The International Space Station Turns 20: It Was Once a Symbol of Global Cooperation | QDaily Business History

"A chance to cooperate on a shared scientific goal, existing largely above politics."

At 22:50 Beijing time on the 20th, 400 kilometers above Earth, American Serena Auñón-Chancellor, Russian Sergey Prokopyev, and German Alexander Gerst will go live to mark the 20th anniversary of the launch of the International Space Station (ISS).

Five months ago they rode Russia's Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft up to the ISS. After a six-month tour, they return to Earth on December 20.

Today they will link up with Earth on YouTube, Twitter, and other social platforms and answer questions from people online. Network lag and all, viewers can still receive messages from the station — and watch, once every 45 minutes, a sunrise or a sunset from space.

For 20 years the ISS has circled Earth at 17,500 kilometers per hour. As of midnight Beijing time on the 20th, it had been running for 7,304 days, 9 hours, 40 minutes, and 1 second. Astronauts and scientists from 15 countries work aboard it in rotating groups of no more than six at a time — running experiments, eating, sleeping, exercising, and now and then livestreaming on social media.

Over the past two days the crew took delivery of two shipments of supplies, equipment, and food sent up from Earth: one from Russia's uncrewed Progress 71 cargo ship, the other from the U.S. Cygnus cargo ship.

At 5:28 a.m. Eastern time the day before, the Canadian-built robotic arm on the outside of the station grabbed the incoming cargo craft and took hold of the latest batch of supplies in the station's 20-year history.

Among the goods was a 20th-anniversary present for the station — a combined recycler and 3D printer that can take in any plastic, melt it down, and print new tools.

Soon a non-human crewmate will join the work. CIMON, an artificial-intelligence robot built by Europe's Airbus and IBM for the German Aerospace Center, was switched on for testing last week. The spherical robot shows expressions on a screen, hangs in the air, and can take orders, understand, speak, and fly — exactly like something out of a science-fiction film.

The other way of marking the anniversary took place on Earth. On November 18-19, Russia held a two-day commemoration in Moscow. The heads of the space agencies of the 15 countries that built the ISS were to attend and discuss the next round of cooperation in space exploration; after all these years in orbit, the station is due to be retired in 2025 and brought back down. But NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine did not come, sending a representative instead, with no reason given for his absence. NASA has already said plainly that Russia may have no part in the next-generation space station.

Given the state of U.S.-Russia relations these past few years, that is not a surprising decision. But the people who once pushed to make the ISS real probably never pictured this ending.

The ISS began in Cold War conflict, yet it was born of the vision of global cooperation that followed the Cold War's end, when 14 other countries joined in to build it and go looking for the wider resources of space.

That vision has since been replaced by conflict. Brexit, the U.S.-Russia standoff over Ukraine, the "Russiagate" investigation, trade wars — the station has been in orbit for 20 years, and the world it left behind is unrecognizable.

Getting 460 Tons Into Space Was Not Easy

The space station is the only place people can live once they leave Earth. It circles the planet at 28,000 kilometers per hour, between 51.6 degrees north and 51.6 degrees south of the equator. That speed keeps it in permanent free fall about 400 kilometers up, so it never "falls down." Like the Moon around Earth, the ISS is set so that its rotation and its orbit take the same time — a month — which keeps its observation module pointed at the ground and lets it study Earth.

A space station is a laboratory of the kind humans build on Earth, moved into outer space, where scientific, biological, and technological research goes on. The ISS is the 10th space station humans have launched and assembled. It is huge — a truss 108 meters long, modules spanning 73 meters, bigger than a Boeing 747, with a total weight of 460 tons.

Something that big and that heavy could not go up in one piece. In plain terms the whole thing worked like building with Lego: the participating countries launched blocks with different jobs, and the blocks were assembled into the station. Because each block did a different job, the designs, sizes, weights, equipment, and supplies all differed. Twenty-nine flights by U.S. shuttles including Endeavour and Discovery, plus four by Soviet Progress and Proton rockets, carried into orbit the station's 17 modules, 10 trusses, 3 external platforms, and 3 maintenance systems; the heaviest single launch weighed 19.3 tons. Soviet Progress craft flew about 30 more cargo resupply runs in the same period.

Twenty years ago today, the station's first block — the Russian-built Zarya Functional Cargo Block — rose from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on a Proton heavy-lift rocket. The three-stage Proton put the module into a 220.4-by-339.6-kilometer orbit; during the ascent the module's systems idled to save power.

