Space Stations: Past, Present, And Future | Answers With Joe

this video supported by curiosity stream this July marks the 50th anniversary of our landing on the moon the race to the moon totally dominated space exploration in the 1960s it was mostly like a proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union wouldn't it be great if all wars were just two countries trying to out and hurt each other by the time we landed on the moon we had mastered launches orbital mechanics docking rendezvous Eng landing even walking around in another celestial body but one thing that we hadn't mastered was actually living in space for extended periods anyway so before the moon missions were even complete NASA and the Soviet Union were both already working on long term space activities to try to learn how to actually live up there and this assured in the age of Space Station's after the moon landings it was kind of just assumed that we would keep exploring and go all the way out to Mars in fact most people had predictions that we were gonna be there by the 80s but the problem with Mars is as opposed to the moon which only takes about three days to get there Mars takes like six months to get there plus you wouldn't have a return window for another 18 months which puts the whole thing at like two-and-a-half years of being out there and at that point in time the longest anybody had been in space was a couple of weeks or so we had no idea how to survive in space that long so even though everybody had all this exploratory zeal and wanting to go all the way out to Mars the more prudent thing to do was to build space stations and actually learn how to live in space this is kind of a mind-blowing fact to me but there has been a space station of some kind orbiting Earth since 1973 that's 46 continuous years and it all started with Salyut one yes the Soviets who beat us to space was Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin also beat us to the space station game when they launched Salyut one up into orbit in September of 1971 it was 20 feet in length 4 meters in maximum diameter and 99 cubic meters in interior space this was a test flight of 175 days it was visited by two Soyuz missions so he used 10 and so he's 11 and this mission was only successful in the sense that they got a space station up into orbit and people did live on it but beyond that it was kind of a mess tragic mess first of all Soyuz 10 was able to dock with it do a soft docking anyway but it couldn't do the hard docking which means that it wasn't safe for the crew to actually transfer into the vehicle so they had to completely abort the mission they never actually even got into cell you've one site one remained uninhabited just kind of floating around in Earth orbit until Soyuz 11 was able to dock with it in June of that year and that was a success they were able to get into it but the success kind of ended there they encountered a variety of problems on the station including an electrical fire and had to abandon the mission after only 23 days which was a record at the time so yay and then tragically the Soyuz 11 capsule depressurize while re-entering the atmosphere which killed the three cosmonauts this was the first time anybody had died in reentering the Soviet space station program struggled for a few years they launched three different space stations up there and none of them were ever manned in the longest one that stayed up was 13 days they did finally have some success with saiute 3 in 1974 which was the first of five successful Salyut missions that increased in mission linked all the way up to Salyut 7 that went up in 1982 and had 861 days of occupation in space but bouncing back to the early 70s this was when the United States was kind of winding down their Apollo program the Soviets were struggling with their space station program so in that time the United States put up Skylab in 1973 Skylab was awesome because basically NASA had all these Saturn 5 rocket sleighing around from the Apollo program and they were kind of like well what can we do with this and what they did was really cool they basically took the third stage of the Saturn 5 rocket and just turned it into a habitation module and the cool thing about that was Skylab was huge it was six point six meters wide for comparison the modules on the ISS are closer to four meters wide because they had to fit inside cargo bays like the one on the space shuttle Skylab was occupied for 171 days by three different crews of three with missions lasting as long 283 days which was a record at the time while up there they did experiments and tested life support systems basically just figuring out how to live and work in space and they had some fun while they were at it to this day Skylab is the only Space Station the US has operated exclusively and it was a groundbreaking program Skylab we entered the atmosphere in July of 1979 and landed near the city of Perth Australia to lots of media fanfare so now back to Russia while their final Salyut station was still orbiting around the earth they built and launched one of the most storied and impressive space stations in human history the MIR space station I have to say I have a soft spot for Mir because this was like the little space station that could it had no business being up there as long as it was but it just it just kept going mere went up in 1986 but you could almost argue it was never fully completed because it was constantly being added on to during its entire life it was like a Winchester Mystery House in space but Mir was groundbreaking in a lot of ways where the solute and Skylab missions were basically one large module Mir was made of multiple modules that were added over time which served as sort of a blueprint for the ISS and future space stations also we're previous stations that kind of just experimented with long flight things like water reuse and air circulation and that kind of stuff Mir actually implemented it it was designed to be the first long-term space habitat and it did so for 15 years in that time at hosted astronauts from the United States and other countries and even turned into a bit of a commercial operation taking on the first space tourists Dennis Tito for a paltry twenty million dollars toward the end of its life Mir was kind of an orbiting dumpster fire on the station equipment broke down constantly to the point that the crew was so overwhelmed they just kind of had to let things go fires broke out on multiple occasions and they were - yes - collisions with Soyuz in progress vehicles but the thing just kept going until march of 2001 until they finally deorbited it over the South Pacific now one of the reasons that Rose cosmos decided to end the MIR space station was because the bulk of their funding was now going to another space station the international space station I don't think it's hyperbole to say that the ISS is one of the most expensive and ambitious projects in the history of the world in fact it's been called the single most expensive item of all time and over 150 