United in space: How we built the ISS

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1:09It's a living, breathing organism that has protected my friends. Liftoff is set to occur 52 minutes, 47 seconds after the hour. It is the most expensive project ever completed by humans. We have ignition and lift off of the Soyuz rocket beginning the first expedition to the International Space Station. This is a spacecraft traveling at 17 ,500 miles an hour with 8 or 10 people living and working there 365 days a year. Soyuz heading toward a link up with the International Space Station two days from now. On November 2, 2000, history was made. I'm so proud of what the three of you have done and everyone here on the ground that has worked with you to bring us to this moment Two Russians and one American entered the International Space Station for a 136-day mission Let's look upon this as the real opening of the international space frontier not just for a country, but for Russia, America, Europe, Japan, Canada, and all that are to follow.

2:23The first residents of the ISS, they began a quarter of a century of unbroken human presence in space. You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Dr Alice Bunn, President of the UK Space Trade Association, UK Space. And this is United in Space. With help from people who made the ISS a reality, I want to explore how a near-fatal disaster spurred nations to commit to the programme. Why a Moscow basement and Hollywood royalty sparked bonding between East and West. And how quick thinking and plastic tape saved the station. But first, I want to find out why the ISS has endured for a quarter of a century.

3:11And who better to ask than an astronaut known as the Queen of Space?

3:19I have spent a long time in space. I love it. I enjoy every minute of it because I appreciate the fact that this is such a short time in my life where I have this opportunity to be on the International Space Station or be in space, so I try and suck it all in and savour it all. Across three missions, Peggy Whitson racked up 665 days on the ISS, a record for a NASA astronaut. And for her, one thing stood out from her time on the station. International collaboration. My first flight, it was with two Russians. Later, I flew with Italians, French, Hungarian, Polish, Indian astronauts. I really feel that space is a place where nationality is not that important.

4:13We are there as a crew. We have to depend on each other for our lives in case of an emergency. And so it's very interesting to get to know about cultures and peoples. It just gives you a different perspective on who we are and where we come from. Peggy's experiences show why the ISS is far more than just a spacecraft. It is a unique 25-year partnership that's been home to nearly 300 people from 26 nations. A powerful symbol of what humanity is capable of when we all work together. But the station's history begins in the 1980s. when the superpowers were battling for space supremacy. Our progress in space, taking giant steps for all mankind, is a tribute to American teamwork and excellence.

5:06And we can be proud to say we are first, we are the best, and we are so because we're free. Tonight I am directing NASA to develop a permanently manned space station and to do it within a decade. In 1984, US President Reagan announced Space Station Freedom, a partnership with Japan, Canada and the European Space Agency. But with that programme still in the design phase, the Soviets unveiled a revolutionary space station. Now, yesterday, May put 1986 into the history books, the Soviets launched a huge new laboratory which will form the heart of the world's first permanently manned space station, Named Mir, the Russian word for peace, the craft has the capacity for six other space modules to dock onto it simultaneously.

5:57Mir's modular design was groundbreaking. A space station that could grow as new capsules were added and where crews could stay over a year in space. It seemed that the US and her partners were being left behind. But geopolitics was about to intervene. I'm standing on top of the Berlin Wall, which for years has been the most potent symbol of the division of Europe. In 1989, communism began to fall across Eastern Europe. And there can be few better illustrations of the changes which are sweeping across this continent than the party which is taking place here on top of it tonight. I want to be an astronaut.

6:39Two years later, the Soviet Union collapsed, plunging Russia and its space programme into economic freefall. And in the US, Space Station Freedom was also facing a funding crisis. At that point, NASA had spent$11 billion on trying to organize and execute the Freedom Program, but there was not a single pound of flight hardware that was ready to go. Former shuttle astronaut Bill Shep Shepard found himself at the center of the debate. Our Congress was on the verge of cancelling it, and so I got involved with what essentially was a last-ditch effort to convince Washington that NASA could execute a space station programme.

7:30Then out of the blue, NASA received a lifeline from an unlikely source, a fax from their cash-strapped Russian counterparts, suggesting they collaborate on a joint space station. The Russians had a very viable design for space stations, so they were very experienced in what you would call long-duration flight. They just had a lot of technique and equipment. We could do similar things, but I would say not as robustly as the things the Russians were using. But US politicians still needed convincing, so NASA suggested Shuttle Mir. Their astronauts would join the Russians on a series of four-month-long missions to Mir for a cost of nearly$500 million.

