by Duncan Lunan

Assembly of the International Space Station in orbit began in December 1988, when the Russian Zarya module was joined to the US Unity one.  As I described in ‘Epsilon Boötis, Clyde Tombaugh, Black Knight and STS-88’. ON, June 12^th, 2022, as the multiple connections between the two were made by astronauts on EVA, several protective covers were set adrift;  they were photographed at close range from the Space Shuttle windows, and multiple websites now claim that they were giant alien spaceships, or the ‘Black Knight’ alien satellite, which does not exist, and wouldn’t be in that orbit if it did.

The history of the ISS, which took till 2011 to complete, has not been all plain sailing.  One early sign of trouble was a 1984 report of the US government Office of Technology Assessment, which spelled out in embarrassing detail that the object of international cooperation in space was not to enhance NASA’s capabilities, but to distract US allies from developing their own.  It cast a new light on previous cancellations such as the Space Shuttle flyback booster, to which the British Aircraft Corporation had made a major commitment, and highlighted the subsequent under-use of the European Space Agency’s Spacelab module, which a 1997 report described as “Europe’s most expensive gift to the people of the United States since the Statue of Liberty”.

On my VIP tour of Kennedy Space Center in 1979  (see ‘Eyewitness to History (2)’, ON, July 31^st 2022), my guide told me that I couldn’t be shown the Payload Processing Facility because Britain wasn’t a participant in the Spacelab programme.  When I indignantly replied that we were, I was taken into the building and to my further surprise, the only things in there were Britain’s contribution, the EVA pallets for the Shuttle cargo bay – completely anonymous, with not even a little flag to indicate their origin  (Fig. 1).  That may have been to keep them under the Prime Minister’s radar, since her opposition to human spaceflight was well known.  In all the subsequent years I remember only one brief mention in a British Aerospace brochure, after the first Shuttle launch, and nothing, ever, from the British National Space Centre.  Yet the EVA pallets remained in constant use, not just with Spacelab but all the way to the end of the Shuttle programme, and Sydney Jordan predicted in his Lance McLane strip that they would still be in use 100 years later  (Fig. 2). 

After Europe’s Columbus module was stripped of its free-flight capability, it was added to the International Space Station in 2008, and for its 10^th anniversary in space, the European Space Agency commissioned a review of its history and accomplishments  (Julien Harrod, Columbus in Space, Europe’s Voyage of Discovery on the International Space Station, Random House, 2018 – Fig. 3).  As the primary biological research module on the ISS, with its facilities frequently updated, it is a major success story. 

As of 2018, nearly 1000 experimenters from 23 nations had performed research on the ISS, with more of them in biology than any other discipline.  Unfortunately, the historical introduction in the book was so positive that it could give a completely false impression.  As it read, Columbus was designed for the ISS from the outset and followed smoothly on from the use of Spacelab on the Shuttle, and the timeline was presented as a winding road, ‘From Vision to Mission’, starting in 1983.  A more accurate representation of the actual process would have been as a game of snakes and ladders, starting far earlier, and at the very least, the loss of the Challenger and the breakup of the USSR should have been marked as major turning points.  There was no indication at all that Spacelab was to have been the precursor to Europe’s independent, free-flying space station, tended by ESA’s own space shuttle Hermes, nor of the long and painful changes of policy and cancellations, as a result of which a modified version ended up as a permanent constituent of the ISS.  As history, it’s like saying that that in World War 2, Britain, the USA and Russia were in opposition to the Axis from the invasion of Poland onwards, in complete unity throughout.  At the time, I was following the story from the US viewpoint in weekly issues of Space News, NASA publications and others, and from the European viewpoint, via the quarterly ESA Bulletin, On Station and other ESA publications.  There were some extremely forthright reports on both sides of the Atlantic.

One of the biggest issues concerned the proposed emergency return vehicle, a lifeboat to bring back the full ISS complement of up to seven astronauts, in an emergency situation where no Space Shuttle was immediately available.  ESA had been considering a manned Crew Return Vehicle/Crew Transportation Vehicle to take personnel to and from the Station, to start in 2002.  However, joint studies with NASA on rescue vehicles began in May 1996.

The original CRV had been a French proposal for a crewed version of Europe’s Automated Transfer Vehicle, which made five successful cargo flights to the Space Station up to 2014.   As the CRV programme converged with the X-38 lifting body and Germany took the lead, France pulled out;  an agreement on German participation in X-38 was signed in November 1997.  The first German components were delivered in November 1998,and a fixed-price contract was signed the following month, by which time the programme had full ESA participation, with more than fifteen major systems provided by European industry.  The first flight to orbit, for a full automated independent return to Earth, was to be carried by the Columbia on the STS-113 mission in February 2001, with Woomera in Australia as prime site for emergency landings.  After drop tests in 1997-1999  (Fig. 4), the X-38 was expected to be fully operational by 2003, but in May 2001, Interavia described it as “understood to be currently on hold because of Space Station budget problems”.  

