Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
How do you keep score in aspace race? There are a few obvious
milestones early on, first person inorbit, for spacewalk, first to the
Moon. But after all those boxesare checked, where do we go Well,
the natural next step was to startliving in space and finding out just
how long you could stay up there. That means space stations, and if
(00:22):
we look at the evolution of humanhabitation in low Earth orbit, we can
get a pretty good idea of whodominated the past and who will take over
the future. The answers might surpriseyou. This is the space race.
Did you know that the first spacestation ever deployed was a Soviet design from
nineteen seventy one called Salu. Itwas actually a very impressive piece of hardware
(00:47):
at eighteen and a half metric tons, twenty meters in length, four meters
in diameter, and ninety nine cubicmeters in volume, so that's pretty big
even by modern standards. Now,we don't talk about this one very often
because there is a deeply tragic storyattached to it. The first and only
(01:07):
crew to ever visit the Salute onenever lived to tell the tale. The
three cosmonauts perished on the return tripwhen their Soyu's capsule depressurized, making them
also the first and only humans tohave died in space. The operation of
Salute one was terminated shortly after thestation was deorbited and burnt up in the
(01:27):
atmosphere on October eleventh, nineteen seventyone. A year later, the Soviets
tried again with a space station modulecalled DOS two, but this one was
lost due to an engine failure onthe Proton rocket, and it never reached
orbital velocity. The whole thing justfell into the ocean. One year after
(01:48):
that, the Soviets made their thirdattempt with Salute two. This one did
reach orbit, but quickly lost altitudecontrol and depressurized, leaving it to tumble
helplessly through space until its orbit decayedand the station burnt up in the atmosphere.
Undeterred, the Soviet Union launched yetanother space station module in nineteen seventy
three. This was originally intended tobe Saluted the third, but since a
(02:13):
flight control aer prevented the station fromreaching the correct orbital height, the Soviets
quickly renamed the mission to Cosmos fiveto five seven and pretended like it was
a regular satellite launch and not afailed space station deployment. A week later,
the remains fell from space and burntup in the atmosphere. Meanwhile,
through all of this, NASA hadbeen working on their own space station concept
(02:36):
named Skylab. With the Apollo programofficially brought to an end, NASA was
left with one excess Saturn five rocketjust kicking around. This incredibly humongous and
incredibly powerful machine was purpose built tosend heavy things to the Moon, but
engineers decided that the Saturn five couldbe retrofit to deploy one final and truly
(03:00):
the epic payload into low Earth orbita space station, and Skylab was one
hell of a space station. NASAhollowed out the S four B module of
the Saturn five, which would havetraditionally served as a third propulsion stage for
the translunar injection burn. The giantfuel tanks were converted into an orbital workshop
(03:20):
with an incredible six point six metersin diameter and fourteen point seven meters in
length. Then on top of that, NASA attached an airlock module and docking
adapter where the Apollo Space Telescope observatorywas mounted. Then an unused Apollo command
and Service module was docked at thefar end to provide power for the station.
(03:42):
Skylab was occupied for a combined totalof one hundred and seventy one days
across three crude missions from nineteen seventythree to nineteen seventy four, and it
easily holds up as one of themost amazing things ever launched into space.
There were lands to eventually use theSpace Shuttle to refurbish and reboost the station
(04:03):
to a higher orbit, but unfortunatelythe Shuttle wasn't ready in time, and
Skylab's orbit decayed to the point whereit finally hit the atmosphere and disintegrated in
nineteen seventy nine. Back in theSoviet Union, they were finally primed for
success. The real Salu three achievedorbit in July nineteen seventy four and was
(04:23):
successfully visited by the crew of Soyuzfourteen. This station was notable for being
the first spacecraft to include a gun. There was a twenty three millimeter aircraft
cannon attached to the station, andthe Soviets would be the first to ever
test fire a conventional weapon in space. Anyway. From there, the Soviets
(04:44):
had a pretty successful run with thesesingle module space stations from Salu three up
to Salute seven. But for theSoviets this was only a warm up act.
