Space station stars in a tale of endurance

More than just maintenance
The two-man crews conducted far more than just maintenance and routine servicing. Although they did not devote a substantial amount of crew hours to science, their presence allowed the existing array of scientific equipment to continue functioning under remote control from scientists back on Earth.

Widely unrecognized by outside observers, these research activities, made possible by the station’s unprecedented communications links with Earth, allowed several different teams of investigators to be running their own equipment simultaneously, day and night.

As the Russians carried the operational load of launching Soyuz spacecraft like clockwork every six months, they had the opportunity to assign the third seat on each vehicle to a short-term passenger who would go up with one long-term crew and then, a week or so later, head back to Earth with the crew that had been relieved.

Sometimes these seats were sold to European astronauts, but attempts to sell them to private space passengers fell through due to problems ranging from medical disqualifications to financial frustration. Russian replacements had to be quickly trained to fill the third seat.

It wasn’t only the third seats aboard Soyuz that were for sale. Buy late 2004, the Russians had made it clear that their original agreement to provide seats for American astronauts on a barter basis would expire at the end of 2005, and new arrangements needed to be made. But as negotiations dragged into early 2005, no resolution appeared imminent.

The true objective behind the orbits
One could well ask whether keeping the station occupied at all during the shuttle gap was worth the cost and the risk, considering that the lessons being learned about living in space aren't going to be applied to other projects in the immediate future. A small delay in learning those lessons would be unlikely to have any noticeable negative consequences.

NASA's constant boasts about how long the station has been occupied, while significant for trivia games, prove nothing about the value of doing so. Perhaps there's some subconscious space gamesmanship involved, since Russia's Mir space station was continuously occupied for about a decade — although the Russians didn't seem to derive any benefit for accomplishing this remarkable feat.

NASA The flags of the nations involved in the international space station light up workstations in NASA's high-tech Payload Operations Center, at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

And despite the real research being conducted — research that doesn't get nearly the attention it deserves, because it's not being performed by astronauts — other hyped activities look so strained as to be comical. There's a camera in a window run by high-school kids who could get better pictures from commercial imaging satellites at a fraction of the cost NASA absorbs. There's a respectable portable ultrasound device that promises genuine advances in telemedicine — but NASA has never made clear the advantage of testing it aboard a space station instead of under earthside conditions where it will have real benefits. Other medical activities involve the circular logic of learning how people react to space conditions so that people can be exposed to more space conditions.

But these questions miss the larger goal of the project. Little money would have been saved by shutting the station down for a few years, although NASA had studied the procedures required for "de-manning" the facility. The American flight control team has broadened its experience in handling long spaceflights, a lesson they were supposed to learn from the experienced Russians. In the end, they didn't have to: They learned by doing it themselves.

Perhaps the greatest long-range value is simply in accustoming the world to the notion of people living in space on a regular basis, rather than in two-week episodes. The "larger goal" is the endurance itself, and that may prove in the end to be all the justification it ever needed.

James Oberg, space analyst for NBC News, spent 22 years at the Johnson Space Center as a Mission Control operator and an orbital designer.

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