The International Space Station: a unique space project | DW Documentary

The International Space Station: a unique space project | DW Documentary

As astronauts, on this spaceship called Earth, we can only overcome challenges by working with each other rather than fighting. That’s why this was the start of a new era. The modules were made in Russia, the US, and Europe. It was a new world where we could work towards a common goal. This is a promising moment. The world had come together! Russia’s strategic nuclear missiles soon will no longer be pointed at the United States. Nor will we point ours at them. Given the current geopolitical situation, it’s hard to imagine such a huge project coming together again. Instead of building weapons in space, Russian scientists will help us to build the International Space Station. While we were preparing at the Johnson Space Centre, there was a poster saying "300 days ’til the first module launch". Then: "200 days ’til the module launch". I remember how it still seemed like a long time away. Now, 25 years have gone by. It went by really quickly. This is the most valuable machine humankind has ever built. And also the most unlikely one we’ve ever built. A new era in space travel: Today a Russian rocket launched the first module of the planned International Space Station. On the launch, it was November 20th of 1998, I had the entire crew over to my house for a watch party. So we had it on TV and we were watching this Proton rocket lift Zarya to orbit. It successfully made it to orbit and we knew that now we were going to have a mission. We were going to launch two weeks later, so it was a great joy in my family room that evening as we all watched Zarya launch. It was quite an event. We had a great time. Then when it came time to actually enter the space station for the first time, as we opened the hatch and got it open I said: Sergei, come here. And I pulled him up alongside me and the whole crew inside but if you look at how we entered, Sergei and I entered through the hatch side by side. I felt it was really important if we were going to have an International Space Station that we had to enter as an international crew. So it’s a trick question I ask people: Who was the first person to enter the space station? There was no first person. I had the privilege of being the first American and Sergei was the first Russian, but we entered side by side. Before opening the hatch, we decided with Bob Cabana who would be first and who would be second, and we also talked about why. We entered the first module together, and we also went into the second side by side. Then the whole team came, and the TV coverage began. It’s tradition to keep a logbook. And it was only right that the shuttle commander wrote the first entry. It was the start of a path that we’ve been traveling together for 25 years. I think I captured it somewhat in the first log entry for the ISS. If you read that logbook entry, the whole crew signed it. But it starts out: From small beginnings great things come. And it talked about our future and what we expected working together. And I truly believe that’s been the case. We can follow our dreams to distant stars, living and working in space for peaceful economic and scientific gain. Tonight, I am directing NASA to develop a permanently manned space station and to do it within a decade. Back then we’d also go to the Russians. We flew straight to Moscow and said, Hey, you’ve got your Mir space station let’s do some research there together. And they said, Sure, come join us. And within a few years we had actually managed to carry out several missions on board Mir. In many respects, the 90s was an ideal time to lay the groundwork for these kinds of partnerships. The Soviet Union had broken up, the idea to create a successor to Mir was in the air, and the Americans also wanted to build a space station. Those factors alone were good signs, and thankfully the collaboration came together. At the time, the Mir station was the benchmark. The first module had gone into space in 1986. So the experience that the Russians had had with the Salyut station and then with Mir was extremely valuable when it came to designing, constructing and operating the International Space Station. Russia had always been a proud nation and they were good at space travel. They were experienced. They had their Soyuz rockets for decades, they’d built space stations they had a lot of experience. Then the Americans came along and said, We don’t have the experience, but we do have the money. So what happened was that Russian experience and the American money were brought together, for the benefit of both. That was the situation back then. When I look at the partnership of the ISS, it’s truly amazing when you consider Russia, the US, Japan, Canada, the European Space Agency and all its partners we are all working together on this as one, you know, 250 or so nautical miles above the Earth, with a crew up there continuously working together. And so that’s pretty awesome. Now when I come into a training module like this one, it feels completely different. Before I flew to the ISS, this was all unfamiliar technology. It was confusing and complex. But ever since I spent a year on the ISS, everything in here feels really familiar. You think differently about the equipment because you’ve worked with it for a long time. Even with a space station, you start to have a sort of personal relationship. It feels a bit like being at home. Being in the Cupola was like the most special. We felt as a crew that we were really lucky because it had just been brought up by the crew before us and attached and all the space walks done to take the covers off. So now we were able to look down on earth. And we didn’t have the robotic arm station in there there was nothing there. You could just go float and look at earth and it was amazing. It’s really hard to tear astronauts away from the Cupola. Welcome to the Cupola. It’s about to get really bright in here. That’s a hallmark of the Cupola. When you come in from the space station and it’s light outside, then suddenly it’s dazzling. Your eyes have to