What Lies Ahead for the International Space Station?

space stations in general. Though you know there's going to be some stuff that obviously I just won't touch on, because I mean, you could do a full mini series that lasts half a year talking about this and only

barely scratch the surface. Anyway. In our previous episode in this series, I talked about how the International Space Station or I s S formed out of both the struggling Russian space program and NASA's attempts to create a US led space station along with Europe, Japan and the contributing toward that, and we learned about some of the modules that bake up the space station. We also talked about how the construction on the I S S was put on hold in the wake of the Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy,

and how the station has two main sections. There's one that's the Russian Orbital Segment or R O S and the other is the U s Orbital Segment or U S O S. Alright, so just a few more modules to talk about before we get up to date. So in NASA sent up a module called Leonardo aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. Leonardo is primarily used as a storage module. And you might say, well, storage for what, And it's pretty much everything from spare parts to rubbish too, you know, waste.

Oh and in case you're wondering if this is the only Ninja turtle to be associated with the I S S, it is not. The Italian Space Agency built through multi purpose Logistics modules or mp l ms, and they were

named Leonardo, Donna Tello, and Rafaelo. And these were designed to be pressurized containers that would be nestled in the Space Shuttle cargo bay and they would be used to transmit you know, cargo like scientific experiments and supplies to the I S S. But Leonardo got modified to become a permanent storage module attached to the International Space Station and the Donna Tello one never launched at all. Rafaello, however, was used in the final Shuttle mission to the Space station.

Leonardo originally docked with Unity you know, the node on the earth facing port, the Nadier Point UH In late February two eleven and the crew of the space station relocated Leonardo and connected it to the forward facing port of Tranquility. Because keep in mind, the space station as modular, so you can do that. You can undock certain modules and redock them elsewhere in order to make room for

new stuff. Now, at that point, Leonardo also became a place where astronauts can go to take you know, sponge baths. The main toilet facilities for the U S O S part of the station are in Tranquility, the Tranquility node, and now Leonardo is attached to Tranquility, so it kind of was expanding their area where they could do, you know, personal hygiene. So Leonardo went up in the winter of that summer. In July, NASA retired the space Shuttle program.

The final mission was STS one five that was with the Space Shuttle Atlantis. This was the one that carried rafael O to the I S S and delivered supplies and parts up to the space station, and that would be the end of the shuttle bringing major components up. But there's still a couple of things we can mention before we wrap up on modules. So in the spa ACEX unscrewed Dragon space capsule, so in other words, you know,

no people aboard this one. This was called by NASA a Commercial Orbital Transportation Services UH spacecraft or a COTS spacecraft c o t S. It docked with the International Space Station. Space X would become an alternative to relying solely on the Russians to get materials up to the I S S. And I've done several episodes either directly about SpaceX or involving SpaceX in the past, so we're not going to go down the entire rabbit hole here.

It's it's enough for you know, another series of episodes. But the important part is that NASA now was able to have an alternative because otherwise they had to rely on Russian spacecraft at that point, because NASA no longer had the crew spacecraft or launch vehicles that would be necessary to make trips up to the station. Now that

wasn't necessarily according to plan. I should add NASA had a different space flight program that was in plans UH, and it was meant to pick up where the Space Shuttle program would leave off, plus go a bit further. This was called the Constellation program, and the program had

a couple of different important goals. One was to complete the construction of the International Space Station, so you know, build launch vehicles capable of bringing payloads up to space that would help complete the I s S. But another was to send a human crew to the Moon by and the third was to eventually send human astronauts to Mars. Well, you know, that goal should tell you that things did not go as planned, because obviously we have not gone

back to the Moon and um. Anyway, the Constellation program included plans for a few different launch vehicles. Uh These were the Areas one, which was meant to launch payloads mostly into orbit, and then the Arias five, which it was a heavy lift launch vehicle design capable of sending stuff much further out than just you know, low Earth orbit. And the journey to this plan in itself was a bumby one for reasons that I've talked about in this

series before. Namely, you know, NASA's big projects are somewhat subjected to the whims of whomever happens to be in charge at the time, and that changes fairly regularly with changes in presidential administrations. And that is not great for stability.

