Monday, November 6, 2000		News Net

Track space station in cyberspace
by Kuljit Bains

WHILE Expedition 1 carrying human cargo docked on to the International Space Station (ISS) in, of course, space, on Thursday last, you can lock on to the NASA site at http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/ if you want to keep abreast of the latest in the Space Age; in the bargain you get to sound IT savvy for you quote sources from the Web and not the same TV news as others.

Two Russians and an American blasted off for the $ 60-billion International Space Station on Tuesday on an expedition that begins a new era in the history of space exploration. American William Shepherd and Russians Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalyov will be the first humans to live on the station, creating a scope for possible missions to other planets.

The 40-metre white, orange and grey Soyuz TM-31 rocket roared into the foggy autumn sky at 0752 GMT from Launch Pad One — the site from which Yuri Gagarin had blasted off to become the first human in space 39 years ago.

The NASA site, dedicated to the ISS, gives you a complete "fact sheet" regarding the development and figures of the project. (Various pieces of information can be reached from a slick panel given at the top of the page. Go to Station > Reference).

In the "fact sheet" you can get an overview of the complex building of the space station. On-orbit assembly of the ISS began with the launch of the US-owned, Russian-built Zarya control module on November 20, 1998, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakstan.

The launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavour from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, followed on December 4, 1998, carrying the US-built Unity connecting module. Endeavour’s crew attached Unity and Zarya during a 12-day mission to begin the station’s orbital construction.

The third component to be launched was a Russian-provided living quarters and early station core known as Zvezda, which means "Star" in English.

This week’s mission delivered a three-man crew called Expedition 1. While they are at the ISS, three space shuttle missions will visit the station to continue on-orbit construction. A total of 44 launches will be required to complete the facility in 2005.

In the Reference section on the Web site, there is also a link to frequently asked questions (FAQS) that have a lot of curious questions answered—like "how can I become an astronaut?" (not easy); "how big will the station be when it is complete"—though "awesome" should suffice for an answer, the site says it will have an end-to-end width of 108.5 meters, and be 88.4 meters long and 43.6 meters tall; it will have a mass of nearly 453.6 metric tonnes. Another question is "how will waste be disposed of?" Also, "Why has the name of the space station been changed from Freedom to International Space Station."

The real space and IT enthusiasts of us can receive up-to-date status reports from NASA by subscribing to this service at http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/spacenews/subscribe/index.html.

A link to the latest status report can be found on the Home page itself. Another interesting link is "Where is the Station?". This tracks the movement of the ISS over the earth and can tell you where it is at a particular time.

For the lazy wanting to get information about the ISS, but not up to navigating through the vast NASA site, there is a reasonable but unofficial site, http://www.shuttlepresskit.com/index.html, that has a concise overview and a brief on the purpose of the mission. There is also a description of the research to be carried out on the station.

One might also want to get info from non-US sites. One such Russian site can be reached at http://www.maximov.com/iss/index.html. It is a fairly simple and basic, but has all the essentials.

A major contributor to the project is Boeing. It has a site on the project, too—
http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/space/spacestation/index.html. A site map lays out the entire site and has live clicks to more than 50 pages of International Space Station data. "This (ISS) is one of the most complex and challenging projects ever undertaken," says Boeing Chairman and CEO Phil Condit.

Happy space surfing!