“And you've never had the slightest yearning to see Earth again?”
Malone gazed at her solemnly for long moments before answering. “Sure I get the itch. But when I do, I go down to the one-gee section of the Wheel here. I sit in a wheelchair and try to get around with these crippled legs of mine. The itch goes away then.”
“But they have prosthetic legs that you can't tell from the real thing,” she said. “Lots of paraplegics ⦔
“Maybe
you
can't tell them from the real thing, but I guarantee you that any paraplegic who uses those things can tell.” Malone shook his head. “No, once you've spent some time up here in zero gee, you realize that you don't need legs to get around. You can live a good and useful life here, instead of being a cripple back down there.”
“I see,” the reporter said.
“Yeah. Sure you do.”
An uncomfortable silence stretched between them. She turned off the recorder on her belt, for good this time. Finally Malone softened. “Hey, I'm sorry. I shouldn't be nasty with you. It's just that ⦠thinking about Sam again. He was a great guy, you know. And now he's dead and everybody thinks he was just a trouble-making bastard.”
“I don't, not anymore,” she said. “A womanizing sonofabitch, like you said. A male chauvinist of the first order. But after listening to you tell it, even at that he doesn't sound so terrible.”
The black man smiled at her. “Look at the time! No wonder I'm hungry! Can I take you down to the dining room for some supper?”
“The dining room in the full-gravity area?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Won't you be uncomfortable there? Isn't there a
dining area in the low-gravity section?”
“Sure, but won't you be uncomfortable there?”
She laughed. “I think I can handle it.”
“Really?”
“Certainly. And maybe you can tell me how Sam got himself into the advertising business.”
“All right. I'll do that.”
As she turned, she caught sight of the immense beauty of Earth sliding past the observation dome; the Indian Ocean a breathtaking swirl of deep blues and greens, the subcontinent of India decked with purest white clouds.
“But ⦔ she looked at Malone, then asked in a whisper, “don't you miss being home, being on Earth? Don't you feel isolated here, away from ⦔
His booming laughter shocked her. “Isolated? Up here?” Malone pitched himself forward into a weightless somersault, then pirouetted in midair. He pointed toward the ponderous bulk of the planet and said,
“They're
the one's who're isolated. Up here, I'm free!”
He offered her his arm and they floated together toward the gleaming metal hatch, their feet a good eight inches above the chamber's floor.
In the grief and turmoil following the January 1986 explosion of the space shuttle
Challenger
, most of the world lost sight of NASA's program to build a permanent manned orbiting station.
A few weeks after that tragic accident, the Soviet Union launched
Mir,
the eighth space station it has placed in orbit since 1971.
Mir
is apparently a permanent station. Two cosmonauts are working in it as I write these words. I doubt that we will ever see a day again when there are not at least a few human beings living and working in space.
NASA's space station is still the most important project in the American
civilian
space program. It is the key to all the future explorations and development of the solar system, a base in orbit from which we can go on to the Moon, to Marsâeventually, to the stars.
Soon after I wrote this piece I was invited to give a lecture in Pittsburgh. My hosts provided a lovely suite in a downtown hotel that overlooks the spot where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers join to form the Ohio. From my hotel window I looked down at the little park there and saw the foundations of the original Fort Pitt.
It struck me that
this
was the frontier less than three centuries ago. Fort Pitt was a bare little outpost in the wilderness then. It has grown into a giant modern city, headquarters of mammoth corporations such as USX (formerly U.S. Steel), Rockwell International, Alcoa Aluminum, and many others.
Less than three hundred miles overhead, a bare little outpost will be built in space. And for the same reasons of industry and exploration that turned Fort Pitt into modern Pittsburgh, that space station will grow into a city of commerce and industry and science.
And it won't take two centuries to make it happen. Not if we act with vigor and intelligence.
Â
Â
“When you think of this thing being a little over four times as long as a shuttle, it is a
big
piece of equipment.”
Neil Hutchinson paused for a moment, then added, “And that's just the initial station that we're trying to put up there.”
Hutchinson was manager of the Space Station Program Office at NASA's Johnson Space Center, outside Houston. He was in charge of building the largest structure ever placed into space.
To Philip Culbertson, Hutchinson's boss at NASA headquarters in Washington, the size of the space station was not as important as its permanency.