NASA is also subject to budgets that are awarded to the agency by Congress, and in fact, just the selection of the aria's design in itself involves the story of different people coming into the picture and tossing out what had come before and saying no, no, no, no, no,

let's do it this way instead. Now, in addition to to those launch vehicles, NASA planned a new spacecraft that could carry crew members up to the I S S. This would be a capsule style spacecraft, not a shuttle, but a capsule in some ways similar to the old Apollo capsules in the late sixties and early seventies, but this wouldn't be larger. It would be able to hold more crew up to six people in fact, compared to Apollos, you know three. And it was called the Crew Exploration Vehicle,

and later on it would evolve into the spacecraft called Oriyan. Now, the Constellation program would end up getting the ACTS under the administration of President Barack Obama. Obama cited lots of issues like the fact that the the program wasn't on schedule and it was over budget. Pretty much always happens

in the space industry. You know, there are a lot of political reasons for this, that it was not his administration that proposed the Constellation program, so there were a lot of different factors that led into this, but ultimately admit that Constellation was no more. However, the Orion spacecraft survived that and it still remains part of NASA's Artemus program, you know, the one that is supposed to take astronauts back to the Moon by but probably no earlier than

at the point. Three Orion spacecraft have been built so far, with a planned test flight to happen later this year December potentially, though we'll quite possibly see that get pushed to two. Also, part of that test is to test out a new launch vehicle a k a. A new rocket. This one is called the Space Launch System or s

L S now. After the cancelation of Constellation, which is a fun thing to say, but not a fun thing in general, NASA went back to the drawing board and began to focus on a super heavy lift launch vehicle. This would become the s L S which replaced not just the Areas one in Areas five rockets, but it also replaced a separate super heavy lift vehicle proposal that was called Jupiter. Uh. That one was not technically part of Constellation, it was part of a separate, parallel program.

But yeah, that one got the AX too, So SLS would effectively replace areas in Jubiter and this, you know, all this bit I'm talking about here is a bit of a tangent from the Space Station, I realized, but I figured it was important to talk about how NASA was attempting to close the gap in operations once they got to the end of the Space Shuttle program. The plan was to have a continuous means of accessing the I S S without relying on the Russians, but it

just didn't work out. There are some critics, including people who previously worked on the SLS design, who say that NASA is going to have to just accept that the future is one in which the agency depends upon commercial launch vehicles like SpaceX's Falcon heavy rockets and UH and to to do that instead of trying to operate their own because it's going to be less expensive in the long run, and these budget issues are going to continue to be a barrier for NASA, and that perhaps even

continuing to develop the sl S is um not wise in other words, like like it's just you just can't fund it so that it doesn't make sense to keep doing it. But so far NASA is still on that track. And also, I should add that's just what those critics say. I'm not saying that that's definitively the case. I certainly can't speak with any level of expertise over whether or

not it makes sense. In the the there were new materials being sent up to the space station, including an experimental inflatable module called the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module or BEAM b E a M. Yeah, this is a space module. On the I S s that it's it's made of fabric, it's got a fabric hull, and it's from the Bigelow Aerospace Company, which was named after its founder, Robert Bigelow.

He as a multimillionaire sometimes billionaire depending on you know, the time, and he made most of his money in commercial real estate, but he really wanted to create an aerospace company. He has this, you know, big interest in space travel. He also has a big interest in things like UFOs. Anyway, the BEAM module is part of Bigelow's bigger plan to create an inflatable habitats for various space missions, including habitats that could be used on the Moon or

on Mars. Now, the beam module hitched a ride on a SpaceX capsule or SpaceX launch vehicle, i should say, and it made it into orbit and crews connected it to the I S S on a port on the Tranquility module. Then they tried to inflate it, but they found the first time that was taking more pressure to

do so than they were expecting. Uh, and the module was not expanding at the right rate, and they figured that maybe the problem was that it had been folded up in its compact shape a little longer than was expected. There were delays in launch, which meant that this this uh inflatable habitat was compressed longer than it was intended to be. And uh so they tried a second time and they got it working, and they later were able to pressurize it and reach equilibrium with the internal space

station pressure, which is right around one atmosphere. And yeah, astronauts have actually gone into this inflated module and they've done work there which blows my mind. I mean, it's a fabric module, but clearly it's an air tight fabric module, and lots of tests were done before anyone set foot figuratively speaking, inside of it. Now. The company has also made a mock up of an inflatable space station called

