- On November 20 the science of engineering
will take a giant step into the 21st century. After 15 years of delays
and controversy, the first module of the International Space Station known
as "Zarya" -- Russian for "Sunrise" -- will blast off
a launch pad in Kazakstan. During the next five years, if all goes as planned,
an international group of astronauts will take turns assembling the 43
pieces built by engineers and technicians in 16 countries. So begins the
first global collaboration to build a way station to the stars.
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- When completed, the International Space
Station will appear to 95 percent of the world's people as a star skimming
across the morning and evening skies.
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- By 20th century standards it's a rather
puny engineering project. The space station will stretch 356 feet by 290
feet, and weigh about a million pounds. That's one-quarter the size of
the Empire State Building (1,454 feet), and that's much, much lighter than
the Golden Gate Bridge (17 billion pounds). At any given time, the station
will be only 250 miles from Earth -- or roughly the equivalent of a four-hour
drive on an interstate.
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- What makes the International Space Station
this century's most challenging, breathtaking and complex construction
project is: location, location, location. In space orbit, microgravity
rules.
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- It will also hold the dubious distinction
of being the only $40 billion engineering project with its destruction
built-in. After 12 to 15 years in slow free fall, the entire structure
will crash into the Pacific Ocean.
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- Building In Space
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- This project requires its builders to
take along all their own food, water, air, supplies and power, but the
extraordinary demands don't stop there. It also forces them to work without
the crutch of gravity, which makes moving huge components easy, but putting
them together extraordinarily awkward and tiresome. And the crews must
live insulated from an environment so hostile that without proper protection
their blood would boil off in moments.
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- But space station supporters insist that
the ends justify the means. From the station's maze of modules and transoms
may emerge a cure for osteoporosis, methods to reduce air pollution, new
miracle materials, a better way to study growing cancer cells, and improved
methods to cleanup toxic waste. Hundreds of scientists and engineers will
design thousands of experiments to be performed on the space vessel that
has been described as the "The Next Logical Step."
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- That's what James Beggs calls it. Beggs,
a former NASA administrator, was the point man in convincing President
Ronald Reagan to give humankind's most ambitious modern engineering project
the go-ahead in 1983.
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- See how the Space Station stacks up against
other *20th century wonders.
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- As long ago as 1960, space scientists
from NASA, the Rand Corporation and the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences
put a space station on the national agenda. It was shoved aside, however,
when President John F. Kennedy kicked off the race with the Soviet Union
to put a man on the moon -- a dream fulfilled by Neil Armstrong and Buzz
Aldrin nine years later.
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- After a few more American citizens left
their footprints on the moon -- plus a flag, a golf ball, a gold olive
branch, a packet of messages from the leaders of 73 nations, an Apollo
patch, and other paraphernalia - the United States asked: What's next?
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- The Space Station That Could
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- NASA engineers and scientists resurrected
the space station. It was to be built from pieces delivered by a fleet
of winged shuttles. It wasn't an end in itself, though. It was intended
to be a staging point on the way to Mars. In fact, says Beggs, if NASA's
budget and plans had remained on course, we'd now be awaiting a blastoff
to Mars, instead of fretting about whether Russia will finish the space
station's third module in time. But in the 60s and early 70s money flowed
to Vietnam. The space station was put on the back burner once again in
1972 when President Richard Nixon approved only the shuttle program.
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- Since then the project has barely stayed
alive. As recently as five years ago it survived a challenge in the U.S.
House of Representatives by one vote.
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- In the end it was foreign policy that
kept the space station aloft, says Marcia Smith, an aerospace policy analyst
at the Congressional Research Service. "What motivated the administration
in 1993," says Smith, "was to ... support a Russian market economy,
and keep Russian scientists and engineers in peaceful pursuits."
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- And so, The Next Logical Step moves forward.
Its major components read like an international shopping list. Russia is
providing the fuel, research modules, a service module and an emergency
escape spacecraft. Canada's contribution is a 55-foot robotic arm for assembly
and maintenance. Eleven member nations of the European Space Agency are
building a laboratory. Japan will provide a laboratory with an exposed
platform. The United States will provide the bulk of the ingredients, including
solar power, a laboratory, major framework and connecting segments, and
a habitation module.
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- The "Next Logical Step"
To What?
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- What the station will not be is a satellite
service, a jumping-off point into deep space, or an earth or stellar observatory.
Its research into microgravity (near weightlessness) and life sciences
is important, but pale in comparison to the bigger picture.
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- "To me, the most exciting idea is
that the station will give us the know-how to live in space," says
Howard McCurdy, professor of public affairs at American University in Washington,
and author of Space and the American Imagination. "The goal is three
years, which is the length of a Mars mission. It's an investment in the
future."
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- In six billion years the sun, the literal
light of our lives, will cease to exist. That's a long way off but eventually
we will need to find another place to live outside our solar system. There's
no way to know if 1998 is too early to put up a way station to another
planet. But since we have the technology and the international wherewithal,
the mothers and fathers of future space voyagers believe that we might
as well start now.
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