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Closing Comments Closing Comments The concept of a Shuttle supporting the assembly of a space station was not an entirely new idea when Space Station Freedom was authorized in 1984. Such concepts had been evaluated during the late 1960s, as the United States and the Soviet Union competed in the race to the Moon. By the early 1970s, the two nations were on more friendly terms and keen to participate in a joint project as Apollo was being phased out and a series of Salyut space stations were being introduced. The American proposal for an Apollo to dock with a Salyut was rejected, as was a proposal to have a Soyuz dock with Skylab. So Apollo docked with Soyuz in the summer of 1975. That program was so successful that talks began almost immediately to assess the pros- pects for a Shuttle-Salyut docking in the early 1980s. In parallel, NASA devised plans for the Shuttle to reactivate Skylab. Neither of these proposals bore fruit. By the early 1980s, the idea of using a Shuttle to assemble and resupply a large space station remained, and would become the lynchpin of the Space Station Freedom before plans for that, too, were revised. By the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 the assembly of Mir had been underway for several years. But Russia, which inherited the station and the spacecraft which serviced it, was hard pressed to continue the requisite funding. Looking back two decades to the 1990s, the merger of the American Shuttle and the Russian space station programs seems so logical, since they complemented each other. From that cooperation emerged the Shuttle-Mir program which served as the precursor to the assembly of the International Space Station. But in the 1970s any suggestion of astro- nauts and cosmonauts working together in over fifty expeditions to two different space stations, Mir and the ISS, would have raised eyebrows. It was the Shuttle which served as the cornerstone, providing the capability to attain the goal of a continuously crewed inter- national research facility in Earth orbit. © Springer International Publishing AG 2017 209 D.J. Shayler, Linking the Space Shuttle and Space Stations, Springer Praxis Books, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49769-3 210 Closing Comments Endeavour stands on the pad ready to begin the assembly of the International Space Station, a task that would draw upon three decades of planning and development of the technologies required to assembly and supply a space station. With hindsight it was perhaps also fortuitous that the Americans did not go straight into space station assembly for the Freedom program without the experience of flying Shuttle to Mir first. True there was little high-profile work completed with the RMS or on EVA at the Russian station, but there was a lot more which laid the groundwork for a smoother transi- tion to the ISS than would likely have been possible without the Mir docking missions. Clearly standing out above everything else was the ability of the crews to put into prac- tice actual rendezvous, docking, undocking, and proximity operations around the station. There was also the less glamorous matter of logistical transfer to and from an already overcrowded and aging station. Learning to work with the Russian (as distinct from the Soviets with ASTP and Shuttle-Salyut talks) and their very different systems and Closing Comments 211 procedures, ideology, and approach was particularly useful, and a clear insight of what could be expected during assembly of the ISS. Important data was also obtained on the mechanics of having a Shuttle remain docked to a large object for several days, well in advance of embarking on the assembly of the ISS. Six months after the conclusion of the Shuttle-Mir program, STS-88, the first Shuttle mission to assemble the ISS was to link the first two elements of that station on-orbit (shown here in a computer graphic), marking the start of what would prove to be a thirteen year construction task. The Shuttle mission to Mir proved the long held view that the Space Shuttle system was compatible with a station in space. By the time of the final mission in June 1998, another Shuttle was being prepared to launch to kick off a far more ambitious project. After decades of planning, testing, proposing, debating, and rehearsing, it was finally time to apply all the lessons with one of the largest international construction projects yet attempted – the International Space Station. That story is related in the companion volume Assembling and Supplying the ISS: The Space Shuttle Fulfills Its Mission. Afterword Having learned the Russian language, trained in Star City and in Houston, and then flown on board Atlantis for the sixth Shuttle-Mir docking mission, I gained a good perspective on how two human spacefaring nations could learn from each other in a joint