International Space Station

6 Key excerpts on "International Space Station"

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  Complete Handbook of Solar System and Space Exploration

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Library Press

    (Publisher)

  Purpose The International Space Station (ISS) is an internationally developed satellite currently being assembled in Low Earth Orbit. Primarily a research laboratory, the ISS offers an advantage over spacecraft such as NASA's Space Shuttle because it is a long-term platform in the space environment, where extended studies are conducted. The presence of a permanent crew affords the ability to monitor, replenish, repair, and replace experiments and components of the spacecraft itself. Scientists on Earth have swift access to the crew's data and can modify experiments or launch new ones, benefits generally unavailable on specialised unmanned spacecraft. Crews, who fly expeditions of several months duration, conduct scientific experiments each day (approximately 160 man-hours a week). As of the conclusion of Expedition 15, 138 major science investigations had been conducted on the ISS. Scientific findings, in fields from basic science to exploration research, are published every month. The ISS provides a location in the relative safety of Low Earth Orbit to test spacecraft systems that will be required for long-duration missions to the Moon and Mars. This provides experience in the maintenance, repair, and replacement of systems on-orbit, which will be essential in operating spacecraft further from Earth. Mission risks are reduced, and the capabilities of interplanetary spacecraft are advanced. ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ Part of the crew's mission is educational outreach and international cooperation. The crew of the ISS provide opportunities for students on Earth by running student-developed experiments, making educational demonstrations, and allowing for student participation in classroom versions of ISS experiments, NASA investigator experiments, and ISS engineering activities.

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  Essence of Big Science (Big Projects, machines & Observatories)

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • University Publications

    (Publisher)

  The station is serviced by Soyuz spacecraft, Progress spacecraft, space shuttles, the Automated Transfer Vehicle and the H-II Transfer Vehicle, and has been visited by astronauts and cosmonauts from 15 different nations. Purpose The International Space Station (ISS) is an internationally developed habitable satellite currently being assembled in Low Earth Orbit. Primarily a research laboratory, the ISS offers an advantage over spacecraft such as NASA's Space Shuttle because it is a long-term platform in the space environment, where extended studies are conducted. The presence of a permanent crew affords the ability to monitor, replenish, repair, and replace experiments and components of the spacecraft itself. Scientists on Earth have swift access to the crew's data and can modify experiments or launch new ones, benefits generally unavailable on unmanned spacecraft. Crews, who fly expeditions of several months duration, conduct scientific experiments each day (approximately 160 man-hours a week). As of the conclusion of Expedition 15, 138 major science investigations had been conducted on the ISS. Scientific findings, in fields from basic science to exploration research, are published every month. The ISS provides a location in the relative safety of Low Earth Orbit to test spacecraft systems that will be required for long-duration missions to the Moon and Mars. This provides experience in the maintenance, repair, and replacement of systems on-orbit, which will be essential in operating spacecraft further from Earth. Mission risks are reduced, and the capabilities of interplanetary spacecraft are advanced. Part of the crew's mission is educational outreach and international cooperation. The crew of the ISS provide opportunities for students on Earth by running student-developed experiments, making educational demonstrations, and allowing for student participation in classroom versions of ISS experiments, NASA investigator experiments, and ISS engineering activities.

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  Handbook of Spacecraft Technology, Components and Space Programs

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Learning Press

    (Publisher)

  The financing, research capabilities and technical design of the ISS programme have been criticised because of the high cost. The station is serviced by Soyuz spacecraft, Progress spacecraft, space shuttles, the Automated Transfer Vehicle and the H-II Transfer Vehicle, and has been visited by astronauts and cosmonauts from 15 different nations. ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ Purpose The International Space Station (ISS) is an internationally developed satellite currently being assembled in Low Earth Orbit. Primarily a research laboratory, the ISS offers an advantage over spacecraft such as NASA's Space Shuttle because it is a long-term platform in the space environment, where extended studies are conducted. The presence of a permanent crew affords the ability to monitor, replenish, repair, and replace exp-eriments and components of the spacecraft itself. Scientists on Earth have swift access to the crew's data and can modify experiments or launch new ones, benefits generally unavailable on specialised unmanned spacecraft. Crews, who fly expeditions of several months duration, conduct scientific experiments each day (approximately 160 man-hours a week). As of the conclusion of Expedition 15, 138 major science investigations had been conducted on the ISS. Scientific findings, in fields from basic science to exploration research, are published every month. The ISS provides a location in the relative safety of Low Earth Orbit to test spacecraft systems that will be required for long-duration missions to the Moon and Mars. This provides experience in the maintenance, repair, and replacement of systems on-orbit, which will be essential in operating spacecraft further from Earth. Mission risks are reduced, and the capabilities of interplanetary spacecraft are advanced. Part of the crew's mission is educational outreach and international cooperation.