8:20It was kind of the wild times of Moscow. The shops just have very little produce. We couldn't get milk, and so we had a Russian cleaner. This lady would bring milk for our son Ian, who was one and a half, in a big bucket, and we'd boil it on the stove. British-American astronaut Michael Fole was one of those sent to Russia. My formal training was probably 80 % Russian language, and about 20 % was technical, because they didn't want to tell us much about how things worked. Someone asked the head of the Russian MIR program, what's Mike's function? He said, Michael is the useful weight. I thought, well, at least I'm going to be useful.

8:59Two, one, we have booster ignition and liftoff of this space shuttle Atlantis, maintaining America's constant presence in space. In May 1997, Michael began his four-month stay on Mir. As I float in, I'm thinking, oh, man, this is where I'm going to be staying. It smells a bit like a garage and a bit oily and then really, really cluttered, but orderly clutter because it's all been bungeed off to the sides of the tube that we're flowing through. It's a bit like going through an intestine, I would imagine. And I suddenly smell hot meat and potato food, better than space shuttle food. and heard this boombox beating disco music.

9:38And I thought, oh, not so bad. Michael was joining a crew who had already been in space for two months and he was keen to find a way to connect with them. There were a lot of things going on, but one of the things was the toilet was broken. I said, can I fix the toilet? It meant changing out all of the urine tubes. Kind of a messy business, but it's important because we recycled the urine into water that we would then turn into oxygen and etc. They let me at it after getting permission from Moscow. Moscow was a bit dubious, but that really, I think, helped me bond with them because I had done the dirty job.

10:12And as a result, when bad things happened, I ended up being well integrated into that crew. And they would answer my questions when I asked how things worked if I insisted that I wasn't doing it for spying. Vasily, the commander, would sometimes float by me and go, Langley, which is where the CIA hit pay story go, Cambridge. Like, Cambridge were your spies, Vasili.

10:38Good afternoon and welcome to the Johnson Space Centre for today's press conference on this morning's activities aboard the Russian space station Mir. A few weeks into Michael's mission, NASA summoned journalists to their base in Houston. As you've probably heard, there has been an event that occurred on the Mir last night, our time, right around 4 a.m. Central Time or maybe slightly before. or the crew of Mir were fighting for their lives. The Russian managers decided they wanted to have Vasily and Sasha try and fly a cargo ship without using radar. Well, this was a terribly, badly thought-out experiment.

11:16When you bring a spaceship in, you're both travelling at about 17 ,000 miles per hour, and Vasily, not using the radar, not knowing how fast it was going, and not knowing how far away it was, was just looking out the window and at the TV screen to try and fly by remote control. So I went off to the back of the mirror, which is where it was meant to dock, looked out through a tiny window, and I said, I can't see it, I can't see it. Well, that told me something was wrong. At that moment, there was a big kathump. I saw the walls of the station move around me. At that moment, I did think I was going to die because I thought it was going to rip the station open.

11:56And then I felt my ears popping. I thought, oh, it gripes that there's a hole in the station. We are going to asphyxiate it at a certain point. We had to stop the leak, and Sasha and I disconnected all these power cables so that we could put the hatch in place to stop the air going into space. The consequence was that we cut off all the power, and the batteries ran down as we went into darkness. And at that point, the station goes dead. With no electricity, the stabilising gyroscopes stopped working and the station began to spin uncontrollably. Now the solar panels couldn't collect power from the sun and recharge the batteries.

12:38But there was a Soyuz escape module attached to Mia. And Michael remembered a tale about a series of small rockets on the spacecraft called thrusters. I had heard a story that you could use the Soyuz thrusters thrusters to stop the spinning of the station. Vasili initially rejected that idea, but I started to discuss with Sasha, the flight engineer, how one could go about using the Soyuz to try and stop the tumbling. And I'm asking these questions, how much fuel will we use? Oh, you don't need to know. I said, well, how much of what we need to go home could we use? And eventually we persuaded Vasili to go and try it.