Once it reached that first elliptical orbit and separated from the Proton's third stage, a set of pre-programmed commands woke its systems and unfolded its solar arrays and communication antennas. Using the Russian Kurs docking navigation system, Zarya docked automatically and remotely with the service module already in orbit. After several days of testing, controllers commanded it into an orbit about 240 statute miles high.

As the base module, Zarya supplied attitude control, communications, and power for everything that came after. A month after it went up — on December 6, 1998 — the U.S.-built Unity node module launched and joined it.

The next module went up on July 2, 2000: the Zvezda Service Module. Built by Russia's Korolev Rocket and Space Corporation, it gave the station a livable environment and life-support systems, and it remains the only ISS component Russia paid for and built on its own. With Zvezda in place, people could finally work aboard the station. On November 2 that year, American astronaut William Shepherd and Russian cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev made up "Expedition 1", riding a spacecraft up to the International Space Station.

The ISS was meant to be finished in 2003 and to begin a 10-to-15-year crewed run. But the total budget ran far past NASA's estimate, and building it proved harder than expected. In 2002, Brazil pulled out of the project after failing to deliver on schedule the "Express" pallet for mounting external payloads. The next year a technical failure destroyed the U.S. shuttle Columbia, and NASA grounded the entire shuttle fleet.

In the two and a half years the fleet stayed grounded, the station's configuration changed. Fewer shuttles flew to it, expedition crews and cargo came to depend entirely on Russia's Soyuz craft, some modules and other structures were canceled or could not be replaced, and scientific work shrank accordingly. The finish date kept slipping, until assembly was finally done in 2011.

At 460 tons the station sounds vast, and it is often likened to a house with six bedrooms, but it normally holds no more than six people at once (during a 2009 NASA mission it briefly held 13). Each long-term resident lives in a pod the size of a phone booth, which serves as both sleeping quarters and private space.

Since the first crew arrived in 2000, scientists have used the station for experiments impossible on Earth. In life science, for instance, researchers can use a range of measurements to judge how gravity affects an astronaut's body, which sharpens work on the brain, the nervous system, bones, and muscles. The station also gives humanity a long-term perch in orbit for watching Earth and the sky — an unmatched vantage point on earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions below, and on the position, distribution, motion, physical state, chemical makeup, and evolution of the bodies above.

As a platform for research and for developing the resources of space, the station gathers up the achievements of human science and technology, and it is the most expensive device people have ever made. From the decision to build it in 1993 to its completion in 2011, more than $100 billion went into it (not adjusted for inflation); the United States, the main funder, puts in $3 to 4 billion a year.

Going to space is still a symbol of the technological frontier, because it is so hard. By NASA's count, as of October 2018 only 222 people from 18 countries had visited the ISS, six in ten of them American.

Born to Win the Cold War, Made Real by the Cold War's End

Looking up at the stars and exploring the long reach of the universe is one of humanity's most romantic goals. But the first plans to leave Earth, build space stations, and reach the Moon came out of a contest between two superpowers.

In 1957 the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, humanity's first step out of the atmosphere and the opening of the Cold War space race with the United States. In the race that followed to put people in space, the U.S. got to the Moon first, in 1969, while the Soviet Union turned to space stations instead. On April 19, 1971, after more than six launches of the Soyuz spacecraft — a series originally prepared for a Moon mission — the Soviet Union launched the first space station in history, the Salyut 1 laboratory, designed by Kerim Kerimov.

Two years after the Soviet launch, the United States, unwilling to fall behind, launched a station of its own, Skylab — a workshop, a solar observatory, and the systems astronauts needed to stay alive and run experiments.

Over the next few years the Soviet Union launched six more stations in numbered order, each generation safer and more reliable than the last. From Salyut 6 on, the stations improved their docking ports and their propulsion orbits, and by the Soviet Mir station in 1986 the design had become a multi-module station built up block by block — the assembly model the ISS uses today. In July 1975 the U.S. and the Soviet Union had already flown a joint mission, though a small one.

Skylab ran for six years before it was retired and came back to Earth in 1979. The Soviet Union still had several stations up there at the time. The space race was still on, and putting a station in orbit was, technically, second in difficulty only to landing on the Moon. After becoming president in the 1980s, Reagan stressed the importance of space exploration and in 1983 proposed the "Star Wars" (Strategic Defense Initiative, SDI) program — an anti-ballistic-missile system in space. Against that backdrop, Reagan also proposed a permanently crewed station in Earth orbit: Space Station Freedom.

