost of the trip was
a whopping twenty million dollars. But you know, the only
other way to get up there would be to be
an official astronaut or cosmonaut or maybe be selected as
a payload specialist, which required a you know, less intense
training period. So it's a pretty small and elite group
(27:52):
that he joined. Mark Shuttleworth a South African businessman who
also has connections to tech and that his company, Canonical,
is responsible for developing the Ubuntu operating system. Uh he
followed suit. He also visited the I S S in
two thousand two, also aboard a Soyo's capsule. But then
(28:12):
in two thousand three we had the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.
The United States put the entire space Shuttle program on
hold for more than two years, and at that point,
the Soyo's capsules became the only way up and back
from the I S S. So Russia thus put a
hold on space tourism for that time. Since the capsule space,
(28:33):
you know, the space inside the capsule was critical for
servicing the I S S. The tourism program came back
on track in two thousand five with Gregory Olsen, and
then in two thousand six, uh A Neuche and sorry
went up to become a space tourist. Next up was
Charles Simoni, who actually went up twice. He went up
(28:53):
once in two thousand seven, and he did it again
in two thousand nine, so you must have loved it.
In between those visits was guy. I actually know someone
I've talked to several times, Richard Garriott. Now, if you've
been listening to this series from the beginning, you know
that Richard's father, Owen Garriott, was an astronaut who was
part of the sky Lab missions. So Owen Garriott had
(29:15):
been aboard Space Station's back in the seventies. Richard Garriott,
known to a lot of gamers as Lord British, spent
a good deal of his personal fortune to visit the
space station, um, you know, without going through the entire
astronaut process. The seventh and last of the space tourists
of that era was Guy Lalleberte, who visited the I
(29:41):
S S in two thousand nine, And this was towards
the end of the Space Shuttle program, and that meant
that once again the Saya's capsule would become the only
way that astronauts and cosmonauts could go to and from
the I S S. And because of that, Russia once
again put an end to its space tourism business. So
for many years that is the end of that. In
(30:01):
twenty nineteen, NASA announced it would entertain the idea of
tourism to the I S S, using you know, commercial
UH space companies to take people to and from the
space station. UH And, as I mentioned, the axiom section
of the I S S once it becomes reality, will
(30:21):
include tourism as part of the commercial activities aboard that
part of the space station. But the vast majority of
visitors the I S S have either been trained astronauts, cosmonauts,
or what NASA calls payload specialists. Now, as that name implies,
the people who fit the category of payload specialists are
those who have expertise with a specific experiment or a
(30:42):
piece of equipment that is sent up to the I
S S. They might be employees of some of the
private companies that NASA contracts with, or they might be
leading scientists in a specific field. They typically have a
much shorter stay aboard the I S S than you know,
other crew members, and they don't have to train quite
as much before they joined the International Space Station. In total,
(31:07):
more than two d forty people have been to the
I S S since it came online. More than a
hundred fifty of those came from the United States, so
the US is in the lead by far. Hack Only
nine other people from the America continents have been to
the I S S. Eight of them were from Canada
(31:27):
and one of them was from Brazil. Every other person
from this part of the world, from the America's both
north and south, came from the United States. Russia is
in second place, with fifty people from Russia and going
to the I S S, and then fewer than twenty
came from Europe. Some of those folks have actually been
multiple times. In fact, a lot of them have visited
(31:49):
the I S S at least twice, not quite as
many have been three times. A few like Mark Kelly,
have been there four times, and there are two cause
minots who have been to the International Space Station five times.
Those two are Yuri Malenchinko and Fyodor your Chicken. So
Malanchinko's career was truly astronomical pun intended He visited mir
(32:14):
as part of the MERE sixteen crew in nine. He
was part of the STS one oh six Space Shuttle
Atlantis crew in two thousand, which marked his first visit
to the I S. S. In two thousand three, he
went back to the I S. S. And while he
was there he got married to his fiancee at Katarina Dimitrieva.
