Wednesday, December 10, 2003
No way to get there
By SANDRA FREDERICK
NEWS-JOURNAL STAFF WRITER
It´s another day on the job for hundreds of scientists and engineers at Kennedy Space Center. However, after the Feb. 1 explosion of space shuttle Columbia, about 107,000 pounds of hardware are stuck on Earth.
In one corner of the warehouse office, a 34,775-pound steel integrated truss segment sits waiting for space flight to the international space station to resume, hopefully by mid-September. The tan steel beam holds miles of wiring and will support solar panels on a new section of the space station.
In another nearby work area, engineers adjust the scaffolding of the Japanese Experiment Module, dubbed “Kibo,” in preparation for flight to the orbiting outpost where it eventually will join three other modules, two Russian and one American. It will be Japan´s first manned facility in space.
“NASA people are being very patient and working with us,” said Shimpei Takahashi, deputy director of Japan´s space agency at KSC. “They have so much experience and are sharing it with us.”
Marking its fifth year circling 220 miles above Earth, the space station is a joint partnership between 16 countries and has met its initial goal to have people live and work in space, said Tip Talone, director of the space station and payload processing at KSC.
“It´s a huge success,” the NASA official said last week during a tour of the facility. “(The space station) is not American. It´s not Japanese. It´s human.”
Astronaut Mark Kelly, pilot of the shuttle Endeavour on a mission to ferry supplies to the space station in May 2001, said the vision of an international team working together for a common goal has been realized. He plans to return to the station as pilot of Discovery in mission STS-121, the second shuttle planned to fly after the Columbia disaster, tentatively set to lift off Nov. 15, 2004.
Working and living side by side 24 hours a day, seven days a week builds camaraderie among them, the astronaut said. He said an enormous amount of knowledge is gleaned from the international laboratories.
“It feels like you are in a big tunnel,” Kelly, whose parents, Richard and Patricia, live in Flagler Beach, said Tuesday during a telephone interview. “It takes you minutes to float from the American side to the Russian side. It´s a pretty comfortable place and has the internal volume of a 747 airliner.”
The first record of a proposal for a manned station in space was in 1869, when Edward Everett Hale published an article in the Atlantic Monthly of how a “Brick Moon” could orbit Earth to help sailors navigate at sea. In 1923, Romanian Hermann Oberth was the first to use the term “space station” to describe a wheel-like facility that, in theory, would serve as a jumping off place for human journeys to the moon and Mars.
And, in 1952, Werner von Braun published his concept of a space station in Collier´s magazine - a 250-foot-wide station orbiting more than 1,000 miles above Earth.
It wasn´t until the Soviet Union launched the world´s first space station, Salyut 1 in 1971, just a decade after launching the first human into space, that it became a reality. The United States followed with a larger version in 1973 - Skylab - which served as host to three crew members before it was abandoned in 1974. Skylab eventually fell from orbit July 11, 1979.
Russia continued to focus on long-duration space missions with the launch of the first modules of the Mir Space Station in 1986. After 15 years of exploratory science, the unmanned outpost returned to Earth in a fiery descent into the southern Pacific Ocean in March 2001.
The race to space surged forward. In the quest to have humans living in space, the first two modules of the international space station were launched and joined in orbit in 1988. Other modules soon followed and the first international crew arrived in 2000.
The colossal project proposed by President Ronald Reagan in 1984 as a joint venture for 16 countries, more than 100,000 people in space agencies and another 500 contractors in 37 U.S. states, has not been without financial controversy. Those involved in the space station include the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan and 11 European countries - and all share the cost.
Compared to Russia´s $4.3 billion price tag for Mir, the cost to the United States so far for its part of the space station is $21.5 billion. By completion in 2006, the cost should come in at about $28 billion, said Bruce Buckingham, a KSC spokesman.
“I like to look back to where we´ve come from in the space program,” Charlie Precourt, deputy manager of the space station program, said Tuesday at KSC. “There have been no system failures in the entire time, compared to the MIR. We have to keep in mind we are learning as we go.”
Did You Know?
The international space station travels an equivalent distance to the moon and back in about a day.
* The space station will weigh almost 1 million pounds when completed in 2006, the equivalent of more than 330 automobiles.
* The station´s solar array surface (9,600 square feet) will be large enough to cover the U.S. Senate Chamber more than three times.
* The station has 15,000 cubic feet of habitable volume - more than a conventional three-bedroom house - and weighs 400,000 pounds.
* Fifty-two computers will control the systems on the space station.
* More than 40 space flights will be required to assemble 100 major components.
* A third of the space station´s resources will be devoted to commercial endeavors.
* International space station crews have eaten about 10,000 meals and 8,000 snacks. About 3 tons of supplies are required to support a crew of two for about six months.
* Based on input from space station crew members, the top five foods in orbit are: shrimp cocktail, tortillas, barbecued beef brisket, breakfast sausage links and chicken fajitas.Their favorite beverage is lemonade.
SOURCE: NASA
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