The BBC reported that Freedom was to be more than an orbiting laboratory — it was to be a way station in space. Besides laboratories it would carry a fully equipped infirmary and recreation facilities, and there were plans to add a hangar for repairing satellites and spacecraft.

Against that same backdrop, the Soviet Union hurried a new station into place, launching the more capable Mir in 1986. Freedom, meanwhile, went nowhere. In between came the 1986 Challenger shuttle explosion, which gradually stranded the whole American space program. In 1991, looking at $118 billion (in the money of the day) to build a station designed to run for 30 years, then-President George H.W. Bush preferred to spend it on going back to the Moon.

At the same time, the Soviet Union broke apart in 1991, the Cold War ended, and the space race stopped. Many American space projects were shelved: the shuttle program lost its push, and Freedom looked less necessary than ever.

The new Russia needed money for everything, and its space agency's budget shrank. In 1989, under the Soviet Union, the space budget was 6.9 billion rubles, 1.5% of GDP. By 1993, as Buran, Russia's most celebrated space company, closed its doors, the space workforce had fallen by 10% and the whole space program's budget had dropped to 0.23% of GDP. By Russia's economic crisis of 1998 the budget had shrunk by 80%, and the space workforce numbered only about 100,000.

The Cold War ended in 1991, but what came next was far from settled, and the risk of nuclear war never really went away. That same year the U.S. Congress passed the Nunn-Lugar Act — a bill built on "cooperative threat reduction," proposed by the American politician Sam Nunn, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and fellow senator Richard Lugar, which held that during the Cold War the Soviet Union and the United States should negotiate disarmament agreements to lower the nuclear threat.

That year the United States began sending Russia economic aid and announced it would look into defense cooperation with Moscow. By 1993 Bill Clinton was president, and his administration backed cooperative threat reduction directly.

Clinton also believed the space station stood for American leadership in space and should not be abandoned. For all these reasons, American and Russian space officials met in 1993 to talk about building a station together. The joint declaration that followed, with 14 other countries, said the station would be built together for peaceful purposes. China also asked to take part, but U.S. worries kept it out.

Yesterday's rivals suddenly joining hands set off plenty of argument at the time. People worried about the security of the technology, and about whether Russia could still carry a space project that size.

In July and August 1993, three negotiators from the Russian space agency went to the United States to discuss whether Mir and Freedom could be merged. The two sides talked for nearly two months and reached an agreement, and in those talks the United States, as the main payer, naturally led. Under the deal the U.S. would pay Russia $400-600 million over the next four years, and the two would redesign Freedom together into what became the International Space Station. Until the joint station was finished, American astronauts could also visit and use Mir. The agreement also capped Russia's plan to copy the Soviet Union and launch eight stations in seven years, so as to avoid needless "competition."

The New York Times wrote that the deal came together largely because of the problems each country faced. Russia was short of money for everything; the U.S. government wanted to push a station forward and kept being voted down by Congress over the budget. The Clinton administration later said in a report that building the station with Russia would cut costs by two-thirds, and argued that with the Cold War over such cooperation was inevitable.

Opinions on building the station are still split today. Some call its finances a bottomless pit — NASA's roughly $19 billion annual budget goes in large part to the ISS, and a 2016 NASA report put maintenance alone at $2.7 billion, not counting the commercial cargo ships that resupply the station or the "ride fees" American astronauts pay to fly on Russian Soyuz craft.

Supporters answer that the station provides an excellent research setting for life science, biotechnology, space medicine, materials science, fluid physics, and combustion science, and that from it people can work toward space factories, space power plants, space tourism, permanent settlements ("space castles"), and emigration to other planets.

In the decades since humans first boarded the ISS, scientists from 15 countries have made real gains in biology, space science, and basic physics: findings on how fragile the human body is in space; protein crystals grown on the station and used to develop new drugs for illnesses such as muscular dystrophy and cancer; electricity generated from microbes; and water purification, along with work on cosmic rays and dark matter.

Researchers also use the station to test space-exploration systems and other technology not yet fully mastered, such as guidance, navigation, and control for satellites and spacecraft. Some of the experiments have found practical uses: robotics Canada developed for the station has improved surgeons' technique, the U.S. has studied the link between everyday diet and osteoporosis, and Russia has studied how the space environment affects the cardiovascular system, the respiratory system, and bone. All of it makes the station's value hard to measure.

That Kind of Cross-Border Cooperation Now Feels Almost Unimaginable

Twenty years on, the picture is entirely different.

The idea that Russia, after the Soviet collapse, would end up with the same political system and values as the U.S. and Europe never came true. Vladimir Putin is now serving a fourth term, and the opposition can do less and less.

Doubt about a single world order is not confined to the former communist world. Brexit and Donald Trump's election have set democracies doubting themselves, and us-against-them politics fills the front pages of American media and everyday conversation alike.

Inside Europe, conservatives have gained more say than before in every major national election. Faced with America's back-and-forth policy, France and Germany recently proposed a European army to shed their reliance on NATO — and NATO itself is, of course, one of Trump's many targets.

As for trade conflict, a bit player in 2017, this year it suddenly became real, and it already seems to be taken for granted.

Even the ISS, once above politics, could not escape the effects — directly, from the clash between the U.S. and Russia.

During the 2014 Crimean crisis, the United States and the European Union imposed economic sanctions on Russia. That year Russia was hit by a financial crisis, and President Putin accused Western countries of engineering it. The U.S. military at one point sent troops in under the cover of exercises to four Eastern European countries: Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.

Even after Trump, generally seen as friendly to Russia, took office, the standoff in Eastern Europe did not ease; it went further. Visiting Kyiv last year, Trump's defense secretary, Jim Mattis, said the Pentagon was considering supplying Ukraine with defensive weapons.

The U.S. Justice Department's "Russiagate" investigation into the 2016 election is still running, and its findings so far point directly at Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU. In the U.S. congressional midterms that just ended, foreign interference was again a hot topic.

The shift between the two countries has touched cooperation and operations on the station too. The 2014 Ukraine conflict did not break up cooperation on the ISS, but the touchy relationship has been changing things quietly. In late August this year, a 2-millimeter hole turned up in the orbital module of the Soyuz MS-09 craft on the Russian segment. In early September Kommersant, one of Russia's largest media outlets, ran a piece suggesting that an American astronaut had punched the hole on purpose.

To some Americans who favor developing space stations, the U.S. has been far too passive on this project. Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who chairs the Senate subcommittee on space science and competitiveness, thinks the U.S. should quit the project and rebuild its leadership in space by putting up a station of its own. By the figures he cites, the price NASA pays Russia to carry each American astronaut rose from $21 million to more than $80 million between 2006 and 2018.

The Trump administration wants to wind the program down faster, hoping to end direct federal funding for the station by 2025. As things stand, each crewed flight on the Space Launch System is expected to cost about $1 billion; with NASA developing its own rockets and capsules, the administration thinks that money would do more sending astronauts back to the Moon.

The U.S. government has not cut NASA's yearly budget, and with more private companies involved it can in fact do more. But across its plans — a space station, Mars, a return to the Moon — none are international projects any more. In 2015 Russia's space agency said that once the ISS retires it would like to build another station with NASA. NASA then issued a closed-mouthed statement thanking Russia for the thought and denying any plan to cooperate. By the time Moscow held the station's 20th-anniversary event, NASA's administrator was not there at all.

With international cooperation off the table, private companies come up more often. The U.S. began contracting cargo resupply out to private firms in 2012. Elon Musk's SpaceX is one of the main contractors: in 2012 its Dragon became the first commercial spacecraft to visit the ISS. NASA has since signed with SpaceX and Orbital ATK to run its cargo resupply flights all the way to the station's retirement in 2025. SpaceX will also start carrying American astronauts to the ISS next April; if that works, the U.S. will move the job from Russia to a private company.

But whoever takes part, if NASA does not keep pushing, the station's story may stop seven years from now. Unlike a satellite in high orbit, it will fall the moment it loses power.

The 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey was the first to put a jointly built American-Soviet station — Space Station V — in front of an audience. Thirty years later that image became, rather unexpectedly, real, and it has since turned up in 69 films.

In the words of retired American astronaut Mark Kelly: "It isn't perfect, and it wasn't designed to last forever, but what the International Space Station has given humanity and nations is extraordinary: a chance to cooperate on a shared scientific goal, existing largely above politics."

Cover image: the International Space Station / Source: NASA

Banner image: the Proton rocket that carried the first module, Zarya, into orbit / Source: Wikipedia