B three three zero. That's a reference to the fact that it expands out to allow for an internal volume of three cubic meters um, and it starts off with a volume of fifty cubic meters so it has quite a bit of expansion. Now. Obviously, an inflatable space station would have some really incredible advantages because you could design much larger modules and not worry about it not fitting on a launch vehicle because you know, on Earth you could have this as a deflated module, so it's really

compact and ready to go up in space. Once in space, you inflate it just like the beam did and expand it out to its full volume in space, and using special materials like kevlar, you can create a fabric hull that is resistant to stuff like micro meteoroids. You know, those impacts can be disastrous if you don't have, you know, armor against them. They also can be effective to shield against stuff like cosmic radiation. The B three three zero

mock up does have a disadvantage. There are no windows in it, because creating a transparent material with the right structural integrity that can also be compressed along with this fabric habitat is really tricky, and so the mock up instead has curved displays mounted on the inside walls of

the space station. So presumably, if you were to have a real deployment of one of these in orbit, you would mount cameras on the exterior of your space station and then feed that camera view into displays that are mounted on the interior walls. So you don't have a window, you would have a view screen kind of like you know, the bridge of the Enterprise. Now, while we do not yet have inflatable moon habitats or space stations, the beam

module showed that the concept works. Astronauts have tested the air quality in the module. They've installed various components inside it. Uh NASA says it's monitored a few likely micro meteoroid collisions with the whole of the beam module. The whole has weathered those admirably simil early. It appears to be at least as effective as the rest of the station with regard to protecting against cosmic radiation, So that's good.

It was intended to be a relatively short term experiment, but it's still up there today and it might remain there for the foreseeable future. The I s S crew actually accessed Beam as recently as September one. The crew had a few things to do with Beam, including prepping cargo for a return trip to Earth aboard a future cargo Dragon mission from SpaceX, and they also tried but failed to fix some malfunctioning wireless temperature sensors that were

part of Beam, but they couldn't get them working now. Sadly, Bigelow Aerospace may have already seen its last days before we could ever get an inflatable space station, at least from that company. In the company shut down its production facilities due to COVID, and Robert Bigelow has subsequently said

that it is unlikely to reopen. So Beam might be the first and only Bigelow inflatable space module, But the concept has been proven to be at least viable, so whether Bigelow comes back and continues that work or someone else does, um that might be a future space station mainstay.

In late twenty SpaceX brought an airlock called Bishop up to the I S S. It is now attached to tranquility and rather than provide astronauts a way to conduct extra vehicular activities you know spacewalks like other airlocks, this one is really meant to allow the crew to deploy stuff like small satellites like CubeSats and stuff, and maybe

even rubbish to jettison rubbish in the future. The airlock received commercial funding, and you know, it really was a necessity because the company that funded it, called nano Rax, had this agreement with NASA to use the I S S to deploy satellites. But the I S S is a pretty busy place and there are a lot of different countries using the I S S as a test bed for numerous experiments, and so the busy schedule meant that the limited airlocks were already busy with all these experiments.

So if nano Rex wanted to deploy these satellites, that really needed another airlock. So they made one and then send it up to the I S S. And finally, for now, at least we have Naka in a u k that's a Russian word that means science. This long delayed module was supposed to go up before, like way back in two thousand seven, but various delays forced that date to slip all the way up to this year.

Those delays included some serious technical issues, such as the discovery in that the fuel system aboard Knaka had contamination in it in the form of metallic dust, and also they found leaks in the fuel system, which necess citated lengthy repairs. And later still they found more fuel system leaks in and that meant more delays. Plus there are all those delays due to budgetary and political issues in Russia.

But Russia finally launched it on July one. It would take the place of the old Piers docking module, the p I R S Russian docking module, the one that was originally opposite the Poisk module so birthed to the Vezda module, and that means that components on Naka were already pretty old before it ever saw service as part of the I S S, which might have contributed to a scary situation which we will talk about after this

quick break. So the I S S crew undocked the Piers module from the Vesta after a few delays, and then the old module would enter it's the orbiting path and would eventually re enter the atmosphere and break apart over the Pacific Ocean. The NAKA module docked in the place that Pierce had been, and it did so on July using an automatic docking procedure, and all that went, you know, fairly well, despite some delays and a couple

of technical glitches, but nothing critical. But then a few hours later NAKA had a software glitch, and that glitch gave a direct command to the modules thrusters to fire, which caused the I S S to rotate like a lot. It flipped one and a half times, and effectively it ended up upside down over Earth in the process. I guess you could say the I S S developed a bit of an attitude problem, kind of like a surly teenager. According to Zebulin Scoville, who apart from having an amazing name,