“We want this thing to fly for twenty-five or thirty years,” said Culbertson, pointing to an artist's rendering of NASA's planned space station. “It
must
be an evolutionary design.”
He tapped the picture on his conference table. “The space station may not be very graceful-looking,” he said, but since it will be assembled in orbit from pieces carried aloft by the space shuttle, there will be no need to make it streamlined. No winds will rock the space station, no weather will threaten it. It will not have to reenter the atmosphere and return to Earth. It is intended to be in space permanently. If it is eventually abandoned, it will be disassembled and sent
back to Earth aboard space shuttles, reversing the technique by which it will be built.
Sitting beside Culbertson was his deputy, John Hodge. Assembling the station in space “just changes your whole attitude toward the design,” he said. The space station can evolve and develop even after it begins operating in orbit.
A slow smile broke across Culbertson's face. “It's kind of nifty that we can attach pieces on the outside with no penalty.”
The first modules of the space station are scheduled to be launched aboard the shuttle in the early 1990s, according to current NASA plans. The station should be complete and “ready for business” in the mid-1990s. Its initial mass will be more than fifty tons, with room for growth. At least six shuttle missions will be required to bring the station's primary components into orbit.
Total program cost was originally budgeted at $8 billion, but by 1987 the cost was more realistically pegged at $12.5 billion.
One year after President Reagan's go-ahead in 1984, NASA awarded some $200 million worth of Phase B advanced development contracts to eight competing teams of aerospace companies for detailed studies of the station's major systems and components.
“We want
a
space station designed, not
the
space station,” says Hodge. There are still plenty of unknowns and variables to be settled before a definite design of
the
space station can be pinned down.
The idea of placing a permanent station in orbit around the Earth goes back to the beginnings of the space program. But the political pressures of the 1960s pushed NASA to send astronauts to the Moon without first erecting an orbiting way station. After the Apollo program was killed and funding for space
shriveled, NASA devoted its major energies to developing the space shuttle.
But the shuttle was intended, from the first, to go back and forth to a permanent station in orbit. By January 1984, with the shuttle fleet working well, President Reagan announced in his State of the Union speech:
“Today I am directing NASA to develop a permanently manned space station and to do it within a decade. A space station will permit quantum leaps in our research in science, communications and in metals and life-saving medicines that can be manufactured only in space.”
The station is intended to serve as a base for many different kinds of scientific research under long-term conditions of weightlessness; as a permanent observatory of the heavens and the Earth; as a “transportation node” where very complex spacecraft can be assembled, checked out, and launched on deep-space missions; as a facility for servicing and repairing satellites; and as a manufacturing facility where new materials and medicines can be made under zero-gravity conditions.
Opposition to the space station has been raised by some scientists who believe that manned space operations are more costly than they are worth. They insist that unmanned spacecraft can accomplish most of the tasks a space station would do, and at a fraction of the space station's cost. They fear that major manned programs such as Apollo, the space shuttle, and now the space station, siphon funding away from their own scientific efforts.
In May 1984 James Van Allen, discoverer of the radiation belts circling Earth, told the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, “The development of a space station is ⦠premature, and will severely reduce the opportunities for advances in
space science during the next decade.”
In November 1984 the Office of Technology Assessment, the high-tech advisory arm of the Congress, issued a massive report that found “no compelling, objective, external case” for a space station. In essence, the report portrayed NASA as pushing the station project merely to keep up its budget and payroll.
NASA Administrator James Beggs blasted the OTA study when it was first released. “Not a professional piece of work.” He claimed that the study was “laced with rhetoric.” But a few weeks later, in testimony to Congress, Beggs said that the study actually makes a “very compelling case” for NASA's space station program.
Despite such arguments and criticisms, NASA is moving ahead, although many in the aerospace community worry that the space station program may be particularly vulnerable to congressional cost-cutters seeking to trim massive federal budget deficits.
Even the station's most important backer, President Reagan, proposed a $50-million decrease in the station's funds for fiscal year 1986, from $280 million to $230 million. Although space enthusiasts want to have the station in operation by 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of the New World, the Administration's schedule now calls for the station to be operational “in the mid-1990s,” meaning 1994 at the earliest.
