Lofty Ambitions: How the World Built a City in Space
Today marks a milestone in human spaceflight. Twenty years ago, on November 2, 2000, Expedition 1, made up of two Russian cosmonauts and one American astronaut, took up residence on the International Space Station(ISS). In the succeeding years human beings have lived, without interruption, somewhere other than planet Earth. More than 240 people representing 19 nations have called the ISS home. Today, Expedition 64, made up of two Russians, one Japanese and four Americans, occupies the Station.
The international partnership required to complete a project as uniquely challenging as the ISS demanded key moments of foresight, decades of negotiation, collaboration on a monumental scale and sustained political will across many nations.
Consisting of modules built on the ground by different countries at sites thousands of miles apart and then fitted together with extraordinary precision for the very first time some 250 miles above the Earth at a cost of more than $150 billion, the ISS is the single most ambitious and expensive project ever undertaken by humans. It is all the more remarkable since the scale of resources and international effort applied to it are more commonly associated with the waging of war. Truly a global project, the Station would likely not have happened without the vision and leadership of the United States, the spacefaring ambitions of its allies, a properly thawed Cold War and the prescience of an obscure analyst at the Library of Congress.
In late 1957, the Soviet Union orbited the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik, and set off a near-panic in Washington. In response, the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 transformed the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). There was a lot of work to do if the United States were to catch up to the Russians in space technology. As urgent, the US needed to demonstrate international leadership in space despite the fact that it so clearly lagged the USSR.
Dr. Eilene Galloway was a defense analyst at the Library of Congress in April 1958 as the Space Act took shape. Her foresight would help to shape the whole future of humanity in space and play a significant role in the ultimate development of the ISS. Helping to draft the Space Act, Galloway proposed that NASA be an Administration rather than an Agency, making the new organization not just more technically but also more bureaucratically muscular, able to coordinate activities across the federal landscape.
She also promoted international cooperation in space, a sentiment shared by her future boss Lyndon Johnson. She understood that international cooperation in this new, fast-moving arena would require America’s nascent space program to be nimble. She therefore recommended that the Space Act include language allowing NASA to create bi-lateral and multi-lateral arrangements with foreign partners, giving it the ability to cooperate internationally as needed without the requirement for formal treaties, and thus Senate approval. This flexibility would be essential decades later when it came time to build the ISS.
A few months later, President Eisenhower, a Republican, asked Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson of Texas, a Democrat, to go to the United Nations and build a coalition that would keep thousands of years of terrestrial conflict from rising into space. Johnson addressed the UN General Assembly in November 1958 on behalf of the president. He said, in part, “Today outer space is free. It is unscarred by conflict. It must remain this way… We know the gains of cooperation. We know the losses of failure to cooperate… Men who have worked together to reach the stars are not likely to descend together into the depths of war and desolation.”
It was surely a worthwhile goal, and important for framing the international character the space age. But Eisenhower was also being canny. He set about leveraging the UN to promulgate a regime of international law that would legitimize unfettered satellite overflights across national borders — thus giving America the ability to peer inside the secretive Soviet Union with spy satellites. The US therefore had complex motives for internationalizing space.
The result of this US-led initiative was creation of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS). It soon became clear that, in addition to addressing the concerns about creating a vast new battleground in space, the nations of the world could use space in ways that would truly benefit all humankind. Dr. Galloway, by now an adviser to Johnson on space policy, said that therefore “the role of COPUOS was to safeguard the right of people of all nations to beneficial results from space exploration by providing assistance for research, exchange and dissemination of information, encouraging national research programs and studying legal problems arising from space exploration. Both fear and hope brought countries together in cooperation.” The Soviet Union and several other East Bloc countries refused to join COPUOS at first, though eventually they did. This very early effort to bring the world together in pursuing the peaceful uses of space also created a solid foundation for America’s claim to international leadership in space.
Through the work of COPUOS, the nations of the world have concluded five treaties with regard to space activities. The most comprehensive is the 1967 Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, better known as the Outer Space Treaty (OST). In the OST, Eisenhower got what he wanted and the treaty created a basic framework for international relations in space.