is also a NASA engineer. He was present when this happened. Naka is apparently trying to pull away from the station that it had just docked with. He didn't know that immediately. In fact, when he first saw an alert come in, it was just a couple of lines, and he thought it was perhaps just a sensor error, But then he checked the video monitors and saw that the thrusters were

active and that this was the real deal now. Initially, as NASA was getting a handle on what was going on, the agency reported that the attitude of the I S shifted only by about forty five degrees, which is already a lot, but it was incorrect. It was more like five hundred forty degrees. Kind of crazy. NASA engineers had no control over knockas thrusters. Only Russian ground control had the ability to send a direct command to the knock A module, and unfortunately, the space station was not in

line of sight with Russia. It would take another hour before the I S S could potentially be in communication range with Russian ground control. So NASA engineers responded by working with the I S S crew and using other thrusters on the International Space Station, specifically on this Vezda module and on a progress cargo ship that was docked with the I S S. In order to counteract naka's error.

The station needed to flip a hundred eighty degrees to get back into the correct attitude, and it took a lot of work to get it all done. At The final orbital correction took place on August twenty one. Remember, the initial uh thrust R misfire was at the end of July, and fortunately no disaster occurred, but it must

have been pretty darn tense. Now that being said, Scoville asserted that the crew were never really in danger, that the situation, while unusual, was not catastrophic, and that the process of turning the station back to its normal attitude was so gradual that the crew aboard the I S S couldn't even detect that the station was was turning,

that it was moving like that. Naka's main purpose is to serve as a science lab for the Russians, and this is interesting because it's the first Russian module that's actually really dedicated to scientific experiments beyond stuff like E V A S and it just became part of the I S S. So, after more than twenty years of being an orbit, the r OS finally has its primary laboratory in place. Uh NACA is also going to serve as the docking port for another module in the near future,

assuming everything goes as planned. This is the us Lavoy Module or Pretty Shell Module. It's scheduled to launch in November of this year, and dockwood. Naka's other port you know, the port that's not connected to the Selvezda and the uh OS. Lavoy is also another docking module. This one has the ability to dock with up to five other spacecraft,

so it increases the station's docking capacity. One important component of NAKA came not from Russia but from the European Space Agency or e s A. This is the European Robotic Arm or e r A. This will be used to help the docking procedures with Oslavoy once that connects to NACO later this year. Again, assuming everything goes well, potentially NAKA and Oslavoy might see some continued use beyond the lifespan of the I S S, but I'll talk

about that more towards the end of this episode. Then we have some other proposed modules that are supposed to join the I S S in the near future. These modules come not from NASA but from a commercial space company called Axiom Space. So you've no doubt heard many times in this series. Budget issues are a constant challenge

with NASA. It's also a big challenge in Russia. The agency has thus chosen to partner with commercial space companies, not just to provide transportation to and from the I S S, but also to build onto the existing space station itself. The plan is for Axiom to build and deploy several modules that will connect to the Harmony node aboard the I S S. These include a node module

so very similar to Harmony and Unity and Tranquility. This will act as kind of an adapter between the U S O S part of the space station and the Axiom Space part of it. Other modules will include one with large windows to allow for spectacular views of Earth, a crew habitat module, and a module dedicated to researching

manufacturing processes in space. And like Nauka and us LaVoi, these Axiom modules could potentially have a life beyond that of the I S S. Also, Axiom is planning on sending non astronauts or commercial astronauts up into space, including a reality TV series winner. I guess because Discovery has planned a reality series called Who Wants to Be an Astronaut, and the winner of that series will go up in a future space X Dragon Cruel crew vessel up to

the Axiom section of the I S S. UH. They're already taking applications for that, so you can check that out if you're interested. I Uh, I did not apply. Now, this is not the first time that non astronauts will have visited the space station. In fact, that has happened in the past already, only a handful of times, but it has happened. So to talk about this we have

to dial the clock back quite a bit. Now. It's the late nineteen nineties and the Soviet Union had collapsed, the Russia was having trouble funding its space agency, and it was having a lot of trouble maintaining the Mere space station. A private company called Mere Core took shape and took charge of the space station. So this one had private funding and was trying to turn Mere into a commercial space station instead of a state backed one.

