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Crew experience aids Alpha's evolution

Each crew gleans knowledge from the last


By John Kelly
FLORIDA TODAY

CAPE CANAVERAL -- It's Jan. 16, 2000. American astronaut Bill Shepherd is doing what he's been doing every day since he climbed inside the International Space Station about two months ago. He's improvising.


A headset is broken. The commander of the first permanent crew to live on the station is not willing to wait for the replacement, which will be arriving from Earth a few months later than expected. So he grabs a soldering iron.

"The first problem is that we can't plug the iron in," Shepherd wrote later that day in his ship's logs. "Plugs are Mir-style, and apparently the sockets in the service module are different."

There they were, Shepherd and two cosmonauts, living 200-plus miles above Earth in a station about the size of a small apartment. Some tools didn't work. Other gear was not where it was supposed to be, and some was stuck on the ground. Computers crashed or would not communicate with one another. Equipment broke and the crew had to make up some of the repairs as they went along. Generally, it was exactly the kind of growing pains you'd expect moving into a new house.

Except this house was in space, an incomprehensibly complex hulk of highly fickle systems that had been put through exhaustive testing on the ground. But nothing could equate to reality and, of course, not all worked as planned. So the awesome job of being the first station crew came with a regular dose of frustration.

"In all," Shepherd wrote in the daily log, "we have recently experienced -- a scopemeter we can't recharge because we can't plug it in, a soldering iron which has the wrong size tips, which we can't plug in either, a vise we can't use because it's still on the ground, and rivnuts we can't use because we don't have the right drill bits. Not to mention a workbench that's still on the ground somewhere too.

"We are enjoying finding all these 'surprises' particularly before we would need these tools to do something critical. It would be nice, however, just to be able to pull these things out and start using them."

After four months in space, however, Shepherd and his team had opened the station. They'd built a makeshift dining table from scratch. They had worked out computer bugs. They'd repaired broken equipment. Four more crews have lived there since, able to more easily handle the day-to-day tasks that come with the privilege of getting to live what for them is a dream come true: a months-long space trip.

Earlier this month, the ship that Shepherd named Alpha celebrated two years of being permanently manned. And last Monday, a fresh crew of two Americans and one Russian dubbed Expedition 6, boarded a bigger station that is remarkably different than the one Shepherd opened. Not only has the ship changed, so has life for its tenants.
"We are on a true space 'ship' now, making her way above any Earthly boundary,"

Shepherd wrote just before handing the ship over to Expedition 2. "We are not the first crew to board Alpha, or the last to depart. But we have made Alpha come alive."

One of the biggest changes in two years is the added elbow room. Shepherd's crew lived aboard the Russian service module and command module.

"The majority of the time he was up there, there was no U.S. lab," said Mark Sonoda, a space station crew training leader with the contractor United Space Alliance in Houston.

The Destiny lab, where Expedition 5 science officer Peggy Whitson said she now spends most of her time, was not added until months into Expedition 1's term.

"I've been very entertained by having my own orbiting laboratory here," said Whitson, who has talked more about ongoing science work than her predecessors because she has more time to do it than they did.

The livable portion of the space station is now comparable to that of an 1,800-square-foot house. It doesn't feel cramped, Whitson said, in part because of the ability to float freely and use space that can't be used in a house down here on Earth because of gravity.

The other part of the station's evolution is experience. With each successive day that a crew lives on the station, the mission controllers, crew trainers and astronauts themselves are building knowledge that is making things easier.

"You get a lot of training by sitting in mission control," said Dan Bursch, the astronaut who served on the Expedition 4 crew that has (so far) spent the most time living on the station, about six and a half months.

Before he went, Bursch listened to predecessors, talked with mission control, and filed away their concerns and experiences for when he got to space. In addition, the station crews go through about 18 months of training in Houston and Moscow. They practice in life-size replicas of the station in a warehouse-like building at the Johnson Space Center. They learn to speak each others' languages. They learn station hardware. They talk with the on-orbit crews.

Still, Bursch said, "You can't fully understand a lot of it until you're up there.

"Each crew has its own particular challenges," he said. "Expedition 1 was setting up camp, like opening up a new house, even down to labeling things. Even the communication system was different for Expedition 2 than it was for Expedition 1."

By the time Expeditions 3 and 4 showed up, it was "like moving into a furnished house," Bursch said.