adjust. Without this module, we wouldn’t have this one-of-a-kind view: 360 degrees around and 180 degrees onto the earth. It’s sublime. No other place on the station is this incredible. Just minutes before we started this video event, my colleagues here actually gave me the honor of opening the Cupola shutters and it’s an amazing view. It’s a view that I was dreaming about for years. The Earth is so beautiful from above, and so different to what you imagine. It’s not like when you zoom in on a satellite image, where everything always looks the same. The space station is moving, the solar panels are moving, spaceships dock and undock, and we use the robotic arm to grab them. I wanted to document all of that and share it with people down below. Another somersault oops, now I’ve broken something. Oh, the camera’s floating. Okay, I got it. At first it took me a while to control my body. I was constantly bumping into things or colliding with the other crew. It was quite funny at first. But by now, you’re expected to be able to control your own body and not be constantly knocking things off the walls. For the first time, a spacewalk has been carried out by an all-woman team. After 220 previous ISS spacewalks, NASA has finally completed one using only female astronauts. Back in March, Christina Koch and Jessica Meir had their spacewalk cancelled at short notice, because they had nothing to wear. I think that it is actually important to talk about it. As women we also celebrated that spacewalk. It meant a lot, especially because the suits weren’t designed with women in mind. They were designed for medium- to extra-large male bodies, which also left out smaller male astronauts as well. Not just women. Station, this is President Donald Trump. Do you hear me? I just want to congratulate you. What you do is incredible. You’re very brave people. I don’t think I want to do it, I must tell you that. But you are amazing people. They’re conducting the first ever female spacewalk to replace an exterior part of the space station. So I think it was really good that we pointed it out and then they’re changing the new space suits so that they do take into account diverse body sizes. And they will be more inclusive for the people who go fly in them. I was allowed to mix concrete in space. Concrete releases more CO2 around the world than the entire aerospace industry. So if we can examine this traditional material under very specific conditions in space, and put our results into a computer model, then we can optimize concrete and hopefully make a major contribution to combating climate change. When scientists wanted to build satellites, the ISS was always seen as a huge thing that cost too much. But if you look at its size, the research that’s been done there and the international community that’s come together around it, it’s really historic. In terms of space exploration, it’s one of humanity’s greatest achievements. This video has a serious story behind it. When I was commander Halloween came around… Their Soyuz capsule had to make an emergency landing after a major propulsion failure. US astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin had been due to join the crew of the International Space Station. I understood that I was now commanding a crew of three on the space station. And I realized our mission might take a lot longer than we’d anticipated. I said to my crew: They’re going to ask us how long we can stay up here. I asked them if they were ready, and how long they were prepared to stay. Their answer was: as long as it takes to protect this valuable station. It was part of my task to keep the crew’s spirits up amid that uncertainty, maintaining motivation and a sense of togetherness, so that nobody got frustrated. I’d brought the Darth Vader costume because I just had a feeling it might come in handy, though I didn’t know how. It turned out to be perfect. And my two colleagues were really creative. Sergei worked out a really good Elvis costume I still laugh when I think about it. And Serena was the Nutty Professor. We had a lot of fun. It was by far the saddest day of my six months in space. When you’re up there, you can’t see signs of life during the day. But at night, life on Earth is wonderfully illuminated by all the city lights. On February 24, we were flying over Europe with everything brightly lit. But suddenly we came to a dark spot, right in the middle of Europe. It was so striking. It really hit us hard. Something had happened in that country. The whole country had gone dark, with only the capital, Kyiv, still visible. Everything else was blacked out so as not to reveal targets for the Russian air strikes. We knew it was something we had to talk about. Because up there we’re a little family. And within that family we can only work together efficiently and face the dangers and emergencies that come our way if we’re all pulling together. At some point I grabbed Anton and his commander and then also Pyotr and his Russian colleagues. But I wasn’t able to start an in-depth discussion. It was immediately clear that people had been given completely different information. The argument was being made that they had to fight terrorists in the country. Well, that’s how it was on the 24th. In the days that followed, it was relativized. There was some discussion in Western media that the nine cosmonauts were sending a pro-Ukraine message. I think I can correct that here and now. Those suits had been chosen and ordered a year before the launch. So the color was pure coincidence. Later I saw Oleg flying through the station wearing a jacket. I said: Aren’t you too warm with that jacket on? He beat around the bush for a bit and then he said: We only have yellow sweaters, and we’re not allowed to wear yellow any more. Orders from Ground Control. I gave him my blue sweater so that he wouldn’t have to go around the station wearing his jacket. Another thing that happened was that Russian credit cards were blocked from Western services because of the sanctions. That included the music streaming service Spotify, one of several we were able to use. So all of a sudden my Russian colleagues had no music. That has an impact on the crew’s well-being. So we let them use our log-ins. Which isn’t entirely legal, but it was really important that they could listen to music and relax up there, just like we could. There were many reasons the ISS came into being, but the most important was co-operation. There’s still a huge demand for experiments and technologies. We’re doing more experiments onboard the ISS than ever before, and we have more researchers than ever applying to carry out experiments with us. Despite all that, the fact is there isn’t going to be a successor to the ISS as we know it today. We’ve been able to use the international Space Station to test out the capabilities that we’ll be needing to go deeper into space. So the ISS has been used not just for technology growth in terms of facilities and capabilities but also for humans and studying how the human operates in space as well. And so with the things we have learned that allows us to be able to know that we have the right systems going forward to the moon and we’re learning what we need to go to Mars. The space station is this massive entity. It’s well suited to large-scale scientific experiments. You can do all sorts of things with it. But for commercial purposes it’s just too big and expensive. Maintaining it costs far too much. That’s why private companies now want small but sophisticated space stations. They don’t need thousands of square meters of living space, just 2 or 300 would be enough. That’s why smaller ones are being built now. We’ve got contracts to help develop commercial space stations in space. We’re flying private astronauts to the ISS. And we need that time to transition from a US-involvement in this huge International Space Station to smaller commercial destinations in space where the US is one of many customers not primarily responsible so we can focus on that job of exploring beyond planet Earth. Bringing it down will be much more technically challenging than ending the operation of the Mir station. The ISS has a mass of around 420 tons, and as things stand today, it won’t be dismantled into parts with each part brought into re-entry individually. The whole thing in its entirety will have to be brought into re-entry. The typical lifespan of a space station is about 30 years. It’s like a car: after 15 years, it needs more and more repairs, and you start to think about getting something else. That’s what I think will happen with the current space station. As repairs go up, companies won’t be as interested, and they’ll let their space stations burn up in the atmosphere. From Mir we have experience in how to bring a space station out of orbit. It’s no easy task, technically speaking. I may well end up helping my colleagues to make the necessary decisions and to deal with unexpected situations if they arise. But I hope that isn’t going to happen in the near future, even though the station has already been in orbit longer than planned. NASA’s already figuring out concrete scenarios for doing it. They’ve modelled the process and they know what would happen. If the space station had to come down tomorrow, the Americans would know exactly how to do it. If it needs to be de-orbited it will probably be us. It will be one of those types of experiments, safely done and done in a way that we learn from it. There are plans to build a vehicle, send it up and have it push the ISS out of its orbit. Then they’d let it burn up over a specific location probably the South Pacific, which is also where Mir came down. Most of it would burn up and a few metal parts would crash into the sea. That’s a complex operation. You can’t just do it: it needs a great deal of precise planning. So the space agencies will definitely be involved. It may well be a really sad moment. That’s how we felt when the Mir station was brought out of orbit. But this will be especially sad because the ISS wasn’t just a place where we worked. It was also a place where we really lived. When I go outside and I see the space station going overhead, first I think about my friends who are onboard and wonder what they’re doing and how they’re doing. There were times during my mission when the three of us on the space station realized that at that exact moment, there were seven billion people on our home planet and just three members of our species outside of it. You felt like a sheep separated from the herd. And you had to smile because it was such a crazy situation. And such a privilege. The ISS means to me: cooperation and inspiration. Future stations may well be smaller and built differently. We might achieve other unique things, like going to Mars. Missions where all of humanity comes together to achieve something even more ambitious than the ISS. We all know that we can only solve the world’s major challenges by working together. And the ISS was the best proof that that’s possible.

The International Space Station (ISS) is a unique venture. It is the largest project in space the world has ever seen. Since its first component was launched into orbit on 20 November, 1998, the ISS has experienced both highs and lows.

This documentary explores the singular historical situation that made the construction of the ISS possible and hears firsthand from crew members from various nations. It sheds light on the challenges that ISS crews have faced over the years, such as the fact that, for a long time, female astronauts were unable to carry out space walks because there were no suitable space suits available for women. The films also shows how space can be deeply affected by political crises, as events such as the war in Ukraine have been felt in the confined spaces of the ISS. Nonetheless, the International Space Station is proof that nations can work together towards incredible common goals – not for nothing has it been called “humankind’s most valuable machine”. But the end fast approaching. The project was supposed to end in 2024, until the US government agreed to continue operating the ISS until 2030. In 2031, the space station is due to be brought back to Earth using a controlled process of de-orbiting.

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