It even flew a mission up there after. Mir had already been left unoccupied for several months, and the idea was that Mere Corps would sell trips to the space station to wealthy people who wanted to go to space, and then use some of that money to offset the

maintenance and operation costs of Mirror uh be. But that didn't really work out because those costs of operation proved to be considerable and there just weren't enough investors jumping on board to make this a viable business, so the company really had no choice but to allow mir to

de orbit. However, the company had sold a ticket to a guy named Dennis Tito to go up to Mirror, and rather than you know, refund that money, Miracorps was able to partner with a company in the United States called Space Adventures Limited to secure permission for Tito to instead visit the International Space Station if he went up on a Soyo's Russian space capsule. Now, Tito himself was

no stranger to the space industry. He had worked for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that's a NASA field center, but he also was not a trained astronaut. However, the deal meant he could board a Soyo's spacecraft, and in late April of two thousand one, he traveled to the I S S and became the first person to pay for a ticket to visit the I S S. And as such, he is sometimes referred to as a space tourist. I

am told that they hate this title. They don't like space tourists because a lot of them had to go through training and had to actually be participants in various experiments and stuff, so they were working up there too. But they're widely referred to as space tourists, and he was the first. The reported cost of the trip was

a whopping twenty million dollars. But you know, the only other way to get up there would be to be an official astronaut or cosmonaut or maybe be selected as a payload specialist, which required a you know, less intense training period. So it's a pretty small and elite group that he joined. Mark Shuttleworth a South African businessman who also has connections to tech and that his company, Canonical, is responsible for developing the Ubuntu operating system. Uh he

followed suit. He also visited the I S S in two thousand two, also aboard a Soyo's capsule. But then in two thousand three we had the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. The United States put the entire space Shuttle program on hold for more than two years, and at that point, the Soyo's capsules became the only way up and back from the I S S. So Russia thus put a

hold on space tourism for that time. Since the capsule space, you know, the space inside the capsule was critical for servicing the I S S. The tourism program came back on track in two thousand five with Gregory Olsen, and then in two thousand six, uh A Neuche and sorry went up to become a space tourist. Next up was Charles Simoni, who actually went up twice. He went up once in two thousand seven, and he did it again in two thousand nine, so you must have loved it.

In between those visits was guy. I actually know someone I've talked to several times, Richard Garriott. Now, if you've been listening to this series from the beginning, you know that Richard's father, Owen Garriott, was an astronaut who was part of the sky Lab missions. So Owen Garriott had

been aboard Space Station's back in the seventies. Richard Garriott, known to a lot of gamers as Lord British, spent a good deal of his personal fortune to visit the space station, um, you know, without going through the entire

astronaut process. The seventh and last of the space tourists of that era was Guy Lalleberte, who visited the I S S in two thousand nine, And this was towards the end of the Space Shuttle program, and that meant that once again the Saya's capsule would become the only way that astronauts and cosmonauts could go to and from the I S S. And because of that, Russia once again put an end to its space tourism business. So

for many years that is the end of that. In twenty nineteen, NASA announced it would entertain the idea of tourism to the I S S, using you know, commercial UH space companies to take people to and from the space station. UH And, as I mentioned, the axiom section of the I S S once it becomes reality, will include tourism as part of the commercial activities aboard that part of the space station. But the vast majority of visitors the I S S have either been trained astronauts, cosmonauts,

or what NASA calls payload specialists. Now, as that name implies, the people who fit the category of payload specialists are those who have expertise with a specific experiment or a piece of equipment that is sent up to the I S S. They might be employees of some of the private companies that NASA contracts with, or they might be leading scientists in a specific field. They typically have a much shorter stay aboard the I S S than you know, other crew members, and they don't have to train quite

as much before they joined the International Space Station. In total, more than two d forty people have been to the I S S since it came online. More than a hundred fifty of those came from the United States, so the US is in the lead by far. Hack Only nine other people from the America continents have been to the I S S. Eight of them were from Canada and one of them was from Brazil. Every other person from this part of the world, from the America's both

north and south, came from the United States. Russia is in second place, with fifty people from Russia and going to the I S S, and then fewer than twenty came from Europe. Some of those folks have actually been multiple times. In fact, a lot of them have visited the I S S at least twice, not quite as many have been three times. A few like Mark Kelly, have been there four times, and there are two cause minots who have been to the International Space Station five times.