The challenges faced by each crew and their support teams on Earth, in many ways, are dictated by the evolving nature of the ship. Construction is ongoing: inside and out.

The public sees installation of the big stuff, laboratories and solar arrays, but not so much the smaller changes.
Software updates are constant. Parts to repair ailing systems come up, such as valves for a broken carbon dioxide removal system that were brought up on Endeavour. New equipment must be integrated.

"You've got to remember we're still in the middle of a construction zone," said newly arrived station science officer Don Pettit. "And it's kind of like moving into your house while you're still building it, and you've got a table saw set up in the dining room, and a planer set up in the living room, and in the kitchen you've got the cabinets and the counters up, but there's a big hole where the kitchen sink is supposed to be, and a bucket down in there. And that's kind of what we're doing with the space station, and that we're living in the place while we're building it, and at the same time, we're doing as much science as we can."

The adaptation, during constant evolution, is one of the big hurdles for crews in space and on the ground.

"We get more confidence and then we add new hardware," said John McCullough, one of NASA's space station flight directors in Houston. "The crews go through cycles. It's always a little tougher at the start because you have new tenants getting used to a new environment."

Whitson and her predecessors have said it took two to three weeks to get used to being there. Some of the reasons are obvious. There is no up, and there is no down. The brain has to adjust to that as well as basic changes in how you eat, sleep and even go to the bathroom.

Food is mostly freeze-dried and the menu is limited enough that Whitson, after almost six months on orbit, is getting bored with it. Sleep is comfortable but somewhat weird because it's done in sleeping bags that have to be attached to some solid surface. The toilet has a flaw, too.

"I bet you didn't know that we have a form of gambling on board the station," Whitson wrote in one of her letters home. "Carl Walz coined the phrase the red light lottery, and I think it's very appropriate. The person that turns the dial for the air/water separator to activate the suction for the toilet and gets instead a red light indicating the urine tank is full is the winner.

"And since the winner showed up with their own 'full tank of urine,' they have the additional honor of lifting the panel from the floor, removing the full urine tank, recording the date of removal, stowing the full tank in the Progress for disposal, searching for an empty urine tank (in the same place with all the full ones), recording the serial number and date, reattaching the hose, removing the warning indicator, all before the opportunity to use the toilet!"
But that's how experience on the station works, one crew member contributes an idea that might get something fixed, and the future crews benefit. It works the same with training. Knowledge gets passed down.
"Each crew we send up is better trained so it's probably a little easier because they're better prepared," said Ruben Abramsky, another space station crew member training leader with contractor USA.
Every lesson learned helps make training better for the crews now studying in Houston for Expedition flights scheduled during the next two or three years.
"We started by building the training around what we thought the crew was going to need to know how to do," USA's Sonoda said. Later, training teams realized some of the things they were teaching the crew to do could be done from the ground, or taken care of automatically by the spacecraft itself. "We eliminated some wasted training time," he said.
After Expedition 3, when they had three crews worth of data, the training teams, with help from the astronauts, began reviewing their training procedures to more accurately reflect what the astronauts living on station needed to know and what they didn't.
For example, while Shepherd and his team spent a large share of their time on initial installation, repair and maintenance, the succeeding crews like the one that arrived last week, need just a "foundational knowledge of the station and its systems," Sonoda said. "They don't need to know everything."
The ground support teams can walk them through anything unexpected. The USA trainers said the advantage they have is they are working with a group of people who are "super-achievers," highly intelligent and generally accustomed to dealing with stress and surprise circumstances. They teach as much as they can, and then provide support from the ground.
"From an emotional standpoint, I think living here is a lot simpler," Whitson said. "We have a whole team on the ground that does all of our worrying for us, and sets up all of our program. Then, we conduct the work on a daily basis. I think for the most part, life is a little easier here. It's simpler and in some ways it's a little more relaxing."
That's not to say Whitson does not occasionally find herself in situations Shepherd could appreciate. Microgravity's favorite trick is making things disappear, and Whitson and departing station commander Valery Korzun sometimes end up on scavenger hunts for wayward tools.
The biggest complaint from some crews has been being away from home, especially from spouses and children. But communications are improving. Crews can make "telephone" calls almost the same way we can here. They communicate by electronic mail or ham radio, too.
"Actually it's been much better than I imagined," Whitson said. "We've been able
touch with family and friends. I haven't really felt particularly isolated."