Hey there, welcome to Seeker+, where we take in-depth looks at topics over the course of
three episodes. I’m your host, Julian Huguet, and for this series we’re going to talk
about what’s been called the single most complex construction project in the history
of humanity. A structure nearly as big as an American football field with a price tag
in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and yet at its most full it’s only ever housed
13 people. I bet the space nerds have already figured it out. And anyone who looked at
the title for that matter. That’s right our topic this series is the International
Space Station, better known as the ISS.
And who better to tell us about it than two people actually living aboard the station
itself. Can you two hear me?
We have you loud and clear. Welcome aboard.
“Welcome aboard”. That gave me chills. That’s NASA Astronaut Shane Kimbrough and
ESA Astronaut Thomas Pesquet and they really are, no fooling, up in space. Watch, I’ll
prove it. Hey can one of you do a backflip or something like that?
We can do a couple things for you. See, like I said. Space. Well unless you’re listening
to the podcast version of this episode, in which case you’ll just have to take my word
for it. We connected with them while they were off the west coast of Morocco. As the
crow flies it’s not the longest distance phone call I’ve made… at least not yet.
NASA graciously let us borrow these important spacefarers for 20 minutes so we’ll see
where they are by the end of it. Keep in mind that in order to keep the ISS’s average
altitude at about 420 kilometers above the earth instead of 0 kilometers above the earth,
they have to travel at 28,000 kilometers per hour or about 8 kilometers every second. These
astronauts go around the earth 16 times every 24 hours.
Also keep in mind that the ISS is massive. Much much bigger and heavier than anything
else humans have put into space. The United State’s first space station, sky lab? That
clocked in at 75 metric tons. Russia’s biggest solo space station Mir? Almost twice as big
as Skylab at 140 metric tonnes. The ISS? Nearly 420 metric tonnes, three times bigger than
Mir. So how did it even get up there in the first place? The simple answer is piece by
piece and with a lot of cooperation.
In the 1990s the cold war finally thawed out. The Soviet Union collapsed, and relations
between Russia and the US were looking up. As it happened the space agencies of both
countries had been working on space stations of their own for some time that just couldn’t
get off the ground. Russia’s Mir-2 had been in the works since the mid-70s, while the
US program was slowly getting whittled away with budget cuts. The US station’s name,
by the way, was Space Station Freedom, which is the most 1980s American thing I’ve ever
heard. Anyway in 93 the two space agencies decided to take what they had and combine
them into one station. The first piece to go up was the Russian-built segment Zarya,
launched on November 20th 1998. Zarya by the way is the Russian word for “Dawn,” so,
hooray symbolism. The first piece built by the US was carried up by the space shuttle
two weeks later and was named Unity. Again, symbolism, although for me the most symbolic
part of all this is the fact the Russian rockets were originally conceived to carry nuclear
weapons but now carried pieces of a space station that would be forever locked in a
mechanical handshake with their former enemies. And it carried a pizza hut logo. I’m
serious. The next piece was delayed a few years but when the Russian Zvezda service
module finally launched the rocket had a pizza hut logo slapped on the side. The publicity
stunt reportedly cost Pizza Hut one million dollars which suited the Russians who needed
the funding. If you’re wondering why you’ve never seen a NASA launch that looks like a
NASCAR driver's jumpsuit, they have a policy against it. What’s more a sign of the formerly communist
east and capitalist west coming together than a 30 foot tall Pizza Hut logo on a russian
rocket I ask you? Anyway, once Zvezda connected to Zarya, the space station could function
as a home for humanity in space continuously, and since November of 2000 that’s exactly
what it’s done.
Still it had a lot of growing to do and it did so in both directions, with Russian modules
extending from Zarya while modules from NASA, the European Space Agency and the Japanese
Aerospace Exploration Agency branched off of Unity. The Canadian space agency contributed
a robotic arm that was used to help with assembly as well as for grabbing spaceships and guiding
them to the station. When this happens by the way, it’s called berthing, not docking,
so that was a fun fact I learned researching this. The arm has the same grabber on each
side so it can walk end-over-end around the station like the craziest space-slinky you
ever saw, and while other agencies chose symbolic names like Dawn and Unity, Canada called their
arm Canadarm. Gotta love it.