While the article was in press it had been overtaken by events, and the X-38 project had been terminated in March.  The European reaction was dismay:  it had really been thought that the days of European commitment and US cancellation had ended with the disappointment of Spacelab and the reconciliation over the ISS.  For the next year at least, the editorials in ESA publications such as Reaching for the Future and On Station kept expressing the hope that the decision would be altered, or failing that, that Columbus might be withdrawn from the ISS and become a free-flyer again.  While that didn’t happen, Reaching for the Future and On Station both ceased publication, because cooperation was no longer the watchword.

The air supply on the ISS has been a source of contention from the outset.  In the early days, the oxygen supply was provided by the Russian Zarya module, and my colleague Jim Oberg was particularly concerned that the oxygen was generated by the same slow-burning candles which had caused two severe fires on the Mir space station, extinguished by the cosmonauts at great risk to their lives.  In his book Endurance  (Transworld, 2017 – Fig. 5), Scott Kelly describes his battle, throughout his career, to get NASA to take the issue of carbon dioxide build up seriously.  In the battle to save Apollo 13 and bring its crew home, a device had to be improvised to scrub carbon dioxide from the air  (Fig. 6), bringing the partial pressure back from 15 mm of mercury, which was far above the limit for safety, to just 0.1 mm. 

But somewhere along the line since then, mission controllers in Houston had become almost unbelievably complacent about the issue.  Although the Apollo 13 ‘mailbox’ was able to deal with the carbon dioxide produced by three people, the usual six on the ISS supposedly required two huge machines, thoroughly unreliable and a nightmare to dismantle and service, eating heavily into the astronaut’s time.

In Kelly’s investigation, he found that the US Navy does not allow carbon dioxide to rise above 2 mm  (0.3 %)  even if the noise of air purifiers risks giving away a submarine’s position.  NASA regarded 6 mm as the upper limit and routinely allowed 4 mm, at which the astronauts suffered headaches and lapses of judgment, extremely dangerous in space.  Permissible levels in spacesuits were far lower.  Neither astronauts nor cosmonauts had complained for fear of being replaced, but Kelly had decided to retire after his 340-day stay on the ISS, and the parallel study being conducted on his twin brother on the ground made him too valuable to bring back early, so like Chapman’s Homer he could ‘speak out loud and bold’.  Samantha Christoforetti, who was on the ISS for part of Kelly’s stay, then felt able to back him up in her book  (Diary of an Apprentice Astronaut, Allen Lane, 2018 – Fig. 7), though his campaign doesn’t feature in Tim Peake’s Limitless, the Autobiography  (Century, 2020 – Fig. 8), although he too was on the ISS for part of the time.

Columbus in Space does give some idea of the difficulties of working aboard the ISS, but it’s mostly in terms of the detailed planning, even choreography, which the ground planners have to undertake to let the astronauts work round them, giving the impression that despite the complexity it all works smoothly.  The closest Harrod comes to mentioning outright stress is where he says, “The Dutch company behind the fans in Columbus takes some pride in having produced the quietest fans on the Space Station.  Many astronauts have remarked that Columbus is the most relaxing place on the outpost…”.   It doesn’t sound like much, until you remember that there are fans in every compartment and they’re on all the time.  Kelly remains proud of the ISS, which he helped to build, and of what he accomplished while on it, but his narrative is the most candid that I’ve read and leaves one in no doubt why he resigned immediately when he got home.  One begins to see why NASA plans to deorbit the ISS and move to a newer model at the end of its current commitment in 2031.

Undeniably, the international scientific community, and Europe in particular, have gained far more from the Columbus laboratory as part of the ISS than they would have from it as a free-flyer, intermittently manned by small crews, as was originally planned.  The station is a great engineering accomplishment, a scientific asset and a triumph for international cooperation, and it’s worth emphasising that its story is far from over.  Indeed, for the next seven years the ISS will be busier than ever, because after all those years depending on Russian Soyuz ferries and Progress cargo capsules, we now have SpaceX flying Dragon cargoes and Crew Dragon missions to the ISS  (the eighth is about to launch, on February 22^nd), Cygnus cargo deliveries have resumed on the SpaceX Falcon 9  (the first of those just arrived safely), and the very long-awaited Boeing Starliner is about to start crewed missions.  Previously it has flown twice, one failing to dock with the station and the second docking uncrewed, but the third spacecraft is at Kennedy Space Center and gearing up for launch  (Fig. 9). 

Meanwhile the Axiom company has been flying its own crews to the ISS, using Crew Dragon  (see ‘Update on Spaceflight’, ON, January 14^th 2024) – more about them below.  The ISS is still the brightest thing in the night sky apart from the Moon, particularly when its relatively new solar panels catch full sunlight, and its passes are well worth watching:  its distinctive movement across the sky at 5 miles per second is quite unlike an aircraft’s.  Timings are on the website www.heavens-above.com, as well as on  NASA’s and Astronomy Ireland’s, among others.  Heavens-Above forecasts are for ten days ahead, and there’s also a graphic showing where it is when you log in, so you can keep track of it as you wait for the next set of passes visible from your location.

Nevertheless, all good things come to an end, and US policy now is to replace the ISS with commercial successors, deorbiting the ISS itself in 2031 to free up the NASA budget for major Moon and Mars exploration.  The situation with the proposed successors is moving rapidly, with the contractors regrouping as the plans firm up.  Under its Commercial Destinations Free Flyer programme, in December 2021 NASA signed three contracts with private companies for space station development, the self-proclaimed first of which, VAST Space, intends to build a habitat with artificial gravity, but to begin with a space hotel called Haven-1, to be launched by SpaceX ‘no earlier than 2025’ and then visited by Crew Dragons  (Fig. 10).  Another is with Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origins, which intends to build a station, using its own New Glenn boosters, to be called Orbital Reef  (Fig. 11) – a good enough name if you think of it as a habitat, but perhaps less encouraging if you think of it as something to run into or be stranded on. 

We saw enough of that in the Progress collision with the Mir station in 1997, which wrote off the new Spektyr biological research module and forced the sacrifice of all the samples which Michael Foale had accumulated on his research mission.  Orbital Reef is being developed in cooperation with Sierra Nevada Space, whose Dream Chaser vehicle will begin cargo deliveries to the ISS with the second launch of the United Launch Alliance Vulcan in April this year, and is a candidate for future landings at the Cornwall spaceport and possibly Prestwick  (see ‘Update on Spaceflight’ above).

The third contract is with Voyager Space, tied in with Nanoracks, who have had an experimental airlock attached to the ISS since December 2020.  They have joined forces with Lockheed, Northrup Grumman and Airbus to produce Starlab  (Fig. 12), which will have half the internal volume of the ISS and be launched in one piece by SpaceX’s Superheavy booster in the late 2020s;  although the design doesn’t yet appear to be finalised, with one version having a rigid module  (Fig. 13)  instead of Fig. 12’s inflatable one.  Although Superheavy has still to fly with full success, Elon Musk has just released an image of three of those together in the vertical assembly building at his Boca Chica spaceport in Texas, with a fourth ready for stacking when a bay becomes free  (Fig. 14).        

Outside that CDFF programme, NASA has a separate contract with Axiom Space of Houston.  As I mentioned in ‘Update on Spaceflight’, their plan is to assemble their space station modules while attached to the International Space Station  (Fig. 15), eventually separating to form a free-flying station with equivalent internal space to the ISS  (Figs. 16 & 17). 

Axiom have already launched two private missions to the ISS, using the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, and a third all-European one on January 20^th 2024, commanded by Michael Lopez-Alegria, formerly of NASA and now Axiom’s chief astronaut.  They separated from the ISS on February 7^th and came back on the 9^th, leaving the Expedition 70 crew in charge.  (The Expedition 69 crew, who were stranded on the ISS in December 2022, came back in September last after an extended mission of 370 days.)

One intriguing aspect is that in March 2022, Axiom took over the former premises of Fry’s Electronics in Webster, Texas, whose exterior was built to resemble space station modules  (Fig. 18).  Even better, on the interior ceiling was a complete mockup of the ISS, including the Russian FGB and Zvesda modules  (Figs. 19 & 20), Japan’s Kibo  (Fig. 21). ESA’s Columbus and Cupola  (Figs. 19 & 21), Canada’s remote arm  (Fig. 22), a Soyuz ready to dock  (Fig. 23), and two X-38 lifeboats  (Figs 19, 20 & 24).  One of their attachment points might form the base for trial fittings of Axiom station modules, and the other perhaps for tryouts of Gordon Ross’s space ambulance design  (‘Waverider’, ON, November 27th, 2022), which has since been re-imagined by Chris Butler of the Griffith Observer  (Fig. 25), showing an actual ISS airlock rather than the previous, generalised ‘Alpha Station’ one.

On a humorous note, no name has yet been proposed for the Axiom station, as far as I know, but knowing how the DYNA-SOAR name caught on for the Boeing X-20  (‘Wings into Space’, ON, 3^rd December 2023), Axiom should probably come up with one before people start calling it ‘The Attic’.  ‘Axiom Attic and Orbital Reef’ strike me as good names for a pair of fantasy heroes.  The first such pairing I came across was Fritz Leiber’s ‘Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser’, in an early 60s issue of Fantastic Stories.  (At the World Science Fiction Convention in London, 1965, attendance topped 400 for the first time at such an event in the UK, and old hands agreed that numbers had got out of control.  Arrangements at the registration desk broke down, and the first words ever said to me at an SF convention were “You’re not Fritz Leiber, are you?”)  More recently, I reviewed Steven Erikson’s Bauchelain and Korbal Broach, for Interzone in December 2009, and my review of Garth Nix’s Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz has been accepted for ParSec, though it’s not one of my reviews in Issue # 9, which has just come out  (Fig. 26).  Axiom Attic and Orbital Reef may sound like a fantasy duo, but it’s not very likely that all the space stations above will become reality, and which will actually be orbiting over our heads in ten years’ time very much remains to be seen.