How do you keep score in a space race? There are a few obvious
milestones early on, first person in orbit, for spacewalk, first to the
Moon. But after all those boxes are checked, where do we go Well,
the natural next step was to start living in space and finding out just
how long you could stay up there. That means space stations, and if
we look at the evolution of human habitation in low Earth orbit, we can
get a pretty good idea of who dominated the past and who will take over
the future. The answers might surprise you. This is the space race.
Did you know that the first space station ever deployed was a Soviet design from
nineteen seventy one called Salu. It was actually a very impressive piece of hardware
at eighteen and a half metric tons, twenty meters in length, four meters
in diameter, and ninety nine cubic meters in volume, so that's pretty big
even by modern standards. Now, we don't talk about this one very often
because there is a deeply tragic story attached to it. The first and only
crew to ever visit the Salute one never lived to tell the tale. The
three cosmonauts perished on the return trip when their Soyu's capsule depressurized, making them
also the first and only humans to have died in space. The operation of
Salute one was terminated shortly after the station was deorbited and burnt up in the
atmosphere on October eleventh, nineteen seventy one. A year later, the Soviets
tried again with a space station module called DOS two, but this one was
lost due to an engine failure on the Proton rocket, and it never reached
orbital velocity. The whole thing just fell into the ocean. One year after
that, the Soviets made their third attempt with Salute two. This one did
reach orbit, but quickly lost altitude control and depressurized, leaving it to tumble
helplessly through space until its orbit decayed and the station burnt up in the atmosphere.
Undeterred, the Soviet Union launched yet another space station module in nineteen seventy
three. This was originally intended to be Saluted the third, but since a
flight control aer prevented the station from reaching the correct orbital height, the Soviets
quickly renamed the mission to Cosmos five to five seven and pretended like it was
a regular satellite launch and not a failed space station deployment. A week later,
the remains fell from space and burnt up in the atmosphere. Meanwhile,
through all of this, NASA had been working on their own space station concept
named Skylab. With the Apollo program officially brought to an end, NASA was
left with one excess Saturn five rocket just kicking around. This incredibly humongous and
incredibly powerful machine was purpose built to send heavy things to the Moon, but
engineers decided that the Saturn five could be retrofit to deploy one final and truly
the epic payload into low Earth orbit a space station, and Skylab was one
hell of a space station. NASA hollowed out the S four B module of
the Saturn five, which would have traditionally served as a third propulsion stage for
the translunar injection burn. The giant fuel tanks were converted into an orbital workshop
with an incredible six point six meters in diameter and fourteen point seven meters in
length. Then on top of that, NASA attached an airlock module and docking
adapter where the Apollo Space Telescope observatory was mounted. Then an unused Apollo command
and Service module was docked at the far end to provide power for the station.
Skylab was occupied for a combined total of one hundred and seventy one days
across three crude missions from nineteen seventy three to nineteen seventy four, and it
easily holds up as one of the most amazing things ever launched into space.
There were lands to eventually use the Space Shuttle to refurbish and reboost the station
to a higher orbit, but unfortunately the Shuttle wasn't ready in time, and
Skylab's orbit decayed to the point where it finally hit the atmosphere and disintegrated in
nineteen seventy nine. Back in the Soviet Union, they were finally primed for
success. The real Salu three achieved orbit in July nineteen seventy four and was
successfully visited by the crew of Soyuz fourteen. This station was notable for being
the first spacecraft to include a gun. There was a twenty three millimeter aircraft
cannon attached to the station, and the Soviets would be the first to ever
test fire a conventional weapon in space. Anyway. From there, the Soviets
had a pretty successful run with these single module space stations from Salu three up
to Salute seven. But for the Soviets this was only a warm up act.
In nineteen eighty six, the world saw the deployment of the first ever
modular space station, which the Soviets named Mir. You may be noticing a
trend here. While NASA did manage to deploy one very cool space station with
Skylab, it was an incredibly short lived project and it marked the United States
one and only independent space station. We can see pretty clearly here that the
Soviets had essentially cornered the market on long term habitation in low Earth orbit.
It took a decade to fully assemble the seven module Mir station, which would
eventually reach a pressurized volume of three hundred and fifty cubic meters. Now,
something interesting happened over the time period that the station Mir was being constructed.
The Soviet Union collapsed. The fall of the Berlin Wall in nineteen eighty nine
marked the beginning of the end for the Cold War, and now we enter
the period of the Russian space program. This era would bring a new found
cooperation between Western and Eastern superpowers. Now, instead of being engaged in a
space race, the Russians and Americans were working together for the betterment of human
space exploration. Very positive star trek vibes were starting to come out, and
in nineteen ninety three, NASA's Space Shuttle fleet began regular missions to the Mere
station. The Shuttle Atlantis even delivered the final docking module to Mirror in nineteen
ninety five. Now as much as NASA was helping out the Russians with the
use of their fancy space planes, the Americans were using this opportunity to learn
as much as they possibly could about modular space stations and long term habitation in
microgravity, a subject where the United States had fallen massively behind. It was
in nineteen eighty four that President Ronald Reagan originally directed NASA to build an international
space station within the next ten years, and obviously that never happened. So
when we finally arrive at the International Space Station that we all know so well
today, we can see that it shares a lot of resemblance with Russia's.