Those two are Yuri Malenchinko and Fyodor your Chicken. So Malanchinko's career was truly astronomical pun intended He visited mir as part of the MERE sixteen crew in nine. He was part of the STS one oh six Space Shuttle Atlantis crew in two thousand, which marked his first visit to the I S. S. In two thousand three, he went back to the I S. S. And while he was there he got married to his fiancee at Katarina Dimitrieva. It was a long distance ceremony because she happened to

be in Texas while he was in orbit. Malanchinko's time in space collectively amounts to an astonishing eight hundred twenty seven days, with nearly thirty five hours of that time being spent in extra vehicular activities or space walks. Now, that is incredible, but it's still more than fifty days shy of the career wreck that's held by UH Gennedy Padalka, And I apologize. I know I'm butchering these names and that's on me. But anyway, Padalka has more than eight

d seventy eight days logged in space in total. UH and he's also been to the International Space Station, but only four times. Right, he hasn't been the five times UH as for Fyodor. He's also had a stellar career also, pun intended. His time in space amounts to nearly six seventy three days total across multiple missions, including some aboard Space Shuttle missions, and he racked up more spacewalk hours

than Malinchiko. He had fifty nine hours of spacewalks. That's incredible. Now, when we come back, we'll talk a bit about life aboard the I S S and what the future holds for the station, and maybe a couple of other bits of information. But first let's take this quick break. So let's talk about what a typical day would be like

aboard the International Space Station. First of all, the space station climate control keeps the station at about seventy two degrees fahrenheit, which is twenty two point to celsius, and that's all year round, winter, summer, spring, and fall. The atmosphere aboard the I S S is very much like that on Earth, and that it's mostly nitrogen around and

then oxygen at around. A mineral called zeolite acts as a carbon dioxide scrubber uh c O two gets trapped in poores that are in the zero lite mineral, and then you just expose the zeolite to outer space and all the carbon dioxide gets vented out into space, and then you can use the zeolite again, so that keeps the station habitable. You also have a water reclamation system that can reclaim water from pretty much any waste source and then filter it to the point where it becomes

drinkable water. Again, that includes everything from you know, the water vapor you breathe out when you are breathing too, the water you pee out when you're peeing, to the water that is you know, used for a shower. All of the sources of water get reclaimed, filtered, and reused. Okay, so let's say that you are on the I S S. You're in the U s OS segment the United States run section for this example. You wake up. We'll talk more about sleeping quarters in a second, and it's time

to tend to hygiene. Maybe the first thing you want to do is visit the little Astronauts room. In other words, you know you want to go to the toilet. Well, space toilets are a little bit weird. For one thing, they have restraints built into them so that you can remain you know, attached to what is effectively the toilet seat. After all, your in microgravity, so you need something to keep you in place so that you know, you don't

have stuff floating around you. So the toilet has leg restraints and it also has a fan system that creates suction to pull waste away. As you go to the bathroom, you position your posterior over a hole in the toilet seat. Some of the astronauts actually prefer to lift the toilet seat and position themselves directly over the hole that leads down into a bag. So there is a bag set

down in the waist system. The fan draws the waist into the bag, and after you're done, you seal the bag shut and then you push the sealed bag into the waist container that is below the toilet. And then, you know, to be nice, you should put a brand new bag in place uh in the toilet so that the next person to use it doesn't have to, you know,

prepare it first. And then if for urine, you actually have a hose and each astronaut has their own personal little urine funnel that they attached to the hose and the funnel goes, you know, over the relevant equipment and of the astronaut that is, and then you get your own little urine funnel. You know, it's a collector's item. Anyway, this helps you get the p to go the right

way into the hose. And again you've got a fan system that is sucking that you're in down the hose into a wastewater tank where then it can go through the reclamation system and get filtered and turned back into water. Now, let's say that after you do this, you might want to take a shower. Well, the Skylab space station had an experimental shower in it, but using it was a real hassle and it could take more than an hour to do it, and so a lot of astronauts aboard

the Skylab space station chose not to use it. So the crew aboard the I s S instead of a shower, they use a rentless shampoo for their hair, and they use a little bit of liquid soap and some water to do a simple sort of sponge bath and use towels to wipe off the larger globules of water, and and air flow system evaporate rates excess water. That also makes it really cold when you're done with your shower. By the way, it's like when you're sweating and your

sweat evaporates and it cools you down. Well, the air flow system cools you down pretty quickly because the water is evaporating off your skin and pulling heat from your body. Well, that water then gets collected by the water reclamation system to Some crew might also use disposable tallet's as part of their hygiene to help, you know, clean themselves, and that also means that you have to attend to brushing

your teeth. Astronauts typically get to take whatever brand of toothpaste they prefer, although depending on the time, sometimes they just end up sharing a communal toothpaste. So you're kind of stuck with whatever happens to be up there. But there are no faucets or taps or running water aboard the I s S. So two brush your teeth, you would get a pouch that would you could fill with water.