(32:35):
It was a long distance ceremony because she happened to
be in Texas while he was in orbit. Malanchinko's time
in space collectively amounts to an astonishing eight hundred twenty
seven days, with nearly thirty five hours of that time
being spent in extra vehicular activities or space walks. Now,
that is incredible, but it's still more than fifty days
(32:58):
shy of the career wreck that's held by UH Gennedy Padalka,
And I apologize. I know I'm butchering these names and
that's on me. But anyway, Padalka has more than eight
d seventy eight days logged in space in total. UH
and he's also been to the International Space Station, but
only four times. Right, he hasn't been the five times
(33:21):
UH as for Fyodor. He's also had a stellar career also,
pun intended. His time in space amounts to nearly six
seventy three days total across multiple missions, including some aboard
Space Shuttle missions, and he racked up more spacewalk hours
than Malinchiko. He had fifty nine hours of spacewalks. That's incredible. Now,
(33:42):
when we come back, we'll talk a bit about life
aboard the I S S and what the future holds
for the station, and maybe a couple of other bits
of information. But first let's take this quick break. So
let's talk about what a typical day would be like
(34:03):
aboard the International Space Station. First of all, the space
station climate control keeps the station at about seventy two
degrees fahrenheit, which is twenty two point to celsius, and
that's all year round, winter, summer, spring, and fall. The
atmosphere aboard the I S S is very much like
that on Earth, and that it's mostly nitrogen around and
(34:24):
then oxygen at around. A mineral called zeolite acts as
a carbon dioxide scrubber uh c O two gets trapped
in poores that are in the zero lite mineral, and
then you just expose the zeolite to outer space and
all the carbon dioxide gets vented out into space, and
then you can use the zeolite again, so that keeps
(34:45):
the station habitable. You also have a water reclamation system
that can reclaim water from pretty much any waste source
and then filter it to the point where it becomes
drinkable water. Again, that includes everything from you know, the
water vapor you breathe out when you are breathing too,
(35:05):
the water you pee out when you're peeing, to the
water that is you know, used for a shower. All
of the sources of water get reclaimed, filtered, and reused. Okay,
so let's say that you are on the I S S.
You're in the U s OS segment the United States
(35:25):
run section for this example. You wake up. We'll talk
more about sleeping quarters in a second, and it's time
to tend to hygiene. Maybe the first thing you want
to do is visit the little Astronauts room. In other words,
you know you want to go to the toilet. Well,
space toilets are a little bit weird. For one thing,
they have restraints built into them so that you can
remain you know, attached to what is effectively the toilet seat.
(35:51):
After all, your in microgravity, so you need something to
keep you in place so that you know, you don't
have stuff floating around you. So the toilet has leg
restraints and it also has a fan system that creates
suction to pull waste away. As you go to the bathroom,
you position your posterior over a hole in the toilet seat.
(36:13):
Some of the astronauts actually prefer to lift the toilet
seat and position themselves directly over the hole that leads
down into a bag. So there is a bag set
down in the waist system. The fan draws the waist
into the bag, and after you're done, you seal the
bag shut and then you push the sealed bag into
the waist container that is below the toilet. And then,
(36:36):
you know, to be nice, you should put a brand
new bag in place uh in the toilet so that
the next person to use it doesn't have to, you know,
prepare it first. And then if for urine, you actually
have a hose and each astronaut has their own personal
little urine funnel that they attached to the hose and
the funnel goes, you know, over the relevant equipment and
(37:00):
of the astronaut that is, and then you get your
own little urine funnel. You know, it's a collector's item. Anyway,
this helps you get the p to go the right
way into the hose. And again you've got a fan
system that is sucking that you're in down the hose
into a wastewater tank where then it can go through
the reclamation system and get filtered and turned back into water. Now,
(37:23):
let's say that after you do this, you might want
to take a shower. Well, the Skylab space station had
an experimental shower in it, but using it was a
real hassle and it could take more than an hour
to do it, and so a lot of astronauts aboard
the Skylab space station chose not to use it. So
the crew aboard the I s S instead of a shower,
they use a rentless shampoo for their hair, and they
(37:47):
use a little bit of liquid soap and some water
to do a simple sort of sponge bath and use
towels to wipe off the larger globules of water, and
and air flow system evaporate rates excess water. That also
makes it really cold when you're done with your shower.
By the way, it's like when you're sweating and your
sweat evaporates and it cools you down. Well, the air
(38:09):
flow system cools you down pretty quickly because the water
is evaporating off your skin and pulling heat from your body. Well,
that water then gets collected by the water reclamation system
to Some crew might also use disposable tallet's as part
of their hygiene to help, you know, clean themselves, and
that also means that you have to attend to brushing
your teeth. Astronauts typically get to take whatever brand of
(38:33):
toothpaste they prefer, although depending on the time, sometimes they
just end up sharing a communal toothpaste. So you're kind
of stuck with whatever happens to be up there. But
there are no faucets or taps or running water aboard
the I s S. So two brush your teeth, you
would get a pouch that would you could fill with water.
The pouch has a straw extending out from the pouch,
(38:57):
and the straw has a clamp on it, so you
would open up the clamp and squeeze out a little
ball of water. Because again you're in microgravity, so the
water forms a little ball. You could wet your toothbrush.
Toothbrush just sucks that water right into the bristles, put
a little toothpaste on your toothbrush, and then you would
brush your teeth as normal. But where do you spit
the toothpaste when you're done, Well, you don't you swallow it?