In fact, given everything that we've just learned, I don't think it's unfounded
to look at the ISS more like a Mere version two point zero, because
it's pretty clear where this design approach came from It's also worth noting that the
first module of the ISS that was deployed in nineteen ninety eight was the Russian
Control Module. The Russian side of the station is responsible for the power and
propulsion of the ISS, and the first crew to reside on the ISS was
one American and two Russians who all arrived there on a Soyuz rocket launched from
the baikon Or Cosmodrome. Anyway, I find that all pretty interesting because growing
up in North America, we were pretty much led to believe that NASA was
really the leader in this whole International Space Station project, and it never really
occurred to me until right now that the full two decades of research and development
by the Soviets and Russians is what really laid the groundwork for the ISS,
and it probably never would have even happened without that. So there's an interesting
new perspect for you. The ISS is operated primarily by Ross, Cosmos and
NASA. The Russian Service module is responsible for guidance, navigation, life support,
power and propulsion of the entire station, so it's pretty important, while
the NASA side of the station is for operations, logistics, and research.
The other key players in the ISS are the European Space Agency and the japan
Aerospace Exploration Agency, each having their own independent research modules, with the Japanese
Kibo becoming the single largest ISS module. It took three Space Shuttle missions to
get the entire lab into orbit. Following the completion of the ISS in the
early two thousands, there has been only one modular space station deployed to Earth
orbit, China's Tiangong the Heavenly Palace, with just three modules. The Tiangong
is a much smaller scale station than the ISS, and even contains slightly less
pressurized volume than Mirror, But the Tiangong is a significant leap forward in space
station design and technology. If we look back from Salute to Skylab to Mirror
to ISS, we're not exactly seeing a massive amount of progress or even evolution
to the design. If anything, the Skylab really sticks out as being the
nicest space station of the bunch, and that was literally fifty years ago.
The Soviet design aesthetic that carried over all the way to the ISS has a
lot more in common with a submarine than the starship Enterprise. It's cramped,
it's cluttered, there are pipes and wires and god knows what else sticking out
from all angles. Now we flip forward to China's Tiangong and the difference is
night and day. There are only about twenty years between ISS and Tangong,
but it looks like a century worth of progress. Obviously, in the time
between the year two thousand and the year twenty twenty one, a lot of
major breakthroughs were made in the field of silicon microchips and transistors. All of
our electronic devices got thinner and more powerful, so so naturally that transfers over
to our space ships as well. Just look at the SpaceX crew Dragon interior
compared to the Space Shuttle. But there is a little bit more going on
here than just better microchips. The biggest selling point of the ISS was that
it would be a fully modular space station, meaning it can be built out
one piece at a time and you can just keep adding on more pieces as
you go along. And the ISS has a lot of pieces, sixteen pressurized
modules in total, and each one of them had to be transported from the
ground into orbit. This is why it took over a decade to fully assemble
the International Space Station and NASA's rocket of choice at the time wasn't helping either.
The Space Shuttle had two significant flaws that made it a bad rocket for
deploying a space station. Thing Number one, it was really dangerous to fly,
and in two thousand and three, the Shuttle Columbia broke up on reentry,
killing the entire crew and grounding the Shuttle fleet until NASA figured out what
went wrong. This was extremely bad timing for the construction of ISS, because
the workhorse rocket that was intended to do most of the heavy lifting was now
out of service right in the middle of the construction project. And even when
Shuttle service resumed, it never got back to the launch frequency of the nineteen
nineties. And the second thing, the Shuttle just was not very effective at
putting heavy things into space. The Shuttle was technically rated for twenty seven metric
tons to low Earth orbit, but the actual payload capacity to ISS altitude was
more like sixteen metric tons. This presents a significant limitation on a large scale
orbital construction project. The spacious interior of the Skylab module was made possible by
the incredible power of the Saturn five, a rocket that could lift one hundred
and fifty metric tons into low Earth orbit. So the difference in headroom between
Skylab and ISS is directly attributable to the difference in available lifting. Even the
Tiangong station modules, which technically would have fit inside the Shuttle cargo bay,
would have been too heavy for the space plane to handle. Those are around
twenty three metric tons, give or take, so the Tiangong does not suffer
from a lot of bottlenecks and size limitations that we find on the ISS.
There's much more open and continuous space, and this is a clear indicator for
space stations that will come in the future. They are only going to get
bigger thanks to significant advancements in heavy lift rocket technology. The SpaceX Starship is
the most obvious example of this. With somewhere between one hundred and two hundred
metric tons of payload capacity to low Earth orbit and a nine meter diameter cargo
faring, the Starship could deploy something even bigger than Skylab in one single launch,
and the Starship is designed to operate as a fully reusable and high volume
rocket system, so unlike the very limited quantity of Saturn five boosters, Starship
can deploy a lot of these gigantic space station modules, as many as we
can build really SpaceX can launch them, so now we suddenly have the capability
to build the equivalent of skyscrapers in space. And there are other really big
rockets coming like the Blue Origin New Glenn booster, which is already attached to
the Orbital Reef space Station project, which will combine massive seven meter diameter core
modules with inflatable habitats from Sierra Space to very quickly offer up three times the
pressurized volume of the ISS. So the future is looking pretty amazing for human
habitation in space. We're moving quickly from the harsh military esthetic of a submarine
to something that was previously only imaginable in science fiction.