In nineteen eighty six, the worldsaw the deployment of the first ever
modular space station, which the Sovietsnamed Mir. You may be noticing a
trend here. While NASA did manageto deploy one very cool space station with
(05:08):
Skylab, it was an incredibly shortlived project and it marked the United States
one and only independent space station.We can see pretty clearly here that the
Soviets had essentially cornered the market onlong term habitation in low Earth orbit.
It took a decade to fully assemblethe seven module Mir station, which would
eventually reach a pressurized volume of threehundred and fifty cubic meters. Now,
(05:32):
something interesting happened over the time periodthat the station Mir was being constructed.
The Soviet Union collapsed. The fallof the Berlin Wall in nineteen eighty nine
marked the beginning of the end forthe Cold War, and now we enter
the period of the Russian space program. This era would bring a new found
(05:53):
cooperation between Western and Eastern superpowers.Now, instead of being engaged in a
space race, the Russians and Americanswere working together for the betterment of human
space exploration. Very positive star trekvibes were starting to come out, and
in nineteen ninety three, NASA's SpaceShuttle fleet began regular missions to the Mere
(06:14):
station. The Shuttle Atlantis even deliveredthe final docking module to Mirror in nineteen
ninety five. Now as much asNASA was helping out the Russians with the
use of their fancy space planes,the Americans were using this opportunity to learn
as much as they possibly could aboutmodular space stations and long term habitation in
microgravity, a subject where the UnitedStates had fallen massively behind. It was
(06:40):
in nineteen eighty four that President RonaldReagan originally directed NASA to build an international
space station within the next ten years, and obviously that never happened. So
when we finally arrive at the InternationalSpace Station that we all know so well
today, we can see that itshares a lot of resemblance with Russia's.
(07:00):
In fact, given everything that we'vejust learned, I don't think it's unfounded
to look at the ISS more likea Mere version two point zero, because
it's pretty clear where this design approachcame from It's also worth noting that the
first module of the ISS that wasdeployed in nineteen ninety eight was the Russian
Control Module. The Russian side ofthe station is responsible for the power and
(07:24):
propulsion of the ISS, and thefirst crew to reside on the ISS was
one American and two Russians who allarrived there on a Soyuz rocket launched from
the baikon Or Cosmodrome. Anyway,I find that all pretty interesting because growing
up in North America, we werepretty much led to believe that NASA was
really the leader in this whole InternationalSpace Station project, and it never really
(07:46):
occurred to me until right now thatthe full two decades of research and development
by the Soviets and Russians is whatreally laid the groundwork for the ISS,
and it probably never would have evenhappened without that. So there's an interesting
new perspect for you. The ISSis operated primarily by Ross, Cosmos and
NASA. The Russian Service module isresponsible for guidance, navigation, life support,
(08:09):
power and propulsion of the entire station, so it's pretty important, while
the NASA side of the station isfor operations, logistics, and research.
The other key players in the ISSare the European Space Agency and the japan
Aerospace Exploration Agency, each having theirown independent research modules, with the Japanese
(08:30):
Kibo becoming the single largest ISS module. It took three Space Shuttle missions to
get the entire lab into orbit.Following the completion of the ISS in the
early two thousands, there has beenonly one modular space station deployed to Earth
orbit, China's Tiangong the Heavenly Palace, with just three modules. The Tiangong
(08:52):
is a much smaller scale station thanthe ISS, and even contains slightly less
pressurized volume than Mirror, But theTiangong is a significant leap forward in space
station design and technology. If welook back from Salute to Skylab to Mirror
to ISS, we're not exactly seeinga massive amount of progress or even evolution
(09:13):
to the design. If anything,the Skylab really sticks out as being the
nicest space station of the bunch,and that was literally fifty years ago.
