Episode 192: Expedition-1 - ISS, Meet IT

The first long duration crew of the International Space Station is finally here! Let’s learn about what life on the ISS was like, shake our fists at Microsoft, and wonder where to get bootleg movies on the streets of Moscow.

Episode Audio #

Books and links for more information #

• Creating the International Space Station - David Harland, John Catchpole
• Outposts on the Frontier - Jay Chladek
• JSC Mission Control Updates
• Expedition 1 Crew Log
  • Note that the crew log is formatted kind of strangely. New entries were made at the top of each document. So to start, you want to scroll to the bottom of each one, then scroll up to find the start of the first entry. Then when you finish that entry you have to scroll back up again to find the second entry, and so on. It’s not great.

DD-250 Form #

Want to sign for a billion dollar orbital laboratory? There’s still going to be paperwork. Here’s a blank one for you to practice with: DD-250 Form.

Photos #

Videos #

People milling about rocket #

Launch #

Docking #

Entering the hatch #

Radio callsign request #

New Years Poem #

We sail onboard space station “Alpha”
Orbiting high above Earth, still in night
Traveling our destined journey
Beyond realm of sea voyage or flight

A first New Year is upon us
Eight strikes on the bell now as one
The globe spins below on its motion
Counting the last thousand years done.

15 midnights to this night in orbit
A clockwork not of earthly pace
Our day with different meaning now
In this, a new age and place

We move with a speed and time
Past that which human hands can tell
Computers programmed-like boxes
Where only thoughts’ shadows dwell

“Central post” our ship’s bridge aboard
Screens dancing shapes in pale glow
We guide her course by electronic pulse
In figures no compass could show

Our panels set as sails to the Sun
With wake not ever seen but there
Only gyros feel the silent tugs
Wisps, swirls of such ocean rare

On this ship’s deck sits no helm now
Rudder, sheet, and rig long since gone
But here still– a pull to go places
Beyond lines where sky meets the dawn

Though star trackers mark Altair and Vega
Same as mariners eyed long ago
We are still as wayfinders of knowledge
Seeking new things that mankind shall know.

We commend to crews that will follow
Merit of the good ship we sail
Let sun shine strong on Alpha’s wings
A symbol, and bright star we long hail

Movie List #

• The Sixth Sense
• LA Confidential
• Apocalypse Now
• Pulp Fiction
• Saving Private Ryan
• Contact
• Lethal Weapon 3 (for full experience, stop movie 10 minutes from the end)
• Lethal Weapon 4
• Blues Brothers
• Air Force One
• The World Is Not Enough
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• 2010: The Year We Make Contact
• The Rock
• Catch 22
• In-Laws
• Dr. Strangelove
• As Good As It Gets
• Carlito’s Way, using Russian subtitles
• The Big Lebowski
• Used Cars
• GI Jane
• End of Days
• Lion of the Desert
• Tombstone
• City of Angels
• Full Metal Jacket
• History of Navy SEALs
• Usual Suspects
• Frequency
• The Green Mile
• Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
• Hurricane

Transcript #

NOTE: This transcript was made by me just copying and pasting the script that I read to make the podcast. I often tweak the phrasing on the fly and then forget to update the script, so this is not guaranteed to align perfectly with the episode audio, but it should be pretty close. Also, since these are really only intended to be read by myself, I might use some funky punctuation to help remind myself how I want a sentence to flow, so don’t look to these as a grammar reference. If you notice any egregious transcription errors or notes to myself that I neglected to remove, feel free to let me know and I’ll fix it.

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Hello, and welcome to The Space Above Us. Episode 192, International Space Station Expedition 1: ISS, meet IT

Last time, we talked about the 23rd flight of Space Shuttle Atlantis, and the seventh Shuttle flight to the International Space Station, STS-98. The mission carried the heart of the US segment of the ISS, the Destiny Laboratory Module, and in so doing deployed the one millionth pound of payload deployed from the Shuttle. Now that the longstanding roadblock that was the Zvezda service module was finally in place, the ISS was really starting to grow at a steady rate.

There was a lot to talk about on the STS-98 episode, but there was one prominent topic I scrupulously avoided. In fact, I also avoided it on the STS-97 episode. The ISS now has a crew.. and today we’re going to meet them. We ended our STS-98 coverage in March of 2001, but let’s wind the clock back a few months to October of 2000 and meet the three men who have been waiting far too long to be properly introduced on the podcast.

Commanding Expedition 1, the first ever long duration crew of the International Space Station, was NASA astronaut Bill Shepherd. We haven’t seen Shep in a while, with his previous flight being way back in 1992 when he helped deploy the LAGEOS-2 satellite on STS-52. In the intervening years, Shep has been hard at work as a manager, helping to usher the ISS into existence. Given his extensive involvement in ISS planning, he was a natural choice to command this historic mission. This is his fourth and final flight.

Joining Shepherd on this flight was Flight Engineer, and commander of the Soyuz portion of this mission, Yuri Gidzenko. This is not Gidzenko’s first spaceflight, but it is his first mission on The Space Above Us, so let’s take a quick look at how he got to this point. Yuri Gidzenko was born on March 26th, 1962 in Elanets, in the Nikolaev region of the Soviet Union, in what is now Ukraine. He graduated from the Higher Military Pilot School in Kharkov, and later from the Moscow State University of Geodesy and Mapping. In between, he spent a few years in the Soviet Air Force before being selected to begin training as a cosmonaut in 1987. In 1995 he flew as the commander of the Euro-Mir mission to Mir, spending 180 days in space with cosmonaut Sergei Avdeyev and German astronaut Thomas Reiter. This is his second of three flights.

Last, but not least, Flight Engineer Sergei Krikalev. Of course, we know good ol’ Sergei from two Shuttle flights: STS-60, when he became the first Russian to launch on an American spacecraft, and STS-88, when he helped connect the Zarya and Unity modules, creating the start of the ISS. In fact, this means that Krikalev is the first person to visit the ISS twice. And despite the fact that he had nearly 500 days of spaceflight experience before even starting this mission he’s not done yet, since this is his fifth of six flights.

We’re meeting the Expedition 1 crew because the plan for this episode is to follow them for their entire journey off the planet, lasting nearly five months. Now, I don’t want to get your hopes up. The plan going forward is not to cover each of the Expedition missions. For one thing, that would increase the number of covered missions by like 42%, which is.. too much. For another, the long duration nature of the missions makes them a lot harder to write about and also kind of necessitates skipping over a lot of stuff, which I don’t love doing. So the plan here is to do Expedition 1 and then probably one more later on when the ISS is more established. Maybe we’ll do Expedition 16, featuring our old buddy Dan Tani. We’ll see.

One thing I should mention is that since most of my sources are focused on the NASA side of things or were written by our NASA crew member, and since he’s the commander of this mission, Bill Shepherd gets significantly more mentions on this episode than Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev. So just know that while we’ll be hearing a lot from Shep’s perspective, Gidzenko and Krikalev were equally important members of the crew.

This is also going to be a sort of unusual episode. Part of the reason that this episode was several months late, sorry about that, was that I discovered that my Aerospace Engineering master’s was going to be much harder than expected and it basically took over my life. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I expected it to be hard, but it’s amazing how even a single class at once can expand to take so much time. But even without class, this was sort of a tough episode since there was just so much information that distilling it down into a few nicely organized narratives was proving to be difficult. Rather than continue to try to figure out one magical clean way to tackle this, I think we’re just gonna go for it and see what happens.

So let’s just get right into it. After three years of training that we’re just going to completely ignore, on October 31st, 2000, at 1:53 am Houston time, Shepherd, Gidzenko, and Krikalev launched into orbit atop a Soyuz-U rocket. This was notable because from that moment onwards, there has never been a time that humans were not in orbit. At least, at the time of this recording nearly 25 years later, and hopefully whenever you’re listening.

The Soyuz rocket dropped off the Soyuz spacecraft – side note, why did they have to name their rocket and their spacecraft the same thing? anyway– The Soyuz rocket dropped off the Soyuz spacecraft in an initial orbit of 233 by 182 kilometers. At this point in the mission, Yuri Gidzenko was acting as commander, since of course Bill Shepherd, as an American, was no expert in the operation of the Soyuz spacecraft. As he put it in a pre-flight interview, his job was to stay out of the way and to just run the radios and some life support equipment while the Russian crew members did the rest. While the Expedition 1 crew spent the next few days phasing their orbit and performing rendezvous maneuvers, flight controllers in Moscow activated life support equipment and air purification systems on board the station in anticipation of their imminent arrival. On November 2nd, after an automated and uneventful final approach, with a definitive thunk, the front of the Soyuz made contact with the aft docking port on Zvezda, and with that the first long duration crew had arrived. Just over an hour later, at 4:23am Houston time, the hatch was opened. At Commander Shepherd’s urging, Gidzenko and Krikalev were the first to float through the hatch. And I know I kind of just made a nearly identical point but it’s worth making this again. From this point onwards, other than the brief moments when crews relocated a Soyuz from one docking port to another or went on an EVA, the International Space Station has continuously had a human crew onboard.

Rather than a lot of pomp and ceremony, the crew immediately got to work. The ground crews had turned on the basics but they could only control so much via telemetry. If the crew wanted to eat a hot dinner that night, for instance, they would have to set up the food warming station. If they didn’t want to be stuck using the Soyuz’s radio, they needed to activate and check out the communications systems onboard. And similarly, if they didn’t want to be dependent on the Soyuz “facilities”, they needed to activate the toilet that was delivered by a Shuttle crew on an earlier mission. Though in another moment that reminds us how unglamorous life in space can be, the crew reportedly couldn’t find their utensils and had to eat their first meal “without the normal utensils”, which I’m pretty sure just means “with their hands”.

Despite the immediate onslaught of tasks, the crew did find some time for some celebratory radio messages. Commander Shepherd also found a great moment to really put NASA administrator Dan Goldin on the spot but that requires some explanation. Back in the 1980s, NASA had big plans to build a new space station: Space Station Freedom. If you dig up conceptual drawings of Freedom it looks kind of like a big overgrown version of the ISS. Space Station Freedom was pretty ambitious and quickly struggled with budget and schedule issues and was on the verge of cancellation when the Soviet Union conveniently fell apart. As we’ve discussed in the past, this freed up a bunch of Russian aerospace engineers who suddenly had nothing to do. NASA had an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: by bringing Russia into the space station project they kept those aerospace engineers working on nice and friendly civilian projects instead of going off to make missiles for who-knows-what regimes, while also spreading the cost of the station around a bit and making it more appealing to Congress. Thus, Space Station Freedom turned, alchemy-like, into what would eventually be called the International Space Station.

But there was a group of people who felt surprisingly strongly that the ISS needed a proper name and not what they saw as just a description. Much like how the Space Shuttles have the somewhat prosaic name “Space Shuttle”, (despite “Pegasus” being right there in that memo to the White House, c’mon) the actual vehicles have cool names like Enterprise, Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour. This group of supporters thought the ISS also needed a cool name. Somehow the name that people started pushing for the ISS was “Space Station Alpha” or just “Alpha”. I’ll be honest, I don’t fully understand the reasoning here, and freely admit that I’m just speculating, but let’s look at this proposed name. “Alpha” sort of implies that it’s first, but it raises the natural question: first what? It’s obviously not the first space station since that honor belongs to Salyut 1, which launched back in 1971. OK, but how about America’s first space station? No, that, of course, would be our old buddy Skylab. OK.. how about.. first international space station? Well.. feel free to disagree with me here, but I don’t think I’m alone in saying that that title goes to Mir. Sure, it was launched and operated by the Russians, but NASA paid for and owned some of the modules onboard, and as we’ve discussed at length there were international crews for several years. And speaking of Mir, it was still flying at this time. So if the new station was Alpha, did that make Mir “Beta”? It just didn’t really make a ton of sense.

However, among the group of people who were strong advocates for the “Alpha” name was none other than Expedition 1 commander Bill Shepherd. Which brings us back to the moments after the crew first arrived on the station. With a live video feed beaming down to the ground, and space nerds and reporters all around the world watching, NASA administrator Dan Goldin hopped on the comms to chat with the crew. Once the connection was established Goldin said “You look great!” Shep replied “Thank you sir, we do have one request.” Goldin then replied “What’s that request?” At that moment, the crew members exchanged glances, and with a big grin Shep radioed down “The first expedition on Space Station requests permission to take the radio callsign “Alpha””. Then, with all three men grinning broadly, they put their hands in for a sort of “go team” display. Goldin, having fallen squarely into Shep’s trap, could do nothing but chuckle and say “Temporarily take it as Alpha. Go ahead. Have a good day!” So for the duration of Expedition 1, you’ll sometimes hear the station referred to as “Alpha” but after that it sort of faded away into spaceflight history fun-fact territory.

Alright, the first crew of Alpha is finally here. So after all this buildup, what’s on the docket? The answer is.. oh my god, so much. But mission commander Shepherd summed it up in a pre-flight interview like this: “Our job is to get the station where it can provide significant amounts of its own electrical power where it has a laboratory for folks to go and do some research. That’s the guts of our mission […]”. Sounds simple, but of course, nothing is ever simple in space.

As always, I’m going to have to summarize a bit, even more so than usual on this flight, so if you want more detail I encourage you to check out for yourself the Mission Control daily public updates, the book Creating the International Space Station by David Harland, and the book Outposts on the Frontier by Chladek among others. I’ll list those on the show notes page so you don’t have to hunt them down. As I already mentioned, the immediate tasks included setting up communications, getting the food warmers working, setting up sleeping stations, charging batteries for various tools, and of course, getting the toilet up and running.

Something that long time listeners won’t be at all surprised by was that almost immediately the crew began to fall behind schedule. Partially this was because early on there were pretty limited communication windows, with the ISS needing to be over Russian ground stations in order for comms to work, limiting passes to around 15 minutes per rev. This was especially problematic when a crew member had a question about where to find a specific piece of equipment that was required in order to continue what they were working on. But also, somehow, incredibly, despite all of the experience on Salyut, Skylab, and Mir, the procedures were written with an assumption that everything would be much easier and faster than it actually was. I’m not exactly sure why this seems to be a lesson that has to be re-learned every single time humanity builds a space station, but here we are again.

Just as a one-off example of this, Shepherd wrote about a procedure that included running a camera to film the execution of some task. OK fine, except the procedure apparently budgeted time as if the camera was within arm’s reach and ready to go. In reality, the camera was still stowed and packed up in its box.. somewhere.

In no particular order, some of the tasks accomplished in that first week included setting up the Vozdukh carbon-dioxide scrubber, activating and wiring up various laptops (including the one for the Early Communications System on the NASA side), setting up and using a bicycle ergometer, and inspecting some batteries in Zvezda that the ground had been keeping an eye on. It turns out they had some bent pins in their connectors so would require repair a little later in the mission. In addition to the CO2 scrubber, the Elektron oxygen generator was also set up, but once it was confirmed to be working it was deactivated since it used too much electricity for the early ISS to handle. It would only be activated once more electricity was available. For now, at least, the crew would have to rely on Jerry Linenger’s least favorite piece of equipment: the oxygen generating canisters referred to as “candles”.

The crew also set up the TORU system we’re familiar with from Mir, which allowed the station crews to take over manual control of the automated Progress resupply vehicles if necessary. Notably, this TORU came equipped with a simulation system so the crew could practice their approaches. I think of this as basically being akin to the PILOT laptop that we first saw John Blaha and Rick Searfoss try out back on STS-58. If the crew had to manually dock a Progress (which, spoiler, they will) they were going to be in practice.

The crew also unpacked a device that a casual observer might not recognize the importance of: the Inventory Management System, or IMS. Again, as we learned from the Shuttle-Mir days, the Russian space station was a technological marvel, but also somewhere that a person with a serious hoarding problem would feel right at home. The Russians even admitted that a few years into the Mir program they simply lost track of what was up there and where. The result was that the station was absolutely completely jam-packed with equipment, food supplies, and literal garbage, just everywhere. Simple procedures could be drawn out for days by the sheer necessity of just physically locating the equipment required to get the job done. So NASA, their Russian counterparts, and especially the Expedition 1 crew, went into the ISS determined to not repeat history. The Expedition 1 crew would spend a surprising amount of time and effort making sure that every single movable object on the station had a bar code on it, which was then scanned and logged in the IMS. The crew was determined to know what was up there and where it was, so IMS operations were a never-ending task throughout their stint on the station.

Though I should mention that in one small benefit to this episode being so late, in the intervening months I had an opportunity to ask a question to the Expedition 71 crew when they came to speak at the Goddard Space Flight Center. I asked Michael Barratt and Tracy Caldwell Dyson what it was like returning to the ISS over 10 years after their first missions. Caldwell Dyson talked about how on her first flight there was a big problem with inventory management and when she got home she worked to help improve the situation, and that it was gratifying to see the situation had indeed improved when she flew again. Which.. makes me wonder what happened in between Expedition 1 and Expedition 23. But I suppose that’s a story for another day.

By November 8th, a little more than a week after arriving, the Expedition 1 crew reported that the station was beginning to feel like home.

On the 9th, the ground noted increased solar activity and while it wasn’t expected to be a problem, they asked the crew to set up a radiation monitor and to change their sleeping locations to be in the more shielded parts of the station for the next two days just to be safe. Normally, Gidzenko slept in the FGB, aka Zarya, and Shep and Krikalev slept in Zvezda. So I guess Gidzenko had his own room.

Also on the 9th, the crew discovered that increased humidity in the station was causing condensation to form on some cold freon lines, requiring them to improvise some insulation. In his notes, Shepherd wrote “bill for technical work to be sent to Energia”, referencing the Russian corporation that more or less runs the Russian space program in a way that I have never quite understood since I find the situation confusing. Shepherd also noted that nine laptops had been deployed, though he was struggling to find some RS 232 serial cables to use with them. He also mentioned that he intended to fabricate a substitute desk out of spare packing equipment from the upcoming Progress vehicle, noting that a food container lid was just about the perfect size he needed. If you’re wondering why Commander Shepherd was building his own desk, it’s because the one made for Zvezda was somehow left on the ground. Don’t worry though, the crew eventually decided that that table was too big and they liked the one that they built better.

And after that eventful week, the crew was granted a long weekend, taking it easy on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. Or at least, easier. They still found time to set up their ham radio among other activities.

Before we barrel on into the daily routine of life aboard the station, let’s take a moment to note some nice ceremonial touches. These items are documented in several places, but I’m mostly pulling from Chladek’s book “Outposts on the Frontier” here, so be sure to give it a read some time. As we know, the ISS got started on STS-88, when the Shuttle, with the Unity node in the payload bay, arrived at the Zarya module and docked the two together. Soon afterward, the crew, including Sergei Krikalev, became the first people to enter the station while in orbit. Among all of the practical supplies and equipment they brought was a custom-made book which had been made at the suggestion of astronaut Jeff Ashby. Created and donated by the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida, the book would serve as a log book for the significant activities on the ISS, just like any other proper ship. On the back cover was a quote from T.S. Eliot reading “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” The book was a really nice touch, and actually made the trip to space twice since it had to be returned to Earth for refurbishment in 2006.

Joining the logbook was another idea of Jeff Ashby’s: a ship bell. The metal of the bell included shavings from Alan Shepard’s Naval Academy class ring, shavings from the ship’s bell of the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, and a screw from Mir. Though, actually, just like the book, it soon had to return to Earth since it turns out it didn’t sound great in orbit and had to be replaced. Oh well, the symbolism is still nice. I imagine that when the time comes to deorbit the International Space Station, its logbook and bell will be among the precious few items returned home for safekeeping.

Before we continue, there’s another source I want to specifically call out, and it’s a doozy: the Expedition 1 crew log. This nearly 90 page long document includes endless glimpses into day to day life onboard the station courtesy of mission commander Bill Shepherd. It included everything from exercise updates, requests for more coffee, reports on in-flight maintenance, requests for more coffee, what the crew did in their spare time, and requests for more coffee. Much of today’s episode will be pulled more or less directly from this incredible time capsule of a document.

Speaking of which.. on November 10th, Shepard wrote about some of his challenges with the elaborate written instructions included with some of the equipment. This would especially be troublesome due to the language barrier. For example, the Russian text might say “in the vicinity of the hermetic plate” while the English might say “look on the plate.” Shepherd’s suggestion to the ground was to include more sketches, since a simple diagram could go a long way with this type of work.

Shepherd had some interesting observations about the little quirks of life onboard the station, specifically with the challenges of running an international mission. There are certain conventions that, for whatever reason, are completely baked into a society’s expectations without ever really being questioned by people who grew up in that society. There’s nothing particularly dramatic about them, but they might not be the same choice that other societies make. For example, if you flip a wall switch from the “down” to “up” position, are you turning that switch on or off? What about a dial? To turn it on should you turn it clockwise or counter-clockwise? Shepherd noted that a lot of what they were doing on this flight was developing a common technical language that both sides could understand. Figuring out standards, terminology, symbology, and so on. I think stuff like this is especially interesting because it’s completely mandatory for any sort of future in space, and can be surprisingly tricky, but on paper it kind of barely looks like anything. Even the mere act of working together and keeping the station running was producing valuable results, even if they weren’t some miracle drug that could only be manufactured in weightlessness.

In a pre-flight interview, Sergei Krikalev sort of touched on this too. He noted that the station is very complex, being made out of a group of subsystems that are themselves complex. There are a lot of interfaces where everything has to work together perfectly. Paraphrasing, he basically says that even if all the big technical challenges are handled properly, there will be a lot of bug-hunting as they suddenly all have to work together in the field for the first time. He continued, “And I believe first several missions on the station are going to face more unknown than others. And this is interesting, this is a big challenge, and that’s why it’s interesting to be in the first several crews.”

Later on that same day that Shep was wishing he had a sketch of the system he was setting up, the crew experienced what I believe was the first major computer issue onboard the station. The station had a large number of computers on board, but it’s important to distinguish between them. The ones that actually ran the critical systems were the type of weird, old, robust computer systems you might typically imagine flying on a spacecraft. But there were also a large number of regular old off the shelf laptops that were used by the crew to interface with those system-level computers, communicate with the ground, and plan their daily activities. It was these laptops that inspired the title of today’s episode. That’s because if a casual reader were to skim through the crew log, it would almost be possible to think that you were reading about the daily challenges of running a small Information Technology department, not the International Space Station. Shepherd writes about how when the computer locked up they had to spend a good chunk of time trying extract the files off of it before they could reformat it, which involved a struggle to find a particular file in DOS. They also wrote that they wish they had a boot CD for Windows. In the end, it took more than five attempts to image the hard drive, safely retrieving the files, before they could reload the computer, burning more than three hours of valuable crew time.

And this is far from the only computer issue they would experience. Over the course of the next week, interspersed among comments like how they would prefer advance warning before attitude maneuvers instead of having to just notice the changing view out the window on their own, or how their ham radio contacts with the amateur radio station at the Goddard Space Flight Center had significantly higher quality audio than their actual comm links, were more unexpectedly prosaic issues. A Russian laptop, apparently running Sun’s Solaris operating system, crashed and wouldn’t boot, so they were hoping the upcoming STS-97 crew could bring a backup hard drive. They were struggling to send down large .avi files with the available file transfer system. They suggested that future crews should be given tools and training so they can repair coaxial cables, which was a surprisingly frequent requirement. And in an update that I think we can all relate to, Shepherd reported that they were having trouble getting the printer to stay on the network. Classic. It’s kind of amazing how much time and energy was spent on simple computer system administration. At least TAGS didn’t have to worry about what subnet it was on.

Throughout all this, the crew were also hard at work attempting to inventory every last item aboard the station before their first Progress resupply vehicle arrived and threw another 1,800 kilograms of stuff into the mix. That Progress, Progress M1-4, launched on November 15th, 2000, sailing through an uneventful ascent and initial rendezvous. Things got a little more exciting for the final approach though. As the automated resupply vehicle was making its final approach to Zarya’s nadir port, on the underside of the station, it failed to lock onto the station’s transponder. Gidzenko hopped onto the TORU controls to perform a manual docking but found that the image being broadcast from the Progress was nearly unusable. It seems that someone neglected to add the position of the sun into their rendezvous constraints, because the sun was shining directly into the spacecraft’s camera lens, making the station difficult to see. The lens also had a foggy appearance, later confirmed by the crew to be caused by ice forming over the TV lens. Gidzenko held the Progress at the five meter point, keeping an eye on it out the window, until they passed into orbital night and the view got somewhat better. Maintaining a hold that close, with limited visibility, is sort of a tense situation, even on the R-bar. Once the image cleared up, he then backed the Progress up to the 35 meter mark before re-approaching the station for a successful docking, 40 minutes later than planned. There were a few lessons to be learned here. First, the issue with ice on the camera lens had to be fixed. Second, rendezvouses had to be timed such that the Sun/Station geometry was favorable. And third, it turned out that the initial automated approach failed because the Kurs system on the Progress was confused by seeing Zvezda and Zarya at the same time. Typically Progress dockings were to the axial port, not the nadir port, so this hadn’t come up before. Lessons learned!

The same day as the docking, the crew opened the Progress up. Krikalev reported that the nose of the docking probe smelled like space, which Shep described as a faint odor of burnt toast. Onboard were a bunch of mission critical supplies, but of course, the crew were most interested in the fun stuff: mail from home, some “excellent kielbassa” which they “tested right away”, and a whole bunch of movies. These movies kind of crack me up because for one thing, they became a surprisingly big part of the crew log, forming a running thread throughout the entire mission. But also.. I’m 90% sure that these are like.. DivX bootlegs burned by someone in mission control. The crew frequently talks about watching “disc 1” and “disc 2” of movies that definitely were not released on two discs. And they later excitedly talk about how much they love their new DVD player and what a step up it is from the “CD movies”. Who knew that my high school self and the crew of the ISS had so much in common?

The crew really threw themselves at unpacking, inventorying, and stowing the contents of the Progress as quickly as possible, tearing through around 70% of the work in only two days. In the crew log, Shep wrote that Zarya had been squared away but was now a sea of bags and boxes. In a pre-flight interview, Gidzenko spoke about how critical this cargo management was. He said it was, “a major problem on the Mir station where the crew couldn’t find an item and the Mir station was large so you spent days looking for things. So you need not only to stow the cargo from a transport vehicle you need to describe it, which takes some time.”

And once the Progress was emptied, the work did not end, because they then had to fill it back up again, with garbage. There was a deadline to this work, because the spacecraft needed to undock and depart the area in time for Space Shuttle Endeavour’s arrival on STS-97. The imminent arrival of the Shuttle also dictated what got packed into the Progress and what didn’t. The Expedition 1 crew had a large amount of packing material that was pretty light but voluminous. They were hoping to send all that down on Endeavour with its nice roomy middeck, which is, in fact, what they ended up doing. Somewhere in all this work, the crew noted the passage of American Thanksgiving, but worked through it like any other day. Though Bill Shepard did mention to the ground “When you ride a good rocket ship to orbit, you have a lot to be thankful for.”

They finally finished their unpacking and packing on November 30th, sealing the Progress up for departure. Since there was still some uncertainty in the plan after the Shuttle left, they weren’t sure if they’d ever see this particular spacecraft again. Spoiler: they will.

With Progress M1-4 banished to its parking orbit and Endeavour still on the launchpad, let’s dip back into a little more of the daily struggles of getting a space station up and running. Remember that printer that wouldn’t connect to the network? Well, they dug out another printer and hooked it up instead.. only to find that it also won’t talk to the network. On that same day they got their first red light on the caution and warning panel, with a false alarm being emitted from a smoke detector. The crew log notes “at least the warning tones are noticeable.” A couple days later, Shep writes about spending more than two hours getting a network driver loaded onto their medical computer but he did ultimately succeed. He noted that this was a major accomplishment for a Mac guy, one of several references to how he vastly preferred MacOS to Windows and DOS. The crew also noted they’d like to be trained better on the “nuts and bolts” of how the email server works so they would be better able to troubleshoot it for themselves without relying on the ground. A couple days after that Shep wrote about a problem that hits so close to home that it was starting to freak me out a little: the crew was having trouble getting Russian fonts to load in PDF files, but they did load in Microsoft Word. Not to dunk on the ISS too hard, but remember when this podcast about like.. landing on the moon? The font problem especially made me laugh because at this point in the log a bunch of malformed words begin to appear, which I have to assume are Russian words that were not being properly encoded back in 2000 and now just show up as a bunch of question marks.

IT problems were not the only problems though. On November 28th they connected some cables to their second air conditioning unit to check the telemetry. In the process, they accidentally turned on the blower and suddenly heard a bunch of vibrations and metallic sounds, accompanied by the smell of hot insulation. Apparently something got sucked into the machinery, or was in there from packing, and several fan blades had sheared off, with one getting jammed in the housing. That was another task for another day, but Shep noted that it did give them something to talk about during their radio chat with the Discovery Channel.

While installing a replacement air conditioner the crew noted with some apprehension that it was positioned right above their main computer and network gear area. Nothing went wrong with the replacement, but they were worried that there was a lot of potential for a mishap with this arrangement. They also wrote that the “Fit of head exchanger unit is very tight. We are saying bad things about the engineers.” They eventually had to loosen support bolts for the entire unit in order to get it loose enough to slide a heat exchanger in, comparing it to changing a car’s transmission.

On December 1st, 2000, Space Shuttle Endeavour launched, kicking off the STS-97 mission, with Brent Jett, Mike Bloomfield, Joe Tanner, Marc Garneau, and Carlos Noriega on their way to deliver the P6 truss and the first giant solar arrays. A couple days later, the ISS crew could spot the orbiter approaching the station. Shep wrote that he first saw it at a range of around 5-8 kilometers, and the view looking down at the orbiter was unreal, with it looking more like a model than a 100 ton object. They felt and heard a slight bump right as contact was called.

As you’ll recall from the STS-97 episode, the Shuttle crew left a bunch of goodies in the pressurized mating adapter before closing the hatch again on their end, leaving it for the ISS crew to retrieve. The crew entered the node, grabbed the stuff, and moved it into Zarya, which they noted was now completely full of floating equipment for the third time in the mission. What’s kind of amazing, is that when the Expedition 1 crew entered the Unity Node to get to the PMA on December 3rd, it was their first time in the Node. Since there was limited power, the Node was cold and dark and there wasn’t really any reason to be in there, so they had spent the mission so far staying in Zvezda and Zarya. Since heaters had been turned on in advance of the expected ingress, the ISS crew found it to be cool, but not uncomfortable, with shorts and long sleeved shirts being fine. They describe “swimming around” in the Node, which was far more spacious than Zvezda, and especially Zarya. They also found that hardly any velcro was on the walls, and got to work installing some for future use. With the large temperature swings, they were also supposed to install dessicant bags to absorb any stray condensation. A frustrated Shep wrote that the dessicant bags were wrapped like they were going to Mars and back. But all the effort was worth it because they were delighted with the gear left by the Shuttle crew, which included mail from home, new tools, bags of water, and perhaps most anticipated, coffee and tea.

And while we’re speaking of the Node, and since I have nowhere else to really put this, I want to briefly mention how the US side of the station communicated with the Russian side of the station. Chladek gets into this in more detail in his book “Outposts on the Frontier” if you want to know more. The most obvious way to get data connectivity between the two halves would be to just run a cable between them, right through the hatch. But after the debacle aboard Mir when Progress crashed into Spektr, leading to the crew using a kitchen knife to saw through a sparking cable so they could close the hatch, that was off limits. Another option would be to do it wirelessly, but that was still kind of a new idea in the computer world. Proper Wi-Fi was only introduced in 1997, and the crew referred to the setup as the “radio LAN” since the term “Wi-Fi” apparently hadn’t permeated society yet. Wi-Fi would have worked but was pretty slow, especially back then, and came with interference concerns. My favorite suggestion was to just set up infrared beams and detectors on either side of the hatch, and use that to transmit data. But apparently there was a concern that all the stray infrared light would interfere with the fire detection equipment. The ultimate solution was super convenient but kind of bizarre in how much it relied on luck. Remember those external data cables that the EVA crew connected back on STS-88? Well, it turns out there just happened to be more capacity than was needed in those cables, leaving some left over for the computers on either side of the station to talk to each other. So they just used those. Convenient!

The presence of the Shuttle crew had a surprisingly small impact on day to day life aboard the station. Due to the low cabin pressure required by the Shuttle EVA crew, the hatches were kept closed for almost the entire time they were docked. And the two crews didn’t even sync up their sleep schedule. I was surprised to learn that the ISS crew actually slept through the first Shuttle EVA, only finding out it was successful after waking up. For the most part, they seem to have just gone about their usual business, while making sure that stuff like electrical systems were in the right configuration, and keeping an eye on the Station systems and making sure nothing was being affected by, or affecting, the Shuttle crew.

As discussed in Episode 190, on the ninth day of the Shuttle mission the orbiter cabin pressure was raised and they could finally open the hatch to the station, allowing the two crews to mingle. There wasn’t really a ton of actual work to do, but both sides had fun exploring the other’s spacecraft.

But just as quickly as they arrived, the Shuttle crew were back on their side of the hatch and the Expedition 1 crew were watching their departure through the ISS windows. It was back to the daily routine.

That daily routine was distinctly different than what any current NASA astronaut was used to. Other than the six people who flew as part of Shuttle-Mir, the entire current astronaut corps was from the Shuttle era, where flights consisted of a week or two of nonstop frenetic energy. Years of training was poured into extracting the absolute maximum out of a few precious hundred hours of spaceflight. Long duration operations were totally different. In a pre-flight interview, Shepherd compared ops on a Shuttle flight to being like an airplane flight, while with the ISS he expected it to be more like a ship at sea, one that must take care of itself. He later commented that the biggest challenge was packing 30 hours of work into an 18 hour day. So what were they actually doing during those hours?

Gidzenko gives us the broad strokes, saying he would get up at 8am Moscow time, eat breakfast, check in with the ground for updates to their schedule, and prepare for the day. He’d work for three hours from 9am to 12pm, then exercise a bit, have lunch, and get back to work. Once he wrapped up work for the day he’d do another hour of exercise before dinner. I thought it was interesting that he breaks the two daily hours of exercise into two sessions, but it makes sense.

While there was plenty of housework to do, both in terms of ship maintenance and stuff like organizing and inventorying supplies, one chore they never had to do was laundry. With no practical way to wash clothes on orbit, they’d just wear the same clothes for two or three days and throw them out. It seems crazy at first until you think about how heavy water is and how light clothing is.

Before the flight, Krikalev seemed to welcome the packed schedule. He said that on Mir, the busier he was, the better he felt. He talked about how the worst days where ones where something went wrong and the ground had to figure out what to do, leaving the crew on their own. He said “Day when you have very busy schedule and when you fulfill this schedule, this is kind of, happy kind of day on the station.”

That said, it’s important to distinguish between “being busy” and “actually getting stuff done.” The nature of life aboard the station meant that a lot of time could be spent on somewhat menial tasks. Let’s just look at one example. The crew had to access a remote power control module, RPCM. OK fine, except it’s stored in that funny little space under the Z-1 truss. And that hatch is where they had set up the interim resistive exercise device, or IRED, which is basically how you do weight lifting exercise in space. So they gather the appropriate tools, head over into the Unity node, pull off all the support braces on the IRED, move it out of the way, open the hatch to the Z-1 vestibule, pull out the RPCM, close the hatch, put the IRED back, clamp down all the supports again, and put away all the tools used to do all that. Over an hour just to grab something that itself was just one part of an overall task.

As just one more example, you know those IMAX shots of stuff like the STS-97 crew arriving onboard the station? They look so off-the-cuff, just neat little slices of life. It turns out that even assuming that the bright lights required for filming are in position and powered, and the camera has film in it and is ready to go, it can take 45 minutes to get a shot. Throw in all the setup and tear down work and you’re looking at several hours of effort just for a few short scenes. I guess that makes sense. Everything takes forever in spaceflight and in film, so when you combine the two it just makes everything take exponentially longer.

With all those moving parts you might wonder how frequently the crew lost stuff on the station. After all, with that much pressurized volume, that much equipment, and no gravity, it wouldn’t be hard to lose track of stuff. According to Shepherd it was actually kind of amazing how little they lost, since just about everything eventually turns up stuck to one of the air intake filters. Except for black sharpie markers, which he claims have a “unique capability to avoid detection.”

Starting on November 18th, a new beat was added to the rhythm of life aboard the station, one which seems to have been enjoyed at the end of almost every day for the rest of the mission: movie time. As I mentioned, the movies came in the form of CDs sent up from the ground, often broken up into two parts. Thanks to Shepherd’s meticulous crew log, I can tell you what they’ve watched so far. The first movie watched aboard the International Space Station, at least the first that was recorded, was M. Night Shyamalan’s film “The Sixth Sense.” According to Shep, nobody liked it. That’s already kind of funny, but what’s really hilarious about this choice is that it was selected by Yuri Gidzenko.. because he thought it was the sequel to The Fifth Element. Now, to be fair to Gidzenko, The Fifth Element stars Bruce Willis and has the number five in the title.. and The Sixth Sense also stars Bruce Willis and has the number six in the title. Ah well, I guess they could do worse. Next up was L.A. Confidential, which came with the note “we may have to watch this one several more times.” A few days later, they broke into Apocalypse Now. The crew log notes “Shep tried to explain why Robert Duvall is always wearing the black cavalry hat, but being a Navy guy, he’s not sure he understands it either.” After that was Pulp Fiction, and then to wind down after all the activity of STS-97’s visit: Saving Private Ryan. Not the most relaxing movie, but definitely a good one.

Oh and I should mention that apparently coffee was a big part of the daily routine since on December 16th, only five days after Endeavour left, Shep recorded that the crew had already drank their entire new supply of coffee. Whoops.

On December 14th we get a little foreshadowing for the upcoming STS-102 episode, when the crew learned that their ride home would be delayed by at least two weeks due to some repairs needed by Space Shuttle Discovery. But if they were missing the action of accommodating visiting vehicles, they didn’t have to worry, because a week later the ground approved a plan to return Progress M1-4 to the station. For the last few weeks it had been hanging out in a nearby parking orbit, trailing the station by around 2500 kilometers. The benefit here was that the crew would be able to cram a little more trash into the vehicle, but also, Russian ground controllers would get a chance to see how the patched rendezvous software worked in real world conditions.

About a week later, Progress M1-4 was again visible outside the station windows. As per the plan, it navigated to within 200 meters of the station, and then Gidzenko flew it in manually. I suppose the idea here was that this way the ground could see how the Progress software would handle the overlapping transponder issue, but by keeping it under manual control they lowered the risk of it again losing lock in close proximity. Gidzenko again flew the Progress in for a successful docking, and the ground reported that the patch had worked. Just to be sure that the cause of the failure was well understood, they asked the crew to pull the electronics that controlled the Kurs rendezvous system so they could later be returned to Earth and examined.

The day before Progress’s return was also notable since it was Christmas! The crew was given a lighter workload for the holiday and had opportunities to chat with their families over the radio. Shepherd lamented that they didn’t have a Christmas tree to decorate, but I guess he had forgotten about the evergreen tree graphic attached to the floating point potential probe by the STS-97 crew! Just hop on out and grab it, Shep!

On the night of December 31st, the crew rang in the new year, and, depending on how pedantic you want to be, the new millennium. In the crew log, mission commander Shepherd wrote about how in US Navy tradition, the person on duty at midnight at New Years would write something appropriate in the ship’s log in prose. I’m pretty sure he meant poetry, because what followed was nine verses about the station, the new year, and the voyaging crew. I thought about reading the whole thing here but it’s a bit long and I probably wouldn’t do it justice, so instead you can check the show notes page to read it for yourself. Needless to say, there were several references to the “Alpha” name that the crew really wanted to make stick.

We’re going to fast forward through most of January, where day to day life was pretty much the usual routine. But one item of note was that when the ground cycled the docking latches in PMA-2, in anticipation of STS-98, they found that there was some sort of issue. The crew made their way over to the mating adapter and watched through the window from the Node as the test was repeated. It turned out that one of the newly added air ducts was in the way. Kind of a surprising amount went into this fix, with back and forth about how to do the fix and when the crew should be in the PMA, as well as clearing stuff out of the way, but the gist of it is that Shep just went in there and moved the hose out of the way, clearing the obstruction and any issues for the upcoming Shuttle flight.

That flight was delayed by a couple of weeks, prompting Shep to write in the log: “Lab delay is critical as we are running out of movies that we have not watched.”

On February 9th, the day after the ISS crew celebrated their 100th day on orbit, Space Shuttle Atlantis arrived, carrying the Destiny laboratory in its payload bay, along with its crew of Ken Cockrell, Mark Polansky, Bob Curbeam, Marsha Ivins, and Tom Jones. Of course, we covered all of STS-98 on the previous episode, so let’s not rehash it here. I’ll just say that after a few more days of frantic activity, the crew of Expedition 1 had a brand new module to play with. Actually, in one moment I forgot to mention, STS-98 mission commander Ken Cockrell brought an actual DD-250 form, titled “Material Inspection and Receiving Report” and had Bill Shepherd sign for the newly installed laboratory. Shepherd noted “We are honored to sign for it, just hope the bill does not come with it.”

A few days after watching Space Shuttle Atlantis depart the station, it was time for the Expedition 1 crew to do the same. But only for a few minutes. Yes, it’s time for everyone’s favorite game, the Soyuz Shuffle. The Soyuz that had delivered the crew to the ISS was currently parked on the aft docking port on the Zvezda module, at the back of the station. The next Progress would be helping to reboost the station, so it needed to be docked at the axial port. This meant that the Soyuz had to be moved to the nadir port of the Zarya module. This is actually a more complicated operation that it might seem at first glance. There was always a very real chance that for a variety of reasons, the crew would not be able to redock their spacecraft and would have no choice but to head home. And this wasn’t theoretical. It wasn’t a vehicle relocation, but there were actual cases of Salyut crews encountering failures with the docking equipment and having to go home before the mission even started. With that in mind, they spent several days shutting down systems and getting the station ready for a lengthy uncrewed stint, just in case.

On February 24th, 2001, the crew suited up and stuffed themselves into the Soyuz spacecraft, closed the hatch, and began to wait for the go-ahead from the ground to undock. All the official sources will confirm this, stating that a couple hours later the crew undocked, backed away about 100 meters, puttered around to line up with Zarya, and then cruised right back in for an uneventful docking. But what the official sources won’t say, and one reason I’m so glad to have found the crew log, is that thanks to the crew log we know that the three men passed those few hours waiting to undock and then later to reopen the hatch.. by watching Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.

Once back on board the station, the crew promptly got to work starting back up everything they just spent a few days shutting down. Such is the life of an astronaut or cosmonaut.

Four days later, Progress M-44 docked itself automatically to the vacated aft port, in what was described as a textbook and uneventful docking. This, of course, prompted a new wave of frantic unpacking, inventorying, and stowing, but again, such is the life of an astronaut or cosmonaut.

If you’re like me, that Austin Powers reference has got you curious what else the crew watched during their many months on orbit. Well I am proud to announce that I combed through the entire crew log for any reference to their nightly movies, and I have as complete a list as anyone can have. I’m just going to blast through this at full speed, so here we go:

• The Sixth Sense
• LA Confidential
• Apocalypse Now
• Pulp Fiction
• Saving Private Ryan
• Contact
• Lethal Weapon 3 (other than the last ten minutes since the disc kept crashing)
• Lethal Weapon 4
• Blues Brothers
• Air Force One
• The World Is Not Enough
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• 2010: The Year We Make Contact
• The Rock
• Catch 22
• In-Laws
• Dr. Strangelove
• As Good As It Gets
• Carlito’s Way, using Russian subtitles (Shep added “You have to watch some cops and robbers to see how much Russian there is that they never taught you in class”)
• The Big Lebowski
• Used Cars (Shep added “we are definitely down to the movies you can’t even find at Blockbuster”)
• GI Jane (this prompted Gidzenko and Krikalev to ask a lot of questions about the Navy SEALs to Shepherd, who is an actual SEAL. He had to explain that the movie wasn’t exactly like the real thing)
• End of Days
• Lion of the Desert
• Tombstone
• City of Angels (the crew log notes that Shep did his best to explain to Yuri and Sergei what the phrase “chick flick” means)
• Full Metal Jacket
• History of Navy SEALs
• Usual Suspects
• Frequency
• The Green Mile
• Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
• Hurricane

After that they seem to have either run out movies or got sick of writing them down. So if you ever wanted to live like an ISS crew member, fire up the DVD player and get started on this list. At least they didn’t watch Emmanuelle.

As we get close to wrapping things up, there is one topic that is conspicuously absent on this mission: science. And the truth is.. there really wasn’t a ton of it to be had on this flight. This flight was all about getting the ISS up and running, making sure the lights turned on, and getting everything wired up. Science was far down the priority list. But that’s not to say that there was nothing at all. For one thing, as with every spaceflight, there was plenty of Earth observation photography to be had. This is valuable data that can’t really be gathered any other way, even with automated platforms, and is always a favorite of the crews.

There were also some student experiments. The crew documented the growth of some plants as part of a student experiment, taking photos of the plants at regular intervals. This actually proved to be slightly trickier than expected since they struggled to take clean photos of the plants themselves, and not reflections on the plastic bags they were housed in, but they eventually figured it out.

One unexpected science cameo came in the form of the Middeck Active Control Experiment II, or MACE-II. If that sounds vaguely familiar, then you get a gold star, because the first MACE flew waaaay back on STS-67, six years earlier. This was that funky experiment that looked like a bunch of spindly poles and cylinders, examining how active control could be used to make structures more stable. I didn’t really see much about it on this flight, other than that Shepherd fixed an issue with it near the end of January.

Oh, and in case you were worried, fear not, we have our mandatory allotment of crystals on this flight. That big dewar of protein crystals was still floating around somewhere, passively doing its thing with no crew involvement. What convenience.

This episode has clearly gotten way out of control, so I think it’s about time to start winding things down here, but it’s sort of a struggle since there’s just so much to talk about with this flight. I’m sure it seems like I’ve been talking forever, but I’m leaving so much on the cutting room floor. Here’s a partial list of stuff I didn’t have time to talk about, in no particular order:

• Numerous amateur radio contacts with the ground, including with some very excited schoolchildren.
• At one point the crew was unable to log their exercise data because of some missing .dat file on the C drive.
• I left out several moments with endless printer debugging, including being unable to print PDFs from the browser, and dealing with the printer mysteriously only printing half pages.
• There were a number of “vampire days” where the crew drew each others’ blood for science.
• Extensive mapping of the sound levels at various points on the station so they could plan appropriate sound damping measures and hearing protection.
• Fixing apparently the only set of headphones on board by cutting the wires out of a speaker and splicing and soldering them into the headphones.
• Disassembling and reassembling the treadmill to fix some broken slats, which turned out to be a huge ordeal.
• And, the classic, Microsoft Outlook repeatedly eating emails.

But all these problems are just part of the journey. As commander Shepherd said before launching: “I think it’s critically important that we have a space program if only to fulfill this need for a technical society to face challenges, surmount them, and move on.”

And it is indeed time to move on! On March 8th, 2001, Space Shuttle Discovery successfully launched into orbit and began STS-102. Two days later it arrived at the station and the first of many many crew handovers to come began. We’ll cover more in the STS-102 episode, but suffice it to say that after getting the Expedition 2 crew up to speed, Bill Shepherd, Yuri Gidzenko, and Sergei Krikalev climbed through the pressurized mating adapter and into Discovery, ready for the ride home. Shep made one last entry in the log book, writing:

After 137 days on board the station, the Expedition 1 crew, now part of the STS-102 crew, departed the ISS aboard Space Shuttle Discovery. Two days later, they landed safely at the Shuttle Landing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Before flying, Shep had said “What I want out of this flight is for people to say that the first crew did a good job, and they came home safe, and they left, you know, a good ship in orbit.” and I think it’s safe to say that the entire crew delivered on that goal. The ISS was no longer an idea, or a lifeless outpost to briefly visit. It was now a laboratory, a gymnasium, a photography studio, a ham radio shack, a DIY furniture factory, a movie theater, and above all, it was a home in space. A new era of spaceflight had dawned.

Next time.. over the last three flights we have been hard at work attaching new major components to the ISS. For STS-102 we’ll take a break from assembly, give some friends a ride, and I’m pretttty sure we’re going to meet a ninja turtle?

Ad Astra, catch you on the next pass.