Humans to Explore Worlds Beyond? 

The Space Shuttle Discovery lifted off carrying the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) on April 24, 1990. The telescope was named for Edwin Hubble, who had discovered the expansion of the universe. HST was released into orbit 388 miles above the Earth a day later. The first images, however, were very blurry. It was discovered that the telescope’s primary mirror had been ground too flat at the edges.

Luckily, HST was made to be serviced by space shuttle crews while in space. Experts designed a set of lenses that would fix the problem. In December 1993, the Hubble repair crew traveled to the HST on the shuttle Endeavor. Using the orbiter’s robotic arm, they placed the HST in the Endeavor’s cargo bay, then made a record five spacewalks to install the corrective optics inside the telescope. The repair was a success: the new images were now ten times more detailed than images from ground-based telescopes.

Once HST was repaired, a new era of astronomical discoveries began. Hubble would allow astronomers to more clearly view distant galaxies and star clusters. In 1994, it recorded the impact of Comet Shoemaker Levy 9 into the atmosphere of Jupiter. The success of HST helped to repair NASA’s image, which had been tarnished after the Challenger disaster.

Yet NASA was having problems with its next big project, a permanent space station in Earth orbit. The space station had been approved by the Reagan (American president) administration in 1984, but in 1993, it was seriously behind schedule and over budget. Not one single piece of hardware had been launched.

The Russian space program was on the brink of extinction after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. There were concerns in the West that Russian engineers and scientist might turn their energies to making weapons. NASA, looking for ways to reduce the cost of an orbiting space station, had already considered using Russia’s planned Mir-2 as a core station module and the Soyuz ferry as an emergency escape vehicle for station crews. In 1993, the Clinton administration directed NASA to make Russia a full partner in the station project. The effort was renamed the International Space Station (ISS) and was to bring together 16 nations, including Canada, Japan and the countries of the European Space Agency. The space station, when completed would contain six research laboratories, weigh one million pounds and take up as much area as football field. It would have a crew of as many as seven astronauts and visiting scientists.

In order to accomplish this, the human spaceflight programs of the two former Cold War rivals had to be integrated. The focus for this effort became the Mir space station. Plans emerged for cosmonauts to fly on the Space Shuttle, while American astronauts visited Mir for several months at a time working under Russian crews. Physician-astronaut Norm Thagard became the first American to ride a Soyuz ferry in space in March 1995, beginning an orbital tour of 115 days.

Americans continued to visit Mir for more than three years. These missions included some noticeable successes, such as Shannon Lucid’s 188-day flight, an American space endurance record. However, there were some troubling moments as well. A fire broke out aboard Mir in February 1997 when an oxygen-generating “candle” malfunctioned. Mir’s crew, including astronaut Jerry Linenger, was nearly forced to abandoned ship, but managed to hang on long enough for the fire to burn itself out. This emergency was followed by other problems, including leaks of toxic coolant inside the space station. There was also a great deal of friction between the Russian Space Agency managers and their NASA counterparts.

In June 1997, an unmanned Progress cargo freighter collided with the Mir during a docking attempt, puncturing one module and damaging a solar panel. Cosmonauts Vasily Tsibliyev and Aleksandr Lazutkin and astronaut Mike Foale were able to seal off the damaged module and restore power to the station.

Meanwhile, both Russia and the U.S. had problems with their robotic exploration programs. Russia’s economic hardships only allowed it one planetary mission in the 1990’s: a Mars orbiter with a collection of small landers; the craft never got out of Earth orbit. In 1993, NASA’s billion-dollar Mars probe was lost just as it was attempting to go into orbit around Mars; it was later determined that the craft had probably suffered a massive fuel leak. NASA was facing continuing budget cuts at the time; this failure forced NASA to take a new approach to solar system exploration. Called “faster, better, cheaper” the new approach focused on smaller, less expensive probes that would take less time to develop. Many scientists welcomed this change, for in the 1980s, tightening budgets had allowed only two American missions in the solar system: the Magellan Venus radar mapping mission and the Galileo Jupiter orbiter.

NASA’s “faster, better, cheaper” method got off to a good start. In 1997 Pathfinder became the first spacecraft since Viking 1 and 2 to land on Mars. Pathfinder landed on July 4, using a new landing system that employed airbags instead of complex retro-rockets. The craft released a small rover called Sojourner a day later. Under control from Earth, Sojourner spent weeks prowling among Mars’ boulders. The Internet, which allowed computer users to see brand new images of Mars soon after they were received on Earth, generated a huge amount of public interest. The Mars Global Surveyor orbiter arrived in September, carrying the high-resolution camera originally meant for the Mars Observer mission. By November, it was taking the most detailed views of Mars ever obtained and making discoveries that would completely changed the way scientists viewed the planet.

Disappointment followed, however. In 1999, NASA lost four Mars probes, including the first lander that scheduled to explore Mars’ polar regions. These failures were later attributed to simple mistakes by mission planners and engineers, and raised doubts about “faster, better, cheaper”. Still, it was clear that there was no going back to the high-cost missions of the past.

It was also clear that the scientific stakes for continuing were now higher than they had ever been, for there was now a renewed search for life beyond Earth. NASA scientists announced that they had found possible evidence for fossil bacteria inside a Martian meteorite, boosting the prospects for past life on Mars. Jupiter’s moon Europa became the next possible abode for living things, when Galileo’s images helped showed that an ocean of water lies beneath Europa’s icy crust. This ocean might possibly harbour living organisms.

NASA attempted to create more vision for its human spaceflight program as such exciting prospects for unmanned space exploration loomed. In 1998, 77-year-old John Glenn, who had been a U.S. Senator for 25 years, spent nine days in orbit aboard the shuttle Discovery, becoming the world’s oldest space traveler. Glenn’s participation in the flight focused on the effects of aging on human response to spaceflight.

By the end of 1998, the first modules of the international space station were in orbit. The assembly process would continue into the first years of the twenty-first century.