billion dollars the ISS is a cooperative venture between the US Russia Japan Canada and the European Space Agency which represents 13 new countries it's been continuously occupied for 18 years by a total of 236 people from 18 countries and a 105 metres long and 70 metres wide it's visible from space with the naked eye in that time its inhabitants of conducted countless experiments and tested long-duration space living and giving us a unique view of our own planet it's truly meant to be a monument to international cooperation and exploration with module names like destiny quest tranquility unity and harmony it's been a shining example of what we can do when we all work together while it is starting to show its age there's no solid plans to end the ISS anytime soon the RUS cosmos believes after their mere experience it could last a full 30 years of funding holds out currently the program is through 2024 the bills have been put forward in the US to extend funding through 2030 obviously I'm skipping over a lot of details here because the ISS is a huge massively complex vehicle with 18 years of stories to tell but suffice to say it's been one of the biggest space success stories of all time and has taught us a lot about long term living in space one spacefaring country that is not a part of ISS is China they tend to kind of go their own way in this department which they did with their own space station called Yong Gong won in 2011 like a lot of the Chinese space program a lot of this is shrouded in mystery but Chung hong-won was a test program for the chung one space station program which is also called the chinese large modular space station this is kind of in the realm of mirror-like meant to dock a whole bunch of different modules together to create a Chinese space station that they run all on their own jian Gong means heavenly Palace and while it was in space from 2011 to 2018 it was only occupied for 25 days of that Cheung Kong one deorbited in 2018 but before that happened in 2016 they launched Heung Gong - this has so far been unmanned but it's the first step in that Chinese large modular space station the Chinese hope to launch their remaining modules over the next few years and begin occupying it with manned missions in 2022 so that brings us up to date but let's look at some of the feature space stations that are in the works following up on the success of the ISS the same international partners are working on a new space station this time around the moon it's a project called lop G or the lunar orbital platform gateway and it's a joint venture between NASA Rose cosmos ESA JAXA and CSA lot G is a big deal because it would be the first permanent presence on the moon and it would serve as a dropping off point for humans and robotic Landers before they descended the surface it's also an opportunity to test the long-term effects of living outside our magnetic shield and possibly establish a gateway for missions to Mars and beyond the first modules are scheduled to start heading toward the moon in 2022 and it's expected to be finished by 2026 although there are plans to continue building on top of that what they call a deep-space gateway architecture and that could go on into the 2030s and this is of course dependent on whether or not NASA can get the SLS off the ground in the next few years which is starting to look a little bit shaky but there are private companies on the way up like the Falcon Heavy Blue origins new new Glen vehicle and possibly the starship now there are a lot of critics of this plan that think it's a lot smarter to just create a moon base instead of having this sort of intermediary stopping point they think that's just a big waste of time and money but we'll see Russia meanwhile has her sights set on a third generation low Earth orbit station called the orbital piloted assembly and experiment complex they hope to get this up before the ISS comes down to maintain a presence in low-earth orbit but the plan for this station sometimes called OPSEC is to create a base for assembling deep-space vehicles and provide a stopping off point for astronauts and cosmonauts returning from lunar or deep-space missions both OPSEC and Logies seem to be kind of buying into this paradigm of a network of space station serving as waypoints for lunar travel and beyond an OP SEC is plan to go out and no earlier than 2024 again just you know before the ISS comes down now another possible Russian space station is another lunar space station that's supposed to go in conjunction with a Russian lunar base the project is called the lunar orbital station and it kind of came out of some frustrations that they had with the international partners on lap G some reports say that NASA did work out some of the problems that they had with lot G so they might be more on board with that this space station might you know be on the back burner for now but even if it is something that goes forward it won't be until the 2030s now everything that I've talked about so far relating to space stations owned by state actors and nations and not private companies and as we all know private companies are really kind of taking over and changing the game in terms of space exploration these days I did a video previously to talk about Bigelow Aerospace and their inflatable or as they prefer to use expandable habitats and some of the plans that they have going forward including their B through 30 space station and the Olympus space station which is freakin huge but there are other commercial space station ventures in the works including a Ryan spans Aurora space hotel concept in the gateway foundations von Braun station one of the more interesting private space station companies on their way up is a company called axiom space this is actually run by a lot of heavy hitters from NASA like longtime NASA engineers and and management people some of the whom oversaw the ISS for several years those are all super interesting projects and they probably deserve a video of their own so maybe keep an eye out for that the space stations in general kind of get overlooked when we talk about space stuff we like the exploration the going where no one has gone before kind of thing but if we're gonna leave Earth if we're gonna be a spacefaring species we have to actually go through the mundane task of living and actually working in space and the only way to do that is through space stations so the idea that in the next 20 years we could have a whole network of private and public space stations around the moon and around earth kind of just serving as waypoints for people to travel around and do science and and explore or maybe even just live and work is really cool to me and it's really exciting to see these plans come together in the early infrastructure being built as I have said many times on this channel these are interesting times now speaking of going to the moon if you're excited about that kind of thing I would highly recommend a series called destination moon on curiosity stream in this series they talk about the issