Fwd: 15 Years Since ISS Expedition 1

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From: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Date: November 1, 2015 at 4:21:39 PM CST
To: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Subject: FW: 15 Years Since ISS Expedition 1

 

 

AmericaSpace

For a nation that explores
October 31st, 2015

'Let's Go Get This Done': 15 Years Since Expedition 1 Opened the Doors to the International Space Station (Part 1)

By Ben Evans

 

Clad in their Sokol ("Falcon") launch and entry suits, Expedition 1 crew members (from left) Bill Shepherd, Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev began the permanent occupancy of the International Space Station (ISS), 15 years ago, this week. Photo Credit: NASA

At 4:21 a.m. EDT on Monday, 2 November, the International Space Station (ISS)—which has, to date, provided an off-the-planet homestead for no fewer than 220 humans from 17 sovereign nations—will pass its 15th year of continuous occupation, extending back to the historic arrival of Expedition 1 Commander Bill Shepherd of NASA and his Russian crewmates, Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev, aboard the Soyuz TM-31 spacecraft. Launched two days earlier from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the three men had been training together for more than four years and would go on to spend more than 4.5 months overseeing perhaps the most critical period of ISS activation. During their 136 days aboard the nascent station, Shepherd, Gidzenko and Krikalev welcomed three Space Shuttle crews and in that relatively short span of time saw their orbital habitat expand to become the largest and most massive inhabited structure ever delivered beyond Earth's atmosphere.

In anticipation of Monday's historic 15-year milestone, NASA plans a 30-minute press conference—involving a space-to-ground hook-up with the incumbent Expedition 45 crew of Commander Scott Kelly of NASA, Russian cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko, Oleg Kononenko and Sergei Volkov, U.S. astronaut Kjell Lindgren and Japan's Kimiya Yui—and ISS Operations Integration Manager Kenny Todd paid his own tribute in last week's briefing ahead of the forthcoming U.S. EVA-32 and 33 activities. "We're coming up on a pretty significant time for the program on 2 November," Mr. Todd noted. "When you think about what you were doing 15 years ago, it's a pretty impressive feat that we've managed to keep people off the planet for 15 years straight."

For Shepherd, his personal and professional relationship with the creation that would become the ISS had extended to a time far earlier than commanding its first long-duration increment. In fact, as pointed out in the memoir Riding Rockets, it struck fellow astronaut Mike Mullane—who flew with Shepherd on the STS-27 shuttle mission in December 1988—as somewhat ironic that the hard-bitten ex-Navy SEAL wound up sharing a space station with a pair of Russian cosmonauts. In June 1993, with three shuttle missions under his belt, Shepherd was named by NASA Administrator Dan Goldin as an Assistant Deputy Administrator (Technical), based at the agency's Washington, D.C., headquarters, with responsibility for leading the transition effort as the former Space Station Freedom was rescoped and redesigned to become the embryo of the future ISS. Only a few months later, Shepherd was named as the Space Station Program Manager at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas, a position which he held for the next two years.

Expedition 1 crewmen Sergei Krikalev (left) and Bill Shepherd participate in survival training, near Star City, Russia, in May 1998. Photo Credit: NASA

Remaining available to return to active astronaut training, it seemed likely that Shepherd would draw an early ISS assignment and, in January 1996, he was named with Krikalev to the Expedition 1 crew, with launch initially targeted aboard a Russian Soyuz-TM spacecraft in the early summer of 1998. Krikalev, who had trained extensively with NASA and had become the first Russian to fly aboard the shuttle, seemed an obvious choice. Interestingly, the third member of the Expedition 1 crew went unannounced for some time, which Bryan Burrough, in his controversial book, Dragonfly, attributed in part to the thorny question of whether a Russian or an American should command Expedition 1. Burrough suggested that veteran cosmonaut Anatoli Solovyov—who had commanded three previous long-duration missions—had been assigned to Expedition 1, but had resigned his position when it became clear that Shepherd would command. "His resignation," wrote Burrough, "capped months of behind-the-scenes maneuvering." Whatever the reality of the situation, Yuri Gidzenko's name was attached to Expedition 1 and by May 1997 he was deep into training with Shepherd and Krikalev, tracking a launch toward the new space station in the spring of 1999.

Unfortunately, as outlined in a previous AmericaSpace article, delays in the arrival of Russia's Zvezda service module—which provided critical quarters and life-support functions for the early expedition crews—pushed its launch back from the fall of 1998 to April 1999 and beyond, before it eventually reached orbit in July 2000. This created a domino-like impact on a stream of shuttle assembly missions and the Expedition 1 crew found their own launch pushed back to 31 October 2000, exactly 15 years ago, today.

"The day went by really fast," Shepherd remembered in a 2010 NASA interview to commemorate the 10th anniversary of continuous occupation of the ISS. "It was foggy, a kind of dew on all the windows. I waved goodbye to my wife, got on the bus, went down to the Launch Assembly Area and we got our space suits on. Then, out of nowhere, my wife came up when we were suited up and gave me a big hug, which was something you just don't do in our program." Upon arrival at Baikonur's Site 1/5—the famed "Gagarin's Start", from which Yuri Gagarin had begun his epochal voyage into orbit—they beheld the enormous Soyuz-U booster, topped by their Soyuz TM-31 spacecraft, and about 400 well-wishers. To Shepherd, it could not have contrasted more markedly from his shuttle career. "This is a couple of million pounds of rocket, all ready to go fly in pace, all sitting there steaming and smoking, and we got 400 people, right there," he said, incredulously.

With Gidzenko in Soyuz TM-31's center seat, commanding the flight uphill, Krikalev in the left-side "Flight Engineer-1" position and Shepherd in the right-side "Flight Engineer-2" position, the first long-duration crew of the ISS began their voyage at 12:53 p.m. local time (2:53 a.m. EST). "The main thought I had was now it's starting," Krikalev recalled in a NASA interview, ten years later. "This is our first work and, oftentimes, it's the way you start is how it's going to go next. I felt a huge load of responsibility."

The Expedition 1 crew launches aboard Soyuz TM-31 from Gagarin's Start at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Their flight commenced exactly 15 years ago, today. Photo Credit: NASA, via Joachim Becker/SpaceFacts.de

Rising rapidly, the Soyuz-U—powered uphill by the single RD-108 engine of its core stage and the RD-107 engines of its four strap-on boosters—exceeded 1,100 mph (1,770 km/h) within a minute of clearing the tower. As they ascended, television images of Shepherd revealed him to be pumping his fist. "As a crew, we had waited a long time to get to that point in life, where this is actually happening," he recalled, "and I was very keen to emphasize, you know, Let's go get this done!" At T+118 seconds, the tapering boosters were jettisoned, leaving the core alone to continue the boost into low-Earth orbit. By two minutes, Gidzenko, Krikalev and Shepherd had surpassed 3,350 mph (5,390 km/h) and, shortly thereafter, the escape tower and launch shroud were jettisoned, exposing Soyuz TM-31 to the near-vacuum of the rarefied high atmosphere.

A little less than five minutes since leaving the desolate steppe of Central Asia, the core booster was jettisoned at an altitude of 105 miles (170 km) and the third and final stage ignited, accelerating the Soyuz to a velocity of more than 13,420 mph (21,600 km/h). By the time it separated, about nine minutes into the flight, Gidzenko, Krikalev and Shepherd were in an orbit of 144 x 113 miles (233 x 182 km), inclined 51.6 degrees to the equator. They deployed their craft's communications and navigation antennas and electricity-generating solar arrays and, 90 minutes later, opened the hatch between the cramped Descent Module and the slightly roomier Orbital Module.

The crew spent a standard two days in transit, before Gidzenko oversaw a smooth, automated docking at the aft longitudinal port of the station's Zvezda module at 2:21 p.m. Baikonur time (4:21 a.m. EDT) on 2 November. At the time of Contact and Capture, Soyuz TM-31 and the ISS were orbiting high above central Kazakhstan. An hour later, at 3:23 p.m. Baikonur time (5:23 a.m. EDT), the hatch was opened into Zvezda's main compartment, with Gidzenko and Krikalev entering first, followed by Shepherd, who had to prepare tools to sample the station's atmosphere and collect gas specimens. "I think Sergei was the first guy in," Shepherd chuckled later, "but then there was kind of a very busy scramble to do the initial things that we had to do and, particularly, to find the TV hook-up and the TV cable so that we could give you that downlink. We were really close to the wire getting all that rigged and happy and we almost missed it."

The trio clasped hands in unison, although Shepherd reflected that they were too busy to regard themselves as pioneers at that time. "After the downlink was done, we just kind of all sat back and said, 'Okay, we'll call it a day', because it was very hectic." For Krikalev, it represented a historic moment, too, but it was actually the second time that he had opened the hatches to the ISS, having also flown on STS-88—the inaugural shuttle assembly mission—back in December 1998, during which he and Bob Cabana had opened the hatches between the newly installed Unity node and the Russian-built Zarya control module. Asked about whether he considered himself to be a pioneer, Krikalev's thinking mirrored that of Shepherd, that their arrival was too busy, bringing the infant station and its systems to life. It was not like his two previous long-duration increments aboard Mir, both of which had brought him to an already fully functional orbital outpost. "At that moment, we were thinking of the present," he said, "although, subconsciously, we understood that was a certain threshold we were supposed to cross."

There could be no denying that it was a historic occasion. Although Soviet and Russian cosmonauts had occupied the Mir space station continuously from September 1989 through August 1999—more than 3,600 days—it was expected that the ISS era would usher in an unbroken new age of human habitation of the heavens. "If all goes well on this and future missions," NASA explained in a pre-launch press release, "30 October 2000 will be the last day on which there were no human beings in space." And notwithstanding the trials and tribulations and tragedies and geopolitical difficulties which befell the project in the years which followed, those words have retained their accuracy to this very day.

 

Copyright © 2015 AmericaSpace - All Rights Reserved

 

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AmericaSpace

For a nation that explores
November 1st, 2015

'We Can Do This': 15 Years Since Expedition 1 Opened the Doors to the International Space Station (Part 2)

By Ben Evans

The Expedition 1 crew (from left) of Yuri Gidzenko, Bill Shepherd and Sergei Krikalev spent more than 136 days aboard the International Space Station (ISS) during their 140-day mission between October 2000-March 2001. Photo Credit: NASA

Fifteen years ago, tomorrow, the first team of astronauts and cosmonauts arrived at the infant International Space Station (ISS) to begin a new era; one which would see no fewer than 220 humans from 17 sovereign nations living and working in low-Earth orbit on a continuous, unbroken basis. In so doing, they would provide our current best-possible analog for someday voyaging to Mars. As outlined in yesterday's AmericaSpace history article, Expedition 1 Commander Bill Shepherd of NASA and his Russian crewmates, Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev, roared away from Baikonur Cosmodrome's Site 1/5—the same launch pad at which Yuri Gagarin commenced his pioneering voyage—atop a mammoth Soyuz-U booster on the cold and foggy afternoon of 31 October 2000. Two days later, Gidzenko guided their Soyuz TM-31 spacecraft to a smooth docking at the aft longitudinal port of the station's Zvezda service module. It was with an air of pioneers that Shepherd, Gidzenko and Krikalev kicked off a 4.5-month expedition which, as of today (Sunday, 1 November), has seen humans living and working in an off-the-planet setting for no less than 5,477 days. And with last year's decision by the International Partners (IPs) to continue permanent ISS habitation through at least 2024, it can be expected that this figure will dramatically increase to a minimum of 8,400 days, approaching a quarter-century of cumulative time in orbit.

In anticipation of the historic 15-year milestone, NASA plans a 30-minute press conference at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas, on Monday—involving a space-to-ground hook-up with the incumbent Expedition 45 crew of Commander Scott Kelly of NASA, Russian cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko, Oleg Kononenko and Sergei Volkov, U.S. astronaut Kjell Lindgren and Japan's Kimiya Yui—and ISS Operations Integration Manager Kenny Todd paid his own tribute in last week's briefing ahead of the forthcoming U.S. EVA-32 and 33 activities. "We're coming up on a pretty significant time for the program on 2 November," Mr. Todd noted. "When you think about what you were doing 15 years ago, it's a pretty impressive feat that we've managed to keep people off the planet for 15 years straight."

Of course, at the time of Expedition 1, few could have foreseen the convoluted twists and turns which would come in the following years, much less the catastrophic loss of shuttle Columbia on 1 February 2003, which brought the structural assembly of the station to a grinding halt for almost four years. When asked in October 2010 if the ISS had turned into what he expected it to be, Sergei Krikalev noted that, in terms of configuration, there were differences, with various components canceled—including NASA's Centrifuge Accommodations Module (CAM) and Russia's Science Power Platform (SPP)—due to budget cuts or the consequences of the shuttle disaster. At the same time, few could have foreseen how the station would evolve: into a permanent home for up to six people, for months at a time, supplied by both national governments and commercial partners, and with a parallel Commercial Crew Program to deliver astronauts and cosmonauts to the ISS in the post-shuttle era. In terms of science, technology and the ability of humans to function away from Earth, the station has already broken significant ground as international eyes now focus upon planting human bootprints on the surface of Mars in the coming decades.

Both STS-97 Commander Brent Jett (left) and Expedition 1 Commander Bill Shepherd were active-duty U.S. Navy officers and observed the tradition of ringing the ship's bell as the visiting crew arrived. Photo Credit: NASA

By Bill Shepherd's own admission, though, it was not until after Expedition 1 that the three men had time to fully appreciate that theirs was a pioneering mission of exploration. After Gidzenko oversaw the automated docking at Zvezda on 2 November 2000, they were simply too busy—setting up food warmers in the station's galley, putting together their respective sleeping quarters, establishing communications links with the respective Mission Control Centers (MCCs) in the United States and Russia and configuring laptop networks—to fully contemplate the epochal event upon which they had embarked.

Just 24 hours earlier, Russia's Progress M1-3—which, in August 2000, had become the first unpiloted cargo ship to arrive at the ISS—had undocked from Zvezda's aft longitudinal port to free it up in advance of the Soyuz TM-31 arrival. On their second day aboard the station, 3 November, the crew installed the Vozdukh regenerative air-scrubbing device into Zvezda's living quarters to replace the previous supply of interchangeable lithium hydroxide canisters, as well as hooking up the Early Communications System and tending to a minor glitch with one of eight batteries in the service module, which had failed to charge properly. Krikalev pointed out that one of its connector pins appeared to be bent or broken. However, it was stressed that six batteries were more than sufficient to power ISS systems.

Over the following days, the crew installed and activated the station's Elektron oxygen-replenishment system, as well as the TORU hardware to offer a backup manual docking capability for future unpiloted visitors—which needed to be in place, ahead of the planned Progress M1-4 launch—and found time to utilize the treadmill delivered in September 2000 by the crew of shuttle Atlantis. On 16 November, Progress M1-4 flew out of Baikonur and, two days later, approached the ISS for docking. Unfortunately, its automatic rendezvous system failed to lock onto a comparable system on the station and Gidzenko assumed manual control to guide the cargo ship to a smooth docking at the Earth-facing (or "nadir") port of the Zarya module.

The visitation of Progress M1-4 was an unusual one, coming as it did betwixt the arrival of the Expedition 1 crew and the planned launches of shuttle mission STS-97 to deliver the first set of photovoltaic solar arrays and radiators. However, its failed automatic docking caused a measure of consternation and a new software "patch" was developed as a possible solution. Only two weeks after its arrival, on 1 December, it was undocked from Zarya and inserted into a "parking orbit" by Russian flight controllers, at a relative distance from the ISS of about 1,550 miles (2,500 km). "Over the next few weeks," NASA reported, "U.S. and Russian managers will discuss whether to attempt a redocking of the Progress in late December or another rendezvous without a docking, to test a software patch as a solution [to] an apparent problem in the Progress' navigation system, which occurred during its automated approach to the ISS."

In addition to satisfying the requirements of testing the software patch, Progress M1-4's departure cleared a path for the rendezvous of shuttle Endeavour and her crew—Commander Brent Jett, Pilot Mike Bloomfield and Mission Specialists Joe Tanner, Carlos Noriega and Canada's Marc Garneau—as they approached a docking at Pressurized Mating Adapter (PMA)-3, then affixed to the nadir interface of the Unity node. The STS-97 crew delivered and installed the P-6 segment of the Integrated Truss Structure (ITS), atop the Unity node, during a pair of EVAs by Tanner and Noriega. Hatches between the shuttle and ISS were not opened until a few days later, on 8 December, due to the need to reduce Endeavour's atmospheric pressure during the EVA preparations. With the respective commanders of Expedition 1 and STS-97 being active-duty U.S. Navy officers, it fell to Shepherd to traditionally ring the ship's bell to welcome the shuttle crew aboard and for Jett, snapping a smart naval salute, requesting permission for himself and his men to come aboard.

Pictured with members of the STS-102 crew in Discovery's crowded flight deck, Expedition 1 crewmen Sergei Krikalev (left) and Bill Shepherd (lower) seem jubilant to be approaching their return to Earth. Photo Credit: NASA

With the departure of STS-97, the ISS now had five times more electrical power-producing capability—around 50 kilowatts overall—which, among other benefits, allowed the Expedition 1 crew to run the Elektron system continuously. And two weeks later, on 26 December, Progress M1-4 was maneuvered to a distance of about 650 feet (200 meters) and manually redocked by Gidzenko at the Zarya nadir port. It remained in place for a further six weeks, until 8 February 2001, serving as a reservoir for trash and other unneeded equipment. During this period, having already observed Thanksgiving and eaten a dinner of ham and smoked turkey aboard the Zvezda module, Shepherd, Gidzenko and Krikalev became the first ISS crew to spend Christmas in orbit, opening presents and receiving holiday greetings from NASA Administrator Dan Goldin.

With the shuttle manifest taking shape, it was already clear that their return to Earth aboard Discovery on STS-102 would be delayed from late February 2001 until mid-March, due to the need to replace ten Reaction Control System (RCS) thrusters. However, in the opening months of the year made famous by Sir Arthur C. Clarke and later made infamous on 9/11, Shepherd and his crew witnessed the arrival of the U.S. Destiny laboratory—ferried aloft aboard Atlantis in February by STS-98 Commander Ken Cockrell, Pilot Mark Polansky and Mission Specialists Bob Curbeam, Marsha Ivins and Tom Jones—whose addition to the rapidly expanding space station allowed it to eclipse Russia's Mir in size and pressurized volume and become the largest and most massive inhabited object ever operated beyond Earth's "sensible" atmosphere. In fact, by the time the STS-98 crew departed, the ISS comprised the Zarya and Zvezda modules, the Unity node, the Z-1 and P-6 components of the expansive truss structure, three PMAs and the Destiny laboratory and tipped the celestial scales at 224,000 pounds (101,600 kg). Added to this was its pressurized extent of 13,000 cubic feet (368 cubic meters), which exceeded even the voluminous Skylab.

It was to this fledgling version of today's expansive ISS that Shepherd, Gidzenko and Krikalev bade farewell in March 2001, as they prepared to return to Earth aboard shuttle Discovery. With STS-102 originally scheduled to fly a 12-day mission from 15-27 February, the Expedition 1 crew might have anticipated a total time spent in space of 119 days, but several weeks of delay meant that by the time their feet touched terra firma on 21 March, they had accrued 140 days aloft, of which 136 had been spent aboard the new space station. Both Gidzenko and Krikalev would visit the ISS again—the former on a visiting "taxi" mission in the spring of 2002, the latter in command of Expedition 11, which welcomed the resumption of post-Columbia shuttle flights, in mid-2005—but Shepherd retired from NASA to pursue private interests.

Since the pioneering voyage of Shepherd, Gidzenko and Krikalev, no fewer than 44 expeditions—involving Russians and Americans, Germans and Frenchmen, Japanese and Belgians, Canadians and Italians, Dutchmen and, in mid-December 2015, for the first time, a UK Government-sponsored Briton—have occupied the station for extended periods from as little as 48 days by Leopold Eyharts to the current 218 days (and counting) of the incumbent One-Year crewmen Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko. In addition to the expeditions, men and women from eight sovereign realms have visited the ISS aboard the shuttle, including the first national astronaut from Sweden and Japan's first woman in space.

Over the last 15 years, records have been made, and re-made. This has been particularly true in 2015, when Italy's first female spacefarer, Samantha Cristoforetti, seized the crown in June for the longest single mission ever undertaken by a woman and, just three weeks later, Russia's Gennadi Padalka establishing an empirical record for the longest cumulative amount of time spent off-planet by any human being. Veteran NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson became the first women in history to command a space station, whilst Suni Williams is currently in possession of the record for the greatest number of EVA hours attained by a female space traveler. Private citizens, spearheaded by Dennis Tito, have also flown to the multi-national station, as well as the first national spacefarers from South Africa, Brazil, Malaysia, South Korea, Denmark and—via dual nationality—also Iran.

Birthdays and anniversaries have been celebrated aboard the ISS, with Russia's Yuri Malenchenko even exchanging wedding vows with his Houston-based bride, Eketrina Dimitriev, in August 2003 and U.S. astronaut Mike Fincke missing the birth of his second daughter in June 2004. Tragedies have also been solemnly observed from inside the space station's walls, with the aftermath of the 9/11 atrocities witnessed by Expedition 3 Commander Frank Culbertson, news of the Columbia disaster having been broken to the Expedition 6 crew on 1 February 2003 and the untimely death of Dan Tani's mother reaching the ears of the Expedition 16 crew in December 2007.

Interestingly, NASA's Expedition 1 press kit made reference to the fact that the pioneering crew of Shepherd, Gidzenko and Krikalev would "set the stage of a continuous human presence in space by international researchers for at least the next 15 years". At least now appears to be exactly that, for the ISS will receive a multitude of visitors through at least the beginning of 2024. In Shepherd's mind, the usefulness of the station in preparing the human body for the long journey to Mars is critical. When he returned to Earth in March 2001, after more than 140 days in space, he talked the Expedition 1 flight surgeon in letting him drive a van around a nearby parking lot. "I was feeling really good," Shepherd recalled, years later. "I was able to walk around, stand up. I didn't have any problems with getting around." Then a thought struck him: If he could climb into a vehicle and drive it, "without hazarding myself or anybody else", then a multi-month voyage to Mars, followed by a landing and walking or driving on the surface was conceivably possible.

"I very strongly had that sense," Shepherd told a NASA interviewer. "I drove the van around the parking lot a little bit, got up, shut the door and said to myself: We can do this!"

 

Copyright © 2015 AmericaSpace - All Rights Reserved

 

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