With the foundation for international cooperation laid by COPUOS, President Nixon hoped to pick up the tempo and fly astronauts from other nations on the Shuttle which did eventually happen. But American efforts to build a truly international partnership, specifically with Europe, around the Space Transportation System as the Shuttle program was formally called were half-hearted and strained relations among the space agencies. Ultimately, the US invited the Europeans to build a laboratory, Spacelab, that could fit inside the Shuttle cargo bay for some scientific missions. It was hardly a real partnership in the Shuttle program and the Europeans knew it. The US hesitation to engage Europe in the Shuttle program as meaningful partners was driven by concerns about security and technology transfers — an apprehension that lingers still today in Washington. At the same time, NASA officials were busy trying to dissuade Western Europe from developing its own launch vehicles, without which it would be dependent on riding the Shuttle into space. Europe thought otherwise, so instead a consortium of European nations, now in the form of the new European Space Agency (ESA), built the Ariane I, a three-stage, liquid fueled expendable rocket that came on line at roughly the same time as the Shuttle. ESA then announced that Ariane would compete with the Shuttle for commercial satellite business. Among other things, the arrival of Ariane on the scene prompted NASA to designate the Shuttle fleet as “operational” very early in its flight schedule. With the formation of ESA, the international space community gained a significant new member.
NASA had first proposed a space station as early as 1959, as part of something it called Project Apollo. Eisenhower did not approve it. His successor, John Kennedy, famously endorsed a revised Apollo, but without a space station. Later, Nixon also nixed a space station, but he approved the Shuttle— an especially odd combination of choices since a main role of the Shuttle was to service a space station.
When it came time to talk seriously about a space station, the US would need to lead a real international partnership, in part because building domestic support for the station continued to be a problem, and in part because of the extraordinary costs involved. Therefore creating interest among US allies in jointly building a space station would make the project more resilient to opposition in Washington at a time when deficits were seriously beginning to worry lawmakers, since costs could be spread amongst many nations. Given the incremental nature of NASA policymaking and budgeting in the post-Apollo era, without the international character of the space station project as it unfolded (and the flexibility provided by Eilene Galloway decades earlier), the station quite literally would not have gotten off the ground.
NASA officials shrewdly recognized the political advantages of internationalizing the space station project, and they leveraged President Ronald Reagan’s desire to extend American leadership in space. Fear that America was behind in space drove Kennedy’s support of Apollo. Post-Apollo, the hope of keeping America ahead powered Reagan’s support for the space station. As in Apollo, scientific considerations were not absent, but for the White House, if not for NASA, these were subordinate to the geo-political benefits of building a space station.
The effort to internationalize the space station project began in earnest in January 1982. Kenneth Pedersen of NASA’s International Affairs Division called representatives from Europe, Canada and Japan to the Johnson Space Center in Houston to discuss their participation in a space station. Initially, the conversation sounded to the US allies a lot like the Shuttle, and they were not interested in that. The Europeans in particular had new leverage, with the competitive Ariane I flying and plans in the works for heavier-lift Ariane II and Ariane III versions. Still, involvement in a US space station was intriguing. If, and only if, it was done under the mantra of “mutual access,” meaning all partners would have access to all parts of the station regardless of which partner built it, then Canada, Japan and Europe could share in some of the high technology nourishing America’s economy.
Some within NASA saw the effort to build international support and participation in the project mainly (or perhaps entirely) as a way to counterbalance opposition to the space station within the Congress and the administration. Others, like Robert Freitag in NASA’s Office of Manned Spaceflight, were more visionary. Freitag saw meaningful international cooperation as essential to build a station now, but also for future issues we all would face in the long term. He thought it “important for us to learn to work together on a high-technology project of this scope because someday it might be really important for us to know how to work together.”