The pouch has a straw extending out from the pouch, and the straw has a clamp on it, so you would open up the clamp and squeeze out a little ball of water. Because again you're in microgravity, so the water forms a little ball. You could wet your toothbrush. Toothbrush just sucks that water right into the bristles, put a little toothpaste on your toothbrush, and then you would brush your teeth as normal. But where do you spit the toothpaste when you're done, Well, you don't you swallow it?

Maybe then you want some breakfast, and you would go over to the kitchen area of the galley area UH in one of the crew habitats, and you would grab your food and heat it up. You might do this with a pouch of food that you then insert into a system that injects hot water into the pouch and thus rehydrates otherwise dehydrated food. There's other types of food where you don't need to do the rehydration. Instead, you use a warmer, a food warmer, a little oven essentially

that heats the food up. And there's a decent variety of food up there, from eggs to waffles to oatmeal. Food tends to stick to the utensils you use, and because you're in microgravity, you don't have to worry about the food falling off of them, so even if you turn your spoon upside down, the oatmeal typically stays in the spoon. UH. There's also no actual bread because bread has a tendency to form crumbs, which would float around and potentially gum stuff up aboard the I s s.

So generally speaking, rather than bread, the crew typically uses tortillas. Uh. Some foods like fruits can be eaten just as they are on Earth, and others, like I said, have to have the special preparation. If you need salt or pepper, you apply that in liquid form because again you have no gravity, so you can't sprinkle a little particles anywhere

that would just float around and get into stuff. So salt and pepper come in liquid condiment form, kind of like ketchup and mustard, And after eating you would need to toss your rubbish away so that doesn't just float around. Now you would likely start your work day, so you would likely work on one of several active experiments aboard the station. Some of these might be controlled from the ground, but you might need to endure them to see how

they're doing. Others might need your active involvement. You might also spend some time taking part in medical experiments, all of which are meant to gather more information about the effects of space on the human body, obviously stuff we need to know for the future of space travel. You might also perform some maintenance tasks aboard the station in

order to keep it operational and clean. That can include stuff like replacing filters or loading up a cargo ship with rubbish to offload it from the station, that kind of thing. In that work day, you would also have two and a half hours of exercise scheduled. UH. This is needed to counteract the effects of space that can lead to stuff like muscle and bone loss. Your body would actually reabsorb those tissues in a way. Your body is eating your muscle and bone, so you have to

have exercise to counteract those effects. This exercise includes stuff like running on a treadmill, or using an exercise bike, or lifting weights. But Jonathan, I hear you say you and have gravity to deal with. How does a treadmill or weights? How do those work well? With the treadmill, you're held in place by essentially bungee cords, like you

have a harness that holds you down against the treadmill. Uh. And the treadmill, at least one of them is on the wall of one of the modules, and you're typically facing earth as you run, which is kind of neat. The weights are more like pneumatic systems where you've got like a platform and a bar almost like a weight bar, and you have these pneumatic tubes that end up creating resistance.

So you do various exercises. Some of them are like squats, some of them are like curls, uh, And it's all in how you're positioning yourself on this platform and using this bar and using the pneumatic resistance so that you're working against that, because obviously weights and micro gravity wouldn't

mean much. They would have a lot of mass, but you know, they wouldn't quote unquote way anything you would have moment intem to deal with because you have mass and acceleration, but you wouldn't have weight, so resistance is more important in that sense. Of course, then you would have lunch during the day and at the evening you would have dinner. You would also have some free time

worked into your schedule. NASA learned early on that if they did not allow astronauts free time, that their performance and morale quickly deteriorated, and free time was absolutely necessary. So that gets worked into your schedule so that you're not just constantly tending to you know, your hygiene or working out or working at an experiment. Okay, we're just about ready to wrap up on space stations. But before we get to that, let's take one more quick break.