13:16We got it basically in a slow spin that allowed the solar rays to point to the sun. And about two days later, Russian ground controllers in Moscow were able to fire thrusters through the computer to stop the whole spin entirely. But during that time frame, of course, it hit the news. Of course, it was a big deal. Jim Bergamo, KTRK TV, ABC in Houston. In your mind, are the problems becoming serious enough and frequent enough to where you are concerned that maybe this is an unsafe vehicle. The other question, the bigger question, of course, is what does all this mean for a future cooperation on the International Space Station?

13:57Russia was very embarrassed by it. And the questions in the US Congress were, let's just stop, let's just stop. You know, this is too dangerous to continue. With the future of the Joint Space Station hanging in the balance, it was up to the head of NASA, Dan Golden, to convince the politicians. I can't begin to overemphasise what we have learned. We believe we are going to have a much safer space station as a result of the experiences we have on Mir. On the 29th of January 1998, the US, Russia, Canada, Japan and 11 members of the European Space Agency agreed to build a station with a similar modular design to Mir.

14:41Their deal set out NASA as the leader of the project's development, with Russia the second in command, and placed Bill Shep Shepard at the centre of a political storm. Because the Americans were taking the lead on the bulk of the hardware that was flying in space, one of the stipulations was that the Americans would provide the commander, and that was going to be me. And so this was really interesting because here I was getting ready to fly in space with two highly experienced cosmonauts, Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gizhenko, both of whom had spent many, many months in space. My total flight experience was less than three weeks.

15:24And so the Russians were not super happy that some American new guy was going to be in charge. The Kremlin did win one concession. As most of the station's systems and modules were derived from Mir, the majority of training would happen in Moscow and in Russian. To help integrate the crew, NASA sent 26-year-old instructor Ginger Kerik to the Russian training base in Star City. I grew up in a household where I wasn't allowed to cross the street. I had to be in bed before the sun set. So when I flew down there for my first trip, it was a little intimidating. I remember seeing guards by the Coca-Cola machine, armed guards, and I thought, oh my gosh, where have I landed?

16:13So I get there and I'm meeting with my very first instructor, and they could not have been more welcoming, more charming. They were great. Despite the warm welcome, it soon became clear there was a problem. The Americans were finding it difficult to bond with the Russians. They would be very reluctant to maybe invite you over to their apartment for dinner. And I think it's because they, for the most part, knew what Americans had when we were back in the U.S. And they didn't want to basically showcase how little they had. And they were ashamed. And we thought, you know what? There's a basement in the cottages where our astronauts were living.

16:54And we thought, that would be a good place. That would be a great place. I had always wanted to have kind of like a bar where we can just, it doesn't matter, you can let your hair down. There was a bar somewhere in Houston that was closing. So we went over there and, oh man, they had a lot of stuff that they were just going to give away. So we put all this stuff on the plate, a pool table, a piano, a couch. And we got all of that to Star City and then we set up the bar. Just hours before the grand opening, Ginger received a mysterious message. The NASA office phone rings. And it's a person on the end of the line who is a personal assistant of a very famous actor.

17:41He would like a tour of the training facility. He's a huge space fan. And I'm like, shut up, this is, who is this? And then the individual pulls up in the car, walks out of the car, walks to me and introduce himself, and I was surprised to see Tom Hanks. And I said, hey, today's the grand opening of the bar, and I made a cake and everything. And so I explained to him what we've done, and he says, oh my gosh, yeah, I'd love to stay for the grand opening of the bar. He's sitting on the top of the bar. I don't think he was able to have alcohol, and so he's drinking orange juice. So I came in and the bar was full of people and there was Tom Hanks.

18:28We had a great party and he signed the bar and took pictures with everybody and it was just, I couldn't have planned that. And you can't make this stuff up. It was awesome. It was such a good day. Shep's hunch proved right. The bar became a hit with a whole Expedition One team, regardless of nationality. But it really turned into a good thing because the Russians would meet at the bar, you know, for a little debrief and a few libations. They would do that at the drop of a hat. And this became a really functional venue for smoothing out any of the issues that we might have. It became a fixture.

19:14Even today, the bar is still in operation in Star City. Main engine start, six engines up and running. On November 20th, 1998, the station's first module, Zarya, blasted into space. Liftoff of the Proton Rocket and the Zarya Control Module, the International Space Station, is underway. Two weeks later, the American Unity Module docked to Zarya. Further missions added technical hardware, food, water and the crew's living quarters. And on October 31, 2000, the station was ready to receive its first residence. Good morning, everybody. This is Mission Control Kolyov. Welcome to NASA's live coverage of the launch of the first expedition crew to the International Space Station.