To give all these pressurized modules and robot arms power the station uses enormous
solar panel arrays connected to a long beam. Today the truss is connected to the Destiny
module right by Unity, but over the course of the station’s assembly pieces of it had
to be temporarily in other places. Really the whole assembly process was like the most
high-stakes game of musical chairs in history. This is where Shane Kimbrough comes in, remember
the NASA astronaut I introduced a while ago? Sorry I talked so long I just wanted you to
appreciate his work. His first space flight was to the incomplete ISS in 2008, and he
actually helped build the station.
That was a while ago when all that new equipment came up back then. And during that short mission,
it was only about 10 days we were attached to the space station for that mission. So
we really just deliver the equipment and hook some of it up but we didn't get the chance
to utilize any of it. So on my last mission and on this mission has been great to actually
be able to use those things use the gym we brought up as well in other systems. So it's
been really great to see the station grow and kind of mature over these last couple
of decades. And to be a small part of that. It's pretty cool.
The main workhorse that delivered the largest pieces to the station was NASA’s space shuttle.
It was so vital it’s operational life had to be extended in order to finish the ISS.
Finally in 2011, the space station was completed. Well, “completed” isn’t really the right
word because it’s still getting updated today. Which poses an interesting problem.
Remember the very first pieces launched in 1998, with some components dating back to
the mid-80s. How do they make a frankenstein monster of technologies from 5 different decades
work together?
You think we'd have the latest and greatest technology. But honestly, as robust as most
of the equipment has to be in the testing process, it has to go through, we're just
by default, not going to have the latest and greatest. But we have some really good stuff,
like we just installed some new solar arrays and a couple spacewalks to mine I did that
are really boosting the energy of the space station, and it will for for years to come,
which is pretty special to be part of that. We just recently also upgraded some data and
conductivity issues, you know, issues that we had, that's all kind of upgraded now. And
a lot of that's not just for our personal use on computers, but it's the space station
and mission control teams around the world can send data back and forth and make sure
that we're keeping the space station where we're supposed to be in the right orbits and
in the right attitude and orientation and those sorts of things. So we, I would say
we are relevant, and we're current, we're not certainly the latest and greatest in technology,
unfortunately, for us, but that's just the way it is. But we've been doing that for again
many decades. And it's proven to be a great system.
By the time the ISS was finished the price tag to launch and assemble all the pieces
was a whopping $100 billion dollars, making it the most expensive single object humanity
has ever built. It’s so expensive Jeff Bezos could just barely afford to buy two. That’s
of course before factoring in the cost of running it, which for NASA is about another
3-4 billion per year. And yet I still don’t think we appreciate this glorious hunk of
space metal enough. Sure it’s huge, 420 metric tonnes as I’m sure some of you remember.
But it’s all the way up there in space, 420 kilometers up I’m sure the same group
of you also remember. It’s hard to appreciate the gravitas of it when it’s whizzing by
so far away. So I asked Thomas Pasquet what it was like for him when he saw the fully
assembled station for the first time in 2016.
Oh, it felt like I was in you know, science fiction movies felt like Star Wars you know
when they get to the Death Star like is huge, big of those huge big battleships that floating
space. That's what it felt like that because the soyuz is pretty tiny. I mean, it's one
and a half tons that come back to Earth but still you get to the station. I remember seeing
the solar rays from the corner of my eyes from the side, the side window on the space
station and that seems So far away, and then I could see the, the entire structure of the
ISS is really felt unreal. Like it's a feat of engineering like something so big, so complex
really actually does exist in space. And that shocked me. And he got real for the first
time that when I got this view on my first flight, that was unbelievable.
Which brings us nicely to today. Now that the station has been fully operational for
over a decade, just what have they been doing up there? Is the station an expensive vanity
project or is there more to it than that? Come back for episode two when we talk about
the ISS today and I ask the astronauts the number-one suggested question I got from social
media. If you want to participate more in the show you can follow us on twitter and
instagram @Seeker, or follow me @HuggetOut in case I get to interview other exciting
people and need ideas for things to ask. You can also let us know what topics you think
we should cover on Seeker+. It can be anything; fish brains, monsoon rains, orangutans. Drop
your ideas in the comments and I’ll seek you later. Seek
you later was a fan suggested sign off by the way and I love it. Why didn’t I think
of that? It's so good.