Lots of the crew have said over the years that their favorite thing to do in their free time would be to look out a window back at Earth and the space station orbits are fast enough that crew can watch a sunset or unrise every forty five minutes or so, which is pretty amazing. Astronauts also get weekends off, though you know, they might have to do some maintenance stuff here and there on weekends, but otherwise they get to

be a little leisurely. They can watch movies, they can read books, they might play games, they might play with toys, they might play pranks on each other. Uh. Apparently they occasionally do prank phone calls back down to Earth from the space station, which I think is awesome. Uh. And they do talk to their families. They get about once a week they get a chance to chat with folks back on Earth besides the you know, regular communications with

like ground control. Now, at the end of the day, it's time to go to bed, except there aren't actually beds. It's more like little sleeping chambers. They kind of look like padded phone booths. If you happen to remember what phone booths look like. Uh. And inside these booths, there's

like a sleeping bag tied to the wall. Typically the bag has a little arm slits worked into it, so you would get into your pj's, you go into your sleeping chamber, you know, your phone booth thing, and you would climb into your little sleeping bag and zip it up and put your arms through the arm slits, and like I said, you're tethered to the wall so that you don't just bump around as you sleep. The chamber also has little doors, so you can close the doors.

You've got privacy and your little tiny you know phone

booth of a bed bedroom. Uh, you can have like a computer in there, so you could do a little work, or you could watch something on the computer if you liked, or you could just drift off to sleep, where upon your arms would lift up in front of you, kind of like your Frankenstein's monster, and you can totally just you know, relax, and you don't have to worry about anything, Like, you don't need anything to support you because again you're in microgravity, so you don't need a pillow, you don't

need anything like that. You just you're just floating in place, sleeping. Crew get eight hours scheduled for sleep on each mission day. Now, let's talk about the future of the I S S. While Russia has just had no could join the r OS section of the station, and there's another module that's scheduled to launch before the end of this year. The current agreement for the I S S between Russia and the other partners, in fact between all the partners expires

in twenty twenty four. Now, there have been some talks from Russia that have indicated that the country is prepared to cease participation in the space station upon citing, in part sanctions that Americans, you know, the American government has leveled against Russia as one of the reasons for that. Subsequently, however, Russia has backed off from that kind of rhetoric, so

the future of the I S S remains uncertain. There's also been some concern that some sections of the I S S, particularly the original modules, the Russian ones, are well beyond their projected lifespan and they're getting a little too old to rely upon. Russian engineer Vladimir Solovyov has said that around eight of the in flight systems in the r OS are at the end of their service period, and he has warned that there could be irreparable failures

to follow now. As I mentioned in the previous episode, the oldest modules in the r O S followed a Soviet design that directly incorporated equipment into the station structure itself, meaning it's impossible to replace those components. They are part of the station, so when they break, you have to repair them or you gotta do without. You can't replace them. The US takes a much different approach. The U S takes a if it breaks, we can replace it kind

of approach. Meanwhile, various parties in the International Agreement are hoping to extend the I S S experiment to eight now. Whether or not the station will make it that far remains to be seen, but there are a lot of engineers who have said that they believe they can make the goal of operating into eight maybe even a little bit further, maybe as far as twenty uh maybe even

more than that. The Axiom modules that are proposed to connect to the I S S starting next year could potentially separate from the I S S at the end of the older space station's service, and then the Axiom station could operate as its own standalone commercial space station. Likewise, there's been talk that the Knaka module could detach from the I S S and reposition to join a new

Russian space station. The other plans for a Russian Russian space stations say that all components would be made specifically for that station. That seems to be contradictory. At the end of the I S S service, the station will be cleared out and then de orbited. It will likely be the last US backed space station, with future stations being commercial enterprises. The NASA will likely form partnerships with so that the agency can make use of the facilities

for future experiments. And there's one other space station I need to quickly mention before we sign off. This year, China launched a module called tiaton a h the first of three modules for a space station named tian Gong. This module is a habitation module a crew habitat module. The other two are lab modules, which China plans to launch and join to tian Hay next year. One crew has already visited tian Hay. They did so earlier this summer.

Three Chinese astronauts visited briefly and uh, yeah, they prepared it for future missions that will build it out as a full space station. So we do have another one up there, and there's some plans for different commercial ones potentially in the future, but obviously I can't really say much about them now. They're in the planning stages. And as we have learned in this series, if nothing else, you can't plan on anything as being absolute. There's always

wiggle room in these things. And that's it. That's it for this this round up about space stations. I'm gonna move on to different topics. So I hope you've enjoyed this series of episodes about the evolution of space station over the years. It's really interesting. It's a lot more haphazard than I originally thought, Like I just didn't realize how delicate the whole process is. Like the station itself is incredibly resilient, but the path to getting there was

fraught with challenges. And uh, if you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me. The best way to do that is over on Twitter. The handle we use is text stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an i heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.