20:03We were basically underneath a low cloud. The shuttle never would have flown that day because we want to have optical tracking of the shuttle, so if we can't see it, we can't launch. But the Russians said, hey, no big deal. This is not something we worry about. We're good to go here. Here are the crew members walking out of basically the crew quarters. Bill Shepard, the commander of Expedition One, along with Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalov. For launch day, you have to board a bus. But before you board the bus, there's some rituals that have to occur. Also the traditional blessing before the crew members head over to the suit-up room.

20:45This man in full priest garb comes out and he takes this thing and dips it in water and starts blessing him. But he's spraying water all over the place, all over everyone. And people are like diving and it was just hilarious. And it's getting up the crew members nose and just what is happening. And so once the crew members got blessed, then they could go downstairs and get in the bus. I didn't have children, but I thought, I wonder if this is what moms feel like on the first day of school when their kids go to the bus. Because it was just, oh my God, it's really happening. They're in the bus. And now the crew members heading out for the trip to the launch pad.

21:35Known as Site 254. It's actually the very launch pad that has been used for every crewed launch from Baikonur, including that of the first human to be sent into space, Yuri Gagarin, almost 40 years ago. You're in the middle of a crowd of 400 people right at the base of the rocket. Now, this is a fully fueled, ready-to-go machine. You know, it's about a million and a half pounds of stuff that wants to go boom. And you've got 400 people right at the base of it, yelling and screaming and drinking, and some of them are even smoking. I mean, if you had to do this in Florida with a space shuttle, you wouldn't find more than five humans within three miles of that thing just because it's so dangerous.

22:20But here you are. We're 400 of your best friends right at the base of the rocket. That was pretty surprising. I'm in the launch viewing area. And now I got there just before the crew gets out of the bus and they start walking up those steps. and as soon as they got up those steps, they pose and they take that final picture. And then the camera feed cut off. And I don't know why, but then I start hyperventilating because I can't see them anymore. And I don't know what happened to me, but I couldn't breathe. And there was a Russian general. He starts partying the crowd because it was pretty thick.

23:03And he's like, It's the mother of the crew. It's the mother of the crew. He plops me in front of this TV that's even closer to the launch than I was before. And he's like, see, you know, in Russian. Everything's OK. Everything's OK. And so I'm like, OK. But I felt like the biggest dork on the planet. T-minus 30 seconds. Now 30 seconds away from the launch of the first expedition crew to the International Space Station. It got to be 10.30 in the morning. The time was right. They punched the button. Away we went. Lift off of the Soyuz rocket, beginning the first expedition to the International Space Station and setting the stage for permanent human presence in space.

23:55You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service.

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25:39I'm Dr. Alice Bunn, and this is United in Space, an exploration of the life and times of the International Space Station. On October the 31st, 2000, Expedition One, containing two Russians and an American, launched to the ISS. Liftoff of the Soyuz rocket, beginning the first expedition to the International Space Station and setting the stage for permanent human presence in space. Called Expedition One, they began 25 uninterrupted years of humans living in orbit. We have initial contact, initial contact of the Soyuz capsule with the Expedition One crew to the International Space Station. Contact occurring exactly...

26:20Two days later, on November 2nd, 2000, Expedition One entered the International Space Station. And the head of NASA, Dan Golden, was on hand to congratulate Bill Shep Shepard. Shep, I want to say to you and your crew that this is an unbelievable experience. You were involved from the very beginning of the redesign, and it's just so emotional to me. I'm so proud of what the three of you have done and everyone here on the ground that has worked with you to bring us to this moment. Let's look upon this as the real opening of the international space frontier, not just for a country, but for Russia, America, Europe, Japan, Canada, and all that is to follow.

27:14It was a buzz. There were people everywhere and cameras everywhere. where we celebrated for the first 30 minutes of them being in there. And then now I'm like, OK, we've got to get this installed and that installed and that installed. So I go back to my console and just wait to see if I can help. Once the crew had set up the essential support systems, spacecraft began delivering more components of the growing station. Vast solar panels provided a much-needed energy boost. and in the Destiny Laboratory, Shep and his crew began experiments. The lab is a little over 30 feet, hatch to hatch, and it's full of bays for racks.