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  Conflict and Collaboration

  For Better or Worse

  • Catherine Gerard, Louis Kriesberg(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5 Building the International Space Station

  Leadership, conflict, and collaboration

  W. Henry Lambright

  The International Space Station (ISS) represents not only the greatest construction project ever in space, it is one of the most remarkable construction projects in human history. It is also one of the most expensive. While precise figures are elusive depending on what is included, the cost is generally put at $100 billion, with the US paying three-quarters of this amount (Lawrence, 2015, p. 2).1

  The most significant dimension of ISS may not be technical, but political. ISS was initiated by President Ronald Reagan in 1984 and completed under President Barack Obama in 2011. NASA, on behalf of the US, forged a partnership of five space agencies and 16 countries, and kept this partnership intact and moving in a common direction over many years. It did so in spite of tensions within the partnership and turbulence outside. The partners included Europe, Japan, Canada, and Russia, which had initially been rivals in station-building.2 Also, NASA found itself at times in a dependent relationship to Russia, particularly when its prime means of transport, the shuttle, was unavailable due to disaster. In spite of conflicts within the partnership of nations, and from outside, the ISS coalition adhered.

  How did this network of institutions get formed and stay together? What was NASA’s role as lead agency within the lead nation? Many a large-scale project is started and many—probably most—unravel short of fruition. Granted, “success” is an ambiguous term in connection with ISS; the fact it reached “Assembly Complete” is worthy of serious attention when so many large opportunities and problems facing humanity require international cooperation. The Space Station shows how leaders turn crises and conflicts into opportunities for collaborative solutions over project stages. It illuminates how leaders play “two-level games,” i.e., negotiate agreements nationally and internationally, making one help the other (Putnam, 1988, pp. 427–60; Boyer, 2000; Kriesberg, 2015).

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  Transatlantic Space Politics

  Competition and Cooperation Above the Clouds

  • Sheng-Chih Wang(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4 Springboard to Lunar and Solar Space Transatlantic Cooperation in the International Space Station Program

  Nowhere is this more important than our next frontier: space.

  (Ronald W. Reagan1 )

  This chapter investigates the causal mechanism of transatlantic cooperation in the US-led International Space Station (ISS) program2 from the 1980s to the present. The ISS serves as a long-term manned habitation in space. Although there is no clear definition about the functions of the ISS, one of its main functions is to prepare for long-duration human spaceflight into deep space (ESA 2011c). The experience and knowledge gained from the ISS operation can be applied to the Moon and Mars missions. For example, manned spacecrafts flying to Mars should be assembled at LEO (or at the Moon bases in the future) owing to their enormous weight and size that cannot be launched as an integral from the Earth. Therefore, the completion of the ISS is a significant prerequisite for the expansion of human activities to the Moon, Mars, and beyond (McCurdy 1990: 165). It also implies that utilizing the ISS is a crucial step to controlling lunar and solar space.

  The Cold War structure nurtured the US ambition of building a permanent manned space station. The US wanted to develop the space station program because it sought to maintain its alliance leadership and was afraid of falling behind the USSR in the space race (and because other states were interested in this program as well). When the US was struggling for the development of the STS in the 1970s, the USSR placed its first manned space station, Salyut 1, into Earth orbit in 1971. The other six Salyut space stations were launched during the following eleven years (Reibaldi and Caprara 2007: 15). Such an experience proved the USSR had gained mature technologies and knowledge of human space habitation. The US had its own space station, too. Following the success of the Apollo program, the US announced the Skylab program on 22 July 1969. The experimental Skylab space station was launched on 14 May 1973. However, the design of Skylab was inferior to that of the Salyut space stations. The US Skylab space station was transformed from the third stage of a residual Saturn 5 launcher (i.e. the Apollo spacecraft) (Logsdon 2008: 421), and was occupied for only 171 days during 1973 and 1974. The Skylab was left unutilized for years, and finally disintegrated in the Earth’s atmosphere on 11 July 1979 (McCurdy 1990: 71–2; Reibaldi and Caprara 2007: 16).3

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  Spacecraft

  100 Iconic Rockets, Shuttles, and Satellites That Put Us in Space

  • Michael H. Gorn, Giuseppe De Chiara(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Voyageur Press

    (Publisher)

  Columbia accident in February 2003 halted shuttle activity, and with it the delivery and assembly of new modules. Under these circumstances, the station partners chose 2010 as a more realistic target.

  Officially, the International Space Station (ISS) came into being in January 1998 with the signing by fifteen governments—the United States, Russia, Japan, Canada, and the eleven member states of the European Space Agency—of the Space Station Intergovernmental Agreement. But the primary collaboration between the United States and Russia represented the indispensable ingredient in the evolution of the ISS. The US may have been the first (and the only) power to send people to the moon, but the Russians far outdistanced America in its space station experience. Roscosmos not only launched seven Salyut (“salute”) stations from 1971 to 1986, it followed these in 1986 with Mir (“peace”), a dragon fly-shaped, 200,000-pound spacecraft, the biggest object in orbit to that time. Fortuitously, by the time Daniel Goldin approached Russia in 1993 with the hope of a partnership, Roscosmos already had made big strides toward Mir-2, but with little chance of funding due to the post–Cold War chaos in the Russian economy. In effect, the ISS represented a merger of Mir-2 and Alpha. In pursuit of this amalgamation, Russian engineers and planners worked directly with their US colleagues, and Roscosmos pledged to add two new modules to the overall American architecture, increase the size of the crew quarters, lengthen the station’s central corridor, and enhance power generation.

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