The International Space Station (ISS) is a bird that seemed destined never to fly. Over the past decade and a half, it has been sold as an American challenge to Soviet dominance in space (1984), a model of international cooperation (1993) and, most recently, an orbiting laboratory that practically guarantees quantum leaps in basic science and commercial research. But last week, after seemingly endless cost overruns and missed deadlines, the ISS finally received its first crew and became what it should always have been: the first potentially permanent outpost of the human species in space.
“This is the end of the beginning,” says Larry Young, an MIT professor of astronautics who studies the biological effects of weightlessness. Construction and assembly of the station, which orbits Earth every 90 minutes some 230 miles up, will continue until at least 2005. The result will be a football-field-size pied a espace, built by the United States, Russia, the European Space Agency, Japan, Canada and Brazil at a final cost that could top $90 billion. But as the Expedition 1 crew celebrated their arrival at the station they’ve unofficially christened “Alpha,” skeptics back on Earth are still asking, “why bother?”
NASA’s current answer is “science.” With ISS, Young says, researchers will finally have the room, equipment and crew size to “carry out the ill-defined process of inductive and deductive reasoning that is good science.” Research in the ISS’s laboratory modules will focus on the effects of gravity on plants and animals, developing next-generation materials and machines that can function in the high-radiation vacuum of space and commercial development of new drugs and microchips. While Earth-bound scientists complain that NASA has overhyped the station’s research potential, Young is optimistic. The Hubble Space Telescope, he points out, also suffered from delays and technological glitches. “Now, it’s surpassing everyone’s fondest hopes, and no one talks about the problems anymore.”
But some of NASA’s most vocal critics say that the space program should be shooting for loftier goals than new drugs and maybe a few Nobels. “Science is only what you do while you’re up there,” says Keith Cowing, a former space-program employee who runs a watchdog Web site called NASAwatch.com. He says NASA should use the station to push for the next logical step for humans in space: exploring the solar system in person. “I’d like to think we’re up there because we’re flight-qualifying crews to go to Mars,” says Young. Even many scientists agree that an R&D payoff shouldn’t overshadow the goal of getting people to the moon, Mars and beyond. “There will certainly be some interesting science,” says Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, “but probably not $90 billion worth. The only way that you can really justify this project is if you want Star Trek to come true.”
He means the part about exploring the galaxy of course and, yes, he does believe in going where no one has gone before. Like the ISS, the Enterprise also had an international crew. And that may be this project’s most impressive achievement. “This is very sweet because we did it together,” NASA administrator Daniel Goldin told the crowd at mission control on Thursday. The cooperation has at times been strained–Goldin also chastised the Russian government for underfunding its space agency. And the cultural differences between the world’s two largest space programs are so great, says Cowing, that “basically, we think they’re crazy and they think we’re crazy.” The Russians favor skills-based training, expecting cosmonauts to deal with problems as they arise, rather than repeated simulations designed to eliminate the unexpected. American astronauts never travel without exhaustive procedure manuals; cosmonauts prefer to work from memory. “We’re normally overprepared,” says Anna Fisher, head of the space-station branch of NASA’s astronaut office. “The Russians are more willing to accept some surprises.”
Over the next several weeks, Shepherd, Gidzenko and Krikalev will be busy setting up house, installing and testing life-support systems and unpacking several thousand pounds of gear and supplies left behind by previous missions. In early December the shuttle Endeavour will deliver a massive solar-panel array, which will boost the station’s power supply, and, incidentally, make the ISS the third-brightest object in the night sky, after the moon and Venus. In January the first laboratory module will arrive aboard the shuttle Atlantis. The crew will be focused on getting the machines to work right, but the best sign that it might all actually work wasn’t that the station’s lights worked when they first flipped the switch. It was the sight of three crew-cut men–former cold-war enemies–clasping each others’ hands and grinning ear to ear in the home away from home they’re building together.
