A year later astronaut Norman Thagard flew in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to spend 115 days on Mir and on 29 June 1995, Space Shuttle Atlantis docked to the Russian space station. On 3 February 1994 Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev joined the crew of Space Shuttle Discovery on an eight-day orbital mission. “The idea arose that we could capitalise on this expertise by inviting them into this partnership.” “There was a strong sense this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” says Neal. The economy was in such a desperate state there was a real chance the country’s space programme could fizzle out completely. However, with the final collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the Russian space industry was severely lacking in cash. While Freedom was tied up in committees, crews had been living in space station Mir for more than five years. If the space race had been about developing a permanent settlement in space, then Russia would have emerged the winner. “It was done in the usual way with a bunch of contractors and they were over budget – we had spent $8bn and had nothing to show for it.”Īdded to that, the Iron Curtain that had been so important in giving Freedom a political and diplomatic purpose was rapidly coming apart. “As a programme it was in very difficult shape,” says Manber. “Instead of having to design each element, simply took what existed and morphed it into something you could use for a different purpose.” “Skylab was vital for underpinning the resurgence of interest in having a more permanent station,” says David Baker, a former Nasa engineer-turned-author, who worked on the Apollo, Shuttle and space station programmes. Cobbling together a space station programme out of the two was not a giant leap of imagination. The first anyone knew of the tragedy was when ground support staff opened the spacecraft hatch.īack in the USA, with the Moon programme cut short and the Space Shuttle still on the drawing board, Nasa had several enormous Saturn 5 rockets and state of the art Apollo space capsules going spare. Without spacesuits, the crew were killed in seconds. But during re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere a faulty valve opened, sucking the air out of the capsule. On 29 June, the three cosmonauts boarded their Soyuz spacecraft for the return to Earth. The cosmonauts spent three weeks living and working in the 20-metre-long cylinder, setting a new space duration record. Two months later a three-man crew docked and took up residence above the Earth. While the US continued its Apollo Moon missions to dwindling public interest, on 19 April 1971 the Soviets launched Salyut 1 – the world’s first space station. In the distance, blending into the grey sky, the white Proton rocket carrying the Zarya module. They clearly, however, have a sense of humour: the flat area we are standing on turns out to be the cover of a nuclear missile silo.īehind us an ancient loudspeaker crackles into life with a monologue detailing the events leading up to launch. The Russians are not used to allowing international media into the once top-secret Baikonur Cosmodrome. I am one of only three international journalists who have managed to jump through the bureaucratic hoops to make it this far. Huddled out of the bitter wind behind a rock in the middle of the Kazakh Steppe, with a phone clutched to my ear, I am attempting to commentate for BBC radio on the launch of the first stage of the ISS. And when you investigate the story of how we ended up with a giant orbiting laboratory, circling the planet every 90 minutes, it is remarkable the ISS was ever built at all. We should not, however, take the apparent success of the ISS for granted or ever imagine space travel to be as easy as it looks. One of the greatest triumphs of the ISS is to make space appear routine, boring even. Since the ISS was first permanently occupied in 2000, Russian, American, Japanese, Canadian and European astronauts have lived and worked together 400 kilometres (250 miles) above the Earth. It may not be Apollo 13, but this is exactly the way the space agencies like it.
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