(39:20):
Maybe then you want some breakfast, and you would go
over to the kitchen area of the galley area UH
in one of the crew habitats, and you would grab
your food and heat it up. You might do this
with a pouch of food that you then insert into
a system that injects hot water into the pouch and
thus rehydrates otherwise dehydrated food. There's other types of food
(39:43):
where you don't need to do the rehydration. Instead, you
use a warmer, a food warmer, a little oven essentially
that heats the food up. And there's a decent variety
of food up there, from eggs to waffles to oatmeal.
Food tends to stick to the utensils you use, and
because you're in microgravity, you don't have to worry about
the food falling off of them, so even if you
(40:04):
turn your spoon upside down, the oatmeal typically stays in
the spoon. UH. There's also no actual bread because bread
has a tendency to form crumbs, which would float around
and potentially gum stuff up aboard the I s s.
So generally speaking, rather than bread, the crew typically uses tortillas. Uh.
Some foods like fruits can be eaten just as they
are on Earth, and others, like I said, have to
(40:26):
have the special preparation. If you need salt or pepper,
you apply that in liquid form because again you have
no gravity, so you can't sprinkle a little particles anywhere
that would just float around and get into stuff. So
salt and pepper come in liquid condiment form, kind of
like ketchup and mustard, And after eating you would need
to toss your rubbish away so that doesn't just float around.
(40:49):
Now you would likely start your work day, so you
would likely work on one of several active experiments aboard
the station. Some of these might be controlled from the ground,
but you might need to endure them to see how
they're doing. Others might need your active involvement. You might
also spend some time taking part in medical experiments, all
of which are meant to gather more information about the
(41:10):
effects of space on the human body, obviously stuff we
need to know for the future of space travel. You
might also perform some maintenance tasks aboard the station in
order to keep it operational and clean. That can include
stuff like replacing filters or loading up a cargo ship
with rubbish to offload it from the station, that kind
of thing. In that work day, you would also have
(41:31):
two and a half hours of exercise scheduled. UH. This
is needed to counteract the effects of space that can
lead to stuff like muscle and bone loss. Your body
would actually reabsorb those tissues in a way. Your body
is eating your muscle and bone, so you have to
have exercise to counteract those effects. This exercise includes stuff
(41:52):
like running on a treadmill, or using an exercise bike,
or lifting weights. But Jonathan, I hear you say you
and have gravity to deal with. How does a treadmill
or weights? How do those work well? With the treadmill,
you're held in place by essentially bungee cords, like you
have a harness that holds you down against the treadmill. Uh.
(42:13):
And the treadmill, at least one of them is on
the wall of one of the modules, and you're typically
facing earth as you run, which is kind of neat.
The weights are more like pneumatic systems where you've got
like a platform and a bar almost like a weight bar,
and you have these pneumatic tubes that end up creating resistance.
(42:34):
So you do various exercises. Some of them are like squats,
some of them are like curls, uh, And it's all
in how you're positioning yourself on this platform and using
this bar and using the pneumatic resistance so that you're
working against that, because obviously weights and micro gravity wouldn't
mean much. They would have a lot of mass, but
(42:56):
you know, they wouldn't quote unquote way anything you would
have moment intem to deal with because you have mass
and acceleration, but you wouldn't have weight, so resistance is
more important in that sense. Of course, then you would
have lunch during the day and at the evening you
would have dinner. You would also have some free time
worked into your schedule. NASA learned early on that if
(43:18):
they did not allow astronauts free time, that their performance
and morale quickly deteriorated, and free time was absolutely necessary.
So that gets worked into your schedule so that you're
not just constantly tending to you know, your hygiene or
working out or working at an experiment. Okay, we're just
about ready to wrap up on space stations. But before
(43:39):
we get to that, let's take one more quick break.
Lots of the crew have said over the years that
their favorite thing to do in their free time would
be to look out a window back at Earth and
the space station orbits are fast enough that crew can
watch a sunset or unrise every forty five minutes or so,
(44:02):
which is pretty amazing. Astronauts also get weekends off, though
you know, they might have to do some maintenance stuff
here and there on weekends, but otherwise they get to
be a little leisurely. They can watch movies, they can
read books, they might play games, they might play with toys,
they might play pranks on each other. Uh. Apparently they
occasionally do prank phone calls back down to Earth from
(44:24):
the space station, which I think is awesome. Uh. And
they do talk to their families. They get about once
a week they get a chance to chat with folks
back on Earth besides the you know, regular communications with
like ground control. Now, at the end of the day,
it's time to go to bed, except there aren't actually beds.
It's more like little sleeping chambers. They kind of look
(44:46):
like padded phone booths. If you happen to remember what
phone booths look like. Uh. And inside these booths, there's
like a sleeping bag tied to the wall. Typically the
bag has a little arm slits worked into it, so
you would get into your pj's, you go into your
sleeping chamber, you know, your phone booth thing, and you
would climb into your little sleeping bag and zip it
(45:06):
up and put your arms through the arm slits, and
like I said, you're tethered to the wall so that
you don't just bump around as you sleep. The chamber
also has little doors, so you can close the doors.
You've got privacy and your little tiny you know phone
booth of a bed bedroom. Uh, you can have like
a computer in there, so you could do a little work,
or you could watch something on the computer if you liked,
(45:29):
or you could just drift off to sleep, where upon
your arms would lift up in front of you, kind
of like your Frankenstein's monster, and you can totally just
you know, relax, and you don't have to worry about anything, Like,
you don't need anything to support you because again you're
in microgravity, so you don't need a pillow, you don't
need anything like that. You just you're just floating in place, sleeping.
(45:50):
Crew get eight hours scheduled for sleep on each mission day. Now,
let's talk about the future of the I S S.
While Russia has just had no could join the r
OS section of the station, and there's another module that's
scheduled to launch before the end of this year. The
current agreement for the I S S between Russia and
the other partners, in fact between all the partners expires
(46:13):
in twenty twenty four. Now, there have been some talks
from Russia that have indicated that the country is prepared
to cease participation in the space station upon citing, in
part sanctions that Americans, you know, the American government has
leveled against Russia as one of the reasons for that. Subsequently, however,
(46:35):
Russia has backed off from that kind of rhetoric, so
the future of the I S S remains uncertain. There's
also been some concern that some sections of the I
S S, particularly the original modules, the Russian ones, are
well beyond their projected lifespan and they're getting a little
too old to rely upon. Russian engineer Vladimir Solovyov has
(46:58):
said that around eight of the in flight systems in
the r OS are at the end of their service period,
and he has warned that there could be irreparable failures
to follow now. As I mentioned in the previous episode,
the oldest modules in the r O S followed a
Soviet design that directly incorporated equipment into the station structure itself,
(47:21):
meaning it's impossible to replace those components. They are part
of the station, so when they break, you have to
repair them or you gotta do without. You can't replace them.
The US takes a much different approach. The U S
takes a if it breaks, we can replace it kind
of approach. Meanwhile, various parties in the International Agreement are
hoping to extend the I S S experiment to eight now.
(47:44):
Whether or not the station will make it that far
remains to be seen, but there are a lot of
engineers who have said that they believe they can make
the goal of operating into eight maybe even a little
bit further, maybe as far as twenty uh maybe even
more than that. The Axiom modules that are proposed to
connect to the I S S starting next year could
(48:06):
potentially separate from the I S S at the end
of the older space station's service, and then the Axiom
station could operate as its own standalone commercial space station. Likewise,
there's been talk that the Knaka module could detach from
the I S S and reposition to join a new
Russian space station. The other plans for a Russian Russian
(48:29):
space stations say that all components would be made specifically
for that station. That seems to be contradictory. At the
end of the I S S service, the station will
be cleared out and then de orbited. It will likely
be the last US backed space station, with future stations
being commercial enterprises. The NASA will likely form partnerships with
so that the agency can make use of the facilities
(48:51):
for future experiments. And there's one other space station I
need to quickly mention before we sign off. This year,
China launched a module called tiaton a h the first
of three modules for a space station named tian Gong.
This module is a habitation module a crew habitat module.
The other two are lab modules, which China plans to
(49:12):
launch and join to tian Hay next year. One crew
has already visited tian Hay. They did so earlier this summer.
Three Chinese astronauts visited briefly and uh, yeah, they prepared
it for future missions that will build it out as
a full space station. So we do have another one
up there, and there's some plans for different commercial ones
(49:33):
potentially in the future, but obviously I can't really say
much about them now. They're in the planning stages. And
as we have learned in this series, if nothing else,
you can't plan on anything as being absolute. There's always
wiggle room in these things. And that's it. That's it
for this this round up about space stations. I'm gonna
move on to different topics. So I hope you've enjoyed
(49:55):
this series of episodes about the evolution of space station
over the years. It's really interesting. It's a lot more
haphazard than I originally thought, Like I just didn't realize
how delicate the whole process is. Like the station itself
is incredibly resilient, but the path to getting there was
(50:19):
fraught with challenges. And uh, if you have suggestions for
topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff,
please reach out to me. The best way to do
that is over on Twitter. The handle we use is
text stuff h s W and I'll talk to you
again really soon. Text Stuff is an i heart Radio production.
(50:46):
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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Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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