Making the station international also seemed to insulate the project from the vagaries of national politics in any single partner nation — no country would want to suffer the political embarrassment of being the one to pull the plug on such a high-profile and pioneering project. Of course the space station, which Reagan would name “Freedom,” was clearly thought of as another front in the Cold War. Although the Soviets had been orbiting a series of laboratories for a decade by this time, they were modest in scale and no effort was made to make them permanently crewed. Thus, like Apollo and the Shuttle, NASA wanted to do something transformational by building a permanently crewed city in space; unlike Apollo and the Shuttle, this time it needed the world to come along.
Reagan was enthusiastic about space, but wary of a Kennedy-style commitment during a time of daunting budget deficits. He knew from his earliest days as president that NASA saw a space station as the next logical step in space exploration, and a necessary foundation for human exploration of Mars. The moon missions had taken a mere ten days. A trip to Mars could take as much as three years round-trip and only a space station would enable us to learn what happens to people and machines when they spend years in space.
On April 11, 1983, Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 5–83, to create an inter-agency study of plans for a permanently manned station. NASA formally presented the space station to Reagan on December 1, 1983. Four days later, after the NASA Administrator and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget wrangled about the cost, the president endorsed the idea. Six weeks after that he was standing at the rostrum of the US House of Representatives, where John Kennedy had sent America to the moon 23 years earlier. “I am directing NASA to develop a permanently manned space station and to do it within a decade,” he said.
The space station “Freedom” project languished during the rest of the 1980s however, as budget pressures diminished its ambitions, the Cold War thawed and the waning competition with Moscow seemed also to subdue appetites in Washington for a hugely expensive project like the station. The larger and far more expensive “pinwheel” space station concept had long since given way to a less expensive modular chain of “tin cans.”
Then the Soviet empire collapsed, and the situation was again transformed. Daniel Golden, NASA Administrator under President Bill Clinton presided over the opportunity to bring the new Russian Federation into the task of building a space station. Like the mid-1970s Apollo-Soyuz project, it would also be highly symbolic — instead of Space Station Freedom orbiting the Earth as a stick in Moscow’s eye, the International Space Station would tie Russia and the West together in a lasting way.
So on November 7, 1993 the United States and Russia signed an agreement to bring Moscow into the space station fold. Much like Eisenhower’s decision to internationalize space and promote peace among the stars, the decision to invite the Russians to what was now called the ISS was more complex than pursuing post-Cold War niceties. The carrot of ISS membership involved, for example, an effort to also bring Moscow into compliance with the Missile Technology Control Regime, a voluntary international agreement to control the export of weapons of mass destruction.
With Russia now in the ISS family, the initial module of humanity’s first city in space was launched atop a Russian Proton rocket in 1998. The outpost was deemed complete in 2011, after the final Shuttle flight, Atlantis STS-135, delivered two logistics modules. The station is today by far the largest object in Earth orbit. According to NASA, the station “spans the area of a U.S. football field, including the end zones, and weighs 924,739 pounds. The complex now has more livable room than a conventional six-bedroom house, and has two bathrooms, a gymnasium and a 360-degree bay window.”
Earthly benefits of the science made possible by the ISS, particularly in medicine and environmental sciences, are numerous. As the 16th year of continuous human presence in space gets underway, two ISS crewmates, Station Commander Scott Kelly of the United States and Russian Cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko are halfway through their groundbreaking year-long mission to the station. This is yet another milestone on the path to human exploration of our solar system that would not be possible without the ISS.
When the time came to take on the immense task of building and lifting a million-pound city into orbit, NASA’s ability to create multi-lateral agreements with other countries, a product of Eilene Galloway’s prescience, allowed the world to create the ISS. This same framework, and the years of close cooperation built up among the member space agencies, are a strong foundation for other collaborations that can allow humanity to address major problems such as orbital debris and planetary defense (from asteroids, not aliens).
This extraordinary global partnership has enabled humans from many corners of our world to live continuously off of this Earth for the last 20 years. Dr. Galloway would no doubt be pleased. She might also well remind us that many milestones lay ahead if we have the will to reach them.