The Soviet design aesthetic that carried overall the way to the ISS has a
lot more in common with a submarinethan the starship Enterprise. It's cramped,
it's cluttered, there are pipes andwires and god knows what else sticking out
from all angles. Now we flipforward to China's Tiangong and the difference is
(09:39):
night and day. There are onlyabout twenty years between ISS and Tangong,
but it looks like a century worthof progress. Obviously, in the time
between the year two thousand and theyear twenty twenty one, a lot of
major breakthroughs were made in the fieldof silicon microchips and transistors. All of
our electronic devices got thinner and morepowerful, so so naturally that transfers over
(10:01):
to our space ships as well.Just look at the SpaceX crew Dragon interior
compared to the Space Shuttle. Butthere is a little bit more going on
here than just better microchips. Thebiggest selling point of the ISS was that
it would be a fully modular spacestation, meaning it can be built out
one piece at a time and youcan just keep adding on more pieces as
(10:24):
you go along. And the ISShas a lot of pieces, sixteen pressurized
modules in total, and each oneof them had to be transported from the
ground into orbit. This is whyit took over a decade to fully assemble
the International Space Station and NASA's rocketof choice at the time wasn't helping either.
The Space Shuttle had two significant flawsthat made it a bad rocket for
(10:45):
deploying a space station. Thing Numberone, it was really dangerous to fly,
and in two thousand and three,the Shuttle Columbia broke up on reentry,
killing the entire crew and grounding theShuttle fleet until NASA figured out what
went wrong. This was extremely badtiming for the construction of ISS, because
the workhorse rocket that was intended todo most of the heavy lifting was now
(11:07):
out of service right in the middleof the construction project. And even when
Shuttle service resumed, it never gotback to the launch frequency of the nineteen
nineties. And the second thing,the Shuttle just was not very effective at
putting heavy things into space. TheShuttle was technically rated for twenty seven metric
tons to low Earth orbit, butthe actual payload capacity to ISS altitude was
(11:33):
more like sixteen metric tons. Thispresents a significant limitation on a large scale
orbital construction project. The spacious interiorof the Skylab module was made possible by
the incredible power of the Saturn five, a rocket that could lift one hundred
and fifty metric tons into low Earthorbit. So the difference in headroom between
(11:54):
Skylab and ISS is directly attributable tothe difference in available lifting. Even the
Tiangong station modules, which technically wouldhave fit inside the Shuttle cargo bay,
would have been too heavy for thespace plane to handle. Those are around
twenty three metric tons, give ortake, so the Tiangong does not suffer
from a lot of bottlenecks and sizelimitations that we find on the ISS.
(12:18):
There's much more open and continuous space, and this is a clear indicator for
space stations that will come in thefuture. They are only going to get
bigger thanks to significant advancements in heavylift rocket technology. The SpaceX Starship is
the most obvious example of this.With somewhere between one hundred and two hundred
metric tons of payload capacity to lowEarth orbit and a nine meter diameter cargo
(12:43):
faring, the Starship could deploy somethingeven bigger than Skylab in one single launch,
and the Starship is designed to operateas a fully reusable and high volume
rocket system, so unlike the verylimited quantity of Saturn five boosters, Starship
can deploy a lot of these giganticspace station modules, as many as we
(13:03):
can build really SpaceX can launch them, so now we suddenly have the capability
to build the equivalent of skyscrapers inspace. And there are other really big
rockets coming like the Blue Origin NewGlenn booster, which is already attached to
the Orbital Reef space Station project,which will combine massive seven meter diameter core
modules with inflatable habitats from Sierra Spaceto very quickly offer up three times the
(13:28):
pressurized volume of the ISS. Sothe future is looking pretty amazing for human
habitation in space. We're moving quicklyfrom the harsh military esthetic of a submarine
to something that was previously only imaginablein science fiction.
How do you keep score in aspace race? There are a few obvious
milestones early on, first person inorbit, for spacewalk, first to the
Moon. But after all those boxesare checked, where do we go Well,
the natural next step was to startliving in space and finding out just
how long you could stay up there. That means space stations, and if
(00:22):
we look at the evolution of humanhabitation in low Earth orbit, we can
get a pretty good idea of whodominated the past and who will take over
the future. The answers might surpriseyou. This is the space race.
Did you know that the first spacestation ever deployed was a Soviet design from
nineteen seventy one called Salu. Itwas actually a very impressive piece of hardware
(00:47):
at eighteen and a half metric tons, twenty meters in length, four meters
in diameter, and ninety nine cubicmeters in volume, so that's pretty big
even by modern standards. Now,we don't talk about this one very often
because there is a deeply tragic storyattached to it. The first and only
(01:07):
crew to ever visit the Salute onenever lived to tell the tale. The
three cosmonauts perished on the return tripwhen their Soyu's capsule depressurized, making them
also the first and only humans tohave died in space. The operation of
Salute one was terminated shortly after thestation was deorbited and burnt up in the
(01:27):
atmosphere on October eleventh, nineteen seventyone. A year later, the Soviets
tried again with a space station modulecalled DOS two, but this one was
lost due to an engine failure onthe Proton rocket, and it never reached
orbital velocity. The whole thing justfell into the ocean. One year after
(01:48):
that, the Soviets made their thirdattempt with Salute two. This one did
reach orbit, but quickly lost altitudecontrol and depressurized, leaving it to tumble
helplessly through space until its orbit decayedand the station burnt up in the atmosphere.
Undeterred, the Soviet Union launched yetanother space station module in nineteen seventy
three. This was originally intended tobe Saluted the third, but since a
(02:13):
flight control aer prevented the station fromreaching the correct orbital height, the Soviets
quickly renamed the mission to Cosmos fiveto five seven and pretended like it was
a regular satellite launch and not afailed space station deployment. A week later,
the remains fell from space and burntup in the atmosphere. Meanwhile,
through all of this, NASA hadbeen working on their own space station concept
(02:36):
named Skylab. With the Apollo programofficially brought to an end, NASA was
left with one excess Saturn five rocketjust kicking around. This incredibly humongous and
incredibly powerful machine was purpose built tosend heavy things to the Moon, but
engineers decided that the Saturn five couldbe retrofit to deploy one final and truly
(03:00):
the epic payload into low Earth orbita space station, and Skylab was one
hell of a space station. NASAhollowed out the S four B module of
the Saturn five, which would havetraditionally served as a third propulsion stage for
the translunar injection burn. The giantfuel tanks were converted into an orbital workshop
(03:20):
with an incredible six point six metersin diameter and fourteen point seven meters in
length. Then on top of that, NASA attached an airlock module and docking
adapter where the Apollo Space Telescope observatorywas mounted. Then an unused Apollo command
and Service module was docked at thefar end to provide power for the station.
(03:42):
Skylab was occupied for a combined totalof one hundred and seventy one days
across three crude missions from nineteen seventythree to nineteen seventy four, and it
easily holds up as one of themost amazing things ever launched into space.
There were lands to eventually use theSpace Shuttle to refurbish and reboost the station
(04:03):
to a higher orbit, but unfortunatelythe Shuttle wasn't ready in time, and
Skylab's orbit decayed to the point whereit finally hit the atmosphere and disintegrated in
nineteen seventy nine. Back in theSoviet Union, they were finally primed for
success. The real Salu three achievedorbit in July nineteen seventy four and was
(04:23):
successfully visited by the crew of Soyuzfourteen. This station was notable for being
the first spacecraft to include a gun. There was a twenty three millimeter aircraft
cannon attached to the station, andthe Soviets would be the first to ever
test fire a conventional weapon in space. Anyway. From there, the Soviets
(04:44):
had a pretty successful run with thesesingle module space stations from Salu three up
to Salute seven. But for theSoviets this was only a warm up act.
In nineteen eighty six, the worldsaw the deployment of the first ever
modular space station, which the Sovietsnamed Mir. You may be noticing a
trend here. While NASA did manageto deploy one very cool space station with
(05:08):
Skylab, it was an incredibly shortlived project and it marked the United States
one and only independent space station.We can see pretty clearly here that the
Soviets had essentially cornered the market onlong term habitation in low Earth orbit.
It took a decade to fully assemblethe seven module Mir station, which would
eventually reach a pressurized volume of threehundred and fifty cubic meters. Now,
(05:32):
something interesting happened over the time periodthat the station Mir was being constructed.
The Soviet Union collapsed. The fallof the Berlin Wall in nineteen eighty nine
marked the beginning of the end forthe Cold War, and now we enter
the period of the Russian space program. This era would bring a new found
(05:53):
cooperation between Western and Eastern superpowers.Now, instead of being engaged in a
space race, the Russians and Americanswere working together for the betterment of human
space exploration. Very positive star trekvibes were starting to come out, and
in nineteen ninety three, NASA's SpaceShuttle fleet began regular missions to the Mere
(06:14):
station. The Shuttle Atlantis even deliveredthe final docking module to Mirror in nineteen
ninety five. Now as much asNASA was helping out the Russians with the
use of their fancy space planes,the Americans were using this opportunity to learn
as much as they possibly could aboutmodular space stations and long term habitation in
microgravity, a subject where the UnitedStates had fallen massively behind. It was
(06:40):
in nineteen eighty four that President RonaldReagan originally directed NASA to build an international
space station within the next ten years, and obviously that never happened. So
when we finally arrive at the InternationalSpace Station that we all know so well
today, we can see that itshares a lot of resemblance with Russia's.
(07:00):
In fact, given everything that we'vejust learned, I don't think it's unfounded
to look at the ISS more likea Mere version two point zero, because
it's pretty clear where this design approachcame from It's also worth noting that the
first module of the ISS that wasdeployed in nineteen ninety eight was the Russian
Control Module. The Russian side ofthe station is responsible for the power and
(07:24):
propulsion of the ISS, and thefirst crew to reside on the ISS was
one American and two Russians who allarrived there on a Soyuz rocket launched from
the baikon Or Cosmodrome. Anyway,I find that all pretty interesting because growing
up in North America, we werepretty much led to believe that NASA was
really the leader in this whole InternationalSpace Station project, and it never really
(07:46):
occurred to me until right now thatthe full two decades of research and development
by the Soviets and Russians is whatreally laid the groundwork for the ISS,
and it probably never would have evenhappened without that. So there's an interesting
new perspect for you. The ISSis operated primarily by Ross, Cosmos and
NASA. The Russian Service module isresponsible for guidance, navigation, life support,
(08:09):
power and propulsion of the entire station, so it's pretty important, while
the NASA side of the station isfor operations, logistics, and research.
The other key players in the ISSare the European Space Agency and the japan
Aerospace Exploration Agency, each having theirown independent research modules, with the Japanese
(08:30):
Kibo becoming the single largest ISS module. It took three Space Shuttle missions to
get the entire lab into orbit.Following the completion of the ISS in the
early two thousands, there has beenonly one modular space station deployed to Earth
orbit, China's Tiangong the Heavenly Palace, with just three modules. The Tiangong
(08:52):
is a much smaller scale station thanthe ISS, and even contains slightly less
pressurized volume than Mirror, But theTiangong is a significant leap forward in space
station design and technology. If welook back from Salute to Skylab to Mirror
to ISS, we're not exactly seeinga massive amount of progress or even evolution
(09:13):
to the design. If anything,the Skylab really sticks out as being the
nicest space station of the bunch,and that was literally fifty years ago.
The Soviet design aesthetic that carried overall the way to the ISS has a
lot more in common with a submarinethan the starship Enterprise. It's cramped,
it's cluttered, there are pipes andwires and god knows what else sticking out
from all angles. Now we flipforward to China's Tiangong and the difference is
(09:39):
night and day. There are onlyabout twenty years between ISS and Tangong,
but it looks like a century worthof progress. Obviously, in the time
between the year two thousand and theyear twenty twenty one, a lot of
major breakthroughs were made in the fieldof silicon microchips and transistors. All of
our electronic devices got thinner and morepowerful, so so naturally that transfers over
(10:01):
to our space ships as well.Just look at the SpaceX crew Dragon interior
compared to the Space Shuttle. Butthere is a little bit more going on
here than just better microchips. Thebiggest selling point of the ISS was that
it would be a fully modular spacestation, meaning it can be built out
one piece at a time and youcan just keep adding on more pieces as
(10:24):
you go along. And the ISShas a lot of pieces, sixteen pressurized
modules in total, and each oneof them had to be transported from the
ground into orbit. This is whyit took over a decade to fully assemble
the International Space Station and NASA's rocketof choice at the time wasn't helping either.
The Space Shuttle had two significant flawsthat made it a bad rocket for
(10:45):
deploying a space station. Thing Numberone, it was really dangerous to fly,
and in two thousand and three,the Shuttle Columbia broke up on reentry,
killing the entire crew and grounding theShuttle fleet until NASA figured out what
went wrong. This was extremely badtiming for the construction of ISS, because
the workhorse rocket that was intended todo most of the heavy lifting was now
(11:07):
out of service right in the middleof the construction project. And even when
Shuttle service resumed, it never gotback to the launch frequency of the nineteen
nineties. And the second thing,the Shuttle just was not very effective at
putting heavy things into space. TheShuttle was technically rated for twenty seven metric
tons to low Earth orbit, butthe actual payload capacity to ISS altitude was
(11:33):
more like sixteen metric tons. Thispresents a significant limitation on a large scale
orbital construction project. The spacious interiorof the Skylab module was made possible by
the incredible power of the Saturn five, a rocket that could lift one hundred
and fifty metric tons into low Earthorbit. So the difference in headroom between
(11:54):
Skylab and ISS is directly attributable tothe difference in available lifting. Even the
Tiangong station modules, which technically wouldhave fit inside the Shuttle cargo bay,
would have been too heavy for thespace plane to handle. Those are around
twenty three metric tons, give ortake, so the Tiangong does not suffer
from a lot of bottlenecks and sizelimitations that we find on the ISS.
(12:18):
There's much more open and continuous space, and this is a clear indicator for
space stations that will come in thefuture. They are only going to get
bigger thanks to significant advancements in heavylift rocket technology. The SpaceX Starship is
the most obvious example of this.With somewhere between one hundred and two hundred
metric tons of payload capacity to lowEarth orbit and a nine meter diameter cargo
(12:43):
faring, the Starship could deploy somethingeven bigger than Skylab in one single launch,
and the Starship is designed to operateas a fully reusable and high volume
rocket system, so unlike the verylimited quantity of Saturn five boosters, Starship
can deploy a lot of these giganticspace station modules, as many as we
(13:03):
can build really SpaceX can launch them, so now we suddenly have the capability
to build the equivalent of skyscrapers inspace. And there are other really big
rockets coming like the Blue Origin NewGlenn booster, which is already attached to
the Orbital Reef space Station project,which will combine massive seven meter diameter core
modules with inflatable habitats from Sierra Spaceto very quickly offer up three times the
(13:28):
pressurized volume of the ISS. Sothe future is looking pretty amazing for human
habitation in space. We're moving quicklyfrom the harsh military esthetic of a submarine
to something that was previously only imaginablein science fiction.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Special Summer Offer: Exclusively on Apple Podcasts, try our Dateline Premium subscription completely free for one month! With Dateline Premium, you get every episode ad-free plus exclusive bonus content.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!