program. The Shuttle-Mir missions, also known as Phase-I of the ISS program, proved extremely valu- able to all parties. NASA learned about long-duration missions and how to resupply a space station and contribute to its assembly. And the Russians learned how to cooperate with the Americans on the operational and human aspects. Also, when funds were missing in Moscow, the US financial contribution helped to keep Mir alive until the ISS became permanently manned. Once this Shuttle-Mir cooperation was well established, it just happened that the three types of worst life threatening, space emergencies occurred (fire, atmosphere toxicity, and air leak) within a period of a few months. The Russians demonstrated repeatedly their abil- ity to manage successfully such situations, while the Americans showed their capability to maintain full trust in their new partners, even though US astronauts were on Mir during those emergencies. Without the vision, the leadership, and ultimately the success of this program, it is evident that the ISS would have not survived the Columbia accident in 2003, since there would have been no spaceships available to maintain its operations. This would have been catastrophic also for the programs of the other international partners. The Europeans, under their ESA umbrella, benefited well from the Shuttle-Mir pro- gram. They participated simultaneously through both the docking missions and several independent missions on board Mir, flying payloads and testing rendezvous technologies. As a result of this involvement with Mir, ESA was well prepared to exploit the Columbus laboratory of the ISS and to operate the ATV resupply vessel. © Springer International Publishing AG 2017 212 D.J. Shayler, Linking the Space Shuttle and Space Stations, Springer Praxis Books, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49769-3 Afterword 213 ESA astronaut Jean-François Clervoy. (Courtesy J-F. Clervoy) Looking back at Shuttle-Mir, one can easily comprehend how the lessons learned have been applied to more than fifteen years of continuous successful exploitation of the ISS by more than fifteen partner nations. As an astronaut, like many of my space flyer colleagues, I can only hope that this suc- cess will open the door to cooperation with the Chinese, before the ISS has to be disman- tled. We would then be allowed to talk about a truly worldwide, and not just international cooperation, in pursuing humankind’s destiny in space and increasing wisdom on Earth. Jean-François Clervoy ESA Astronaut Class of 1992 (CNES astronaut 1985–1992) Mission Specialist 3, STS-66, Atlantis (ATLAS 3) Mission Specialist 1, STS-84, Atlantis-Mir (sixth docking) Mission Specialist 2, STS-103, Discovery (HST service mission SM-3A) Abbreviations AAP Apollo Applications Program AFB Air Force Base ALT Approach and Landing Tests APAS Androgynous Peripheral Attachment System APU Auxiliary Power Unit ASTP Apollo Soyuz Test Project ASVS Advanced Space Vision System BUp Back-Up (astronaut) Capcom Capsule Communicator CB Astronaut Office, NASA JSC (CB = Directorate Mail Code) CDR Commander CDR Critical Design Review CEIT Crew Equipment Interface Test CG Center of Gravity CM Command Module (Apollo) CMG Control Moment Gyro CNES Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (French National Space Agency) COAS Crew Optical Alignment Sight CR Cosmonaut Researcher (on Mir) CSA Canadian Space Agency CSM Command and Service Module (Apollo) CTB Crew Transfer Bag DAP Digital Auto Pilot DM Docking Module DOR Director of Operations in Russia DSO Detailed Supplementary Objective DTO Detailed Test Objective EAFB Edwards Air Force Base © Springer International Publishing AG 2017 214 D.J. Shayler, Linking the Space Shuttle and Space Stations, Springer Praxis Books, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49769-3 Abbreviations 215 EMTT EVA Maintenance Task Team (Freedom) EMU Extravehicular Mobility Unit EO-XX Space station main expedition crew (Ekspeditsiya Osnovnaya) ESA European Space Agency ESRO European Space Research Organization ET External Tank EVA Extra Vehicular Activity (spacewalking) FCR Flight Control Room FD Flight Director (‘Flight’) FE Flight Engineer FGB Funktsionalno-Gruzovoy Blok (Functional Cargo Block) FY Financial Year (Fiscal) GAS Get Away Special GSFC (Robert F.) Goddard Space Flight Center (NASA, Greenbelt, Maryland) HB High Bay H-Bar Horizontal Bar (rendezvous mode) HHL Hand-Held Laser HST Hubble Space Telescope HTV H-II Transfer Vehicle (Japanese) IFA In-Flight Anomaly IFM In-Flight Maintenance IMU Inertial Measurement Unit ISS International Space Station IVA Intra Vehicular Activity JSC (Lyndon B.) Johnston Space Center (NASA, Houston, Texas) JWG Joint Working Group KSC (John F.) Kennedy Space Center (NASA, Florida) LB Low Bay LCC Launch Control Center LDEF Long Duration
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