At this early stage of the program, hardly any of the details of the station's design have been firmed up. NASA has been doing its own in-house studies for several years, and many aerospace companies have also been conducting studies on their own. Every major aerospace corporation is involved in this competition, from RCA to TRW, from Rockwell to Martin
Marietta, from Ford Aerospace to General Electric, and more.
This much seems clear: the station will be “shuttle compatible”; that is, each component of the station will have to fit inside the shuttle's cargo bay. The station will be assembled in an orbit between 250 and 280 miles high. Its orbit will be inclined 28.5° from the equator, the latitude of the Kennedy Space Center, from which the components of the station will be launched.
This orbital inclination takes advantage of the Earth's spin to give the shuttle an extra bit of velocity, like a broad jumper getting a running start. That not only gives more boost per pound of rocket propellant, it also means that it will take less energy to send satellites from that orbit onward to the geosynchronous orbit, 22,300 miles above the equator.
The task of actually running the space station program and making it work was started in an unprepossessing cinder-block office building a few miles outside the Johnson Space Center, near Houston. The placard taped onto the rented building's glass door said “Space Station Program Office.” But the engineers inside the place called it “the Skunk Works.”
(A note on aerospace etymology: the Skunk Works was, and still is, an elite group of Lockheed engineers in California. This small, tightly knit, highly secret cadre designed such extraordinary aircraft as the U-2 reconnaissance plane and Mach 3 SR-71. The term was originally borrowed from A1 Capp's comic strip,
Liâl Abner.)
Strangely enough, NASA had space problems. The Johnson Space Center, the sprawling complex at Clear Lake, Texas, where all the manned space programs have been directed, did not have enough room to handle the ongoing shuttle program and the space
station as well. So the fledgling space station offices were temporarily housed in the Skunk Works.
Neil Hutchinson, manager of the Space Station Program, is a “second generation” NASA man. At the age of forty-four, he cut a figure of youthful vigor, despite the fact that he had been with the agency since getting his bachelor's degree in math and physics from Willamette University, in Oregon. Tall, intense, his hair and full beard just starting to turn salt-and-pepper, Hutchinson had been a flight director for the final three Apollo missions, all three Skylab missions, the Apollo-Soyuz program, and the first two shuttle flights.
The Space Station Program is being handled differently from earlier NASA projects, Hutchinson pointed out. There will be no prime contractor. No industrial corporation will receive a contract from NASA to design and build the entire station.
“We're really trying to avoid the âprime contractor syndrome,'” said Hutchinson. “We don't want to get into a position where, for the next twenty-five or thirty years, NASA's beholden to a single contractor.”
Hutchinson's office will be responsible for integrating all the studies and designs and coming up with the final selection of systems and contractors. “We have broken the station program into chunks,” he said, “and given primary technical responsibility for those chunks to different NASA field centers.”
The various NASA centers started out by proposing different designs for the station, but by early 1984 Hutchinson's group had narrowed the possibilities down to three, all of them developed at Johnson.
The
Planar
concept called for an A-frame type of structure 300 feet long, with four large sets of solar panels mounted at each end of the framework and the pressurized habitation modules and laboratories located in the middle of the structure.
The
Delta
design was an inverted pyramid, its point facing the Earth, with its array of solar panels at the top and the living quarters at the bottom.
The
Power Tower
, however, was the design that Hutchinson favored. It is based on a central spine, a 400-foot-long aluminum “strongback” that holds all the station's pieces together. Compared to the Delta and the Planar concepts, says Hutchinson, the Power Tower offers advantages of lower drag and easier stabilization.
Even 250 miles high, the space station will encounter some drag from the wispy outermost fringes of the Earth's atmosphere. To counter this, the station will carry cold-gas thrusters capable of nudging it to higher altitude when necessary. The thrusters will squirt out a gas such as nitrogen, which can generate the thrust needed for attitude adjustment. Since the Power Tower design gives the least drag, it will save on the amount of propellant gas the thrusters must carry.
Because the Power Tower is rather like a long, lean pole, it can take advantage of the Earth's gravity to stabilize its attitude in orbit. This is called gravity-gradient stabilization: the more massive end of the Tower, where the habitation modules are clustered, will be attracted by the Earth's mass and will point solidly toward the center of the planet. This means that the Tower will be less inclined to wobble in space than the Planar or Delta configurations, which are “fatter” and less adapted to gravity-gradient stabilization.