INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME 2

Creating the International Space Station, written by David Harland and John Catch – pole, was published by Springer-Praxis in 2002 (ISBN 1-85233-202-6). It described the American and Soviet/Russian national space station programmes, as well as the long, convoluted history of the International Space Station (ISS), from its conception through to the safe recovery of the Expedition-3 crew in December 2001.

The International Space Station: Building for the Future continues the coverage of the construction and occupation of ISS, but first there is a brief resume of the hardware that is already in orbit. These early flights and the politics of constructing ISS during this period are covered in full in the original volume, which ended with the delivery of the Expedition-4 crew to ISS onboard the STS-108 Shuttle flight.

The original flight coverage in this new volume returns to the launch of STS-108, and the beginning of the Expedition-4 crew’s occupation of ISS. It ends with a review of how the modules developed by the European and Japanese partners will be added to the station, enhancing its research capability, and, finally, there is a brief look at the early designs for the Orion spacecraft and its Ares-1 launch vehicle. Plans for Project Constellation to carry humans back to the Moon and on to Mars are not covered as they have no bearing on the ISS programme as presently defined.

Appendices include a Flight Log and an Extravehicular Activity (EVA) Log for the period covered in this volume. Both of these logs continue from those included in the original volume. There is also a List of abbreviations and descriptions of the major ISS hardware.

As this volume begins, all was well with the station, with the exception of the Russian budget. Although many scientists were sceptical about the quantity and quality of science being performed on the station, at least science was being per­formed daily. Russian experience on their Salyut and Mir space stations had sug­gested that on average 2.5 crew members were required simply to keep up with the

ever-present requirement to maintain the station’s systems, while the third crew member spent part of their time performing scientific experiments. While Russia struggled even to fund the contracted number of Soyuz and Progress vehicles, America prepared to move forward with the construction of the Integrated Truss Structure (ITS), the huge cross beam that would house the station’s eight Solar Array Wings (SAWs), associated storage batteries, and cooling radiators. Construction of the ITS would allow the station’s primary power and cooling systems to be config­ured and take over from the temporary systems put in place when the Port-6 ITS was temporarily located on the Z-l truss. The ITS also had to be at least partially constructed, with its power and cooling systems functional, before Node-2 could be launched and docked in place to serve as a mount for the European and Japanese modules. Following the cancellation of the American Habitation Module, the European Space Agency had been paid to provide additional living quarters inside Node-3, which would now be the final pressurised module delivered to ISS, some time in 2008. This would allow the Expedition crew to be expanded to six people.

It was not to be.

The tragic loss of STS-107, Columbia, on February l, 2003, grounded the Space Shuttle fleet and threw the ISS construction schedule in the rubbish bin. Plans to have the station fully constructed by 2008, and maximise its potential through permanent occupation until 2016 were no longer realistic. The period that followed the loss of Columbia stretched the goodwill of the partners involved in the ISS programme to the full.

Ever short of money, the Russians claimed that they could not afford to produce the extra Soyuz and Progress spacecraft required to keep ISS occupied. They sug­gested that it be abandoned until Shuttle flights were resumed. NASA stated that they would only abandon the station as a last resort. Russia was therefore forced to find the additional funding, and permanent occupation continued, with two-man “care­taker crews’’ flying to and from ISS in Russian Soyuz spacecraft and being re­supplied by Russian Progress cargo ships. Despite major differences of opinion on Earth over the American-led invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, the Russians con­tinued to work amicably with the Americans on ISS.

When the Columbia Accident Investigation was over, and the Shuttle was pre­paring to Return to Flight, the Russians felt that they had paid the debt incurred when their first module, Zvezda, was only fitted out with American financial assis­tance and then launched two years late. They insisted on the return of the ISS experiment time that the Americans had negotiated away from them at that time. The relationship between the two major partners had changed significantly.

Dedicated to the memory of the crew of Soyuz-n

Georgi Dobrovolsky Vladislav Volkov Viktor Patsayev

They were called forward at short notice to occupy the world’s first space
station, Salyut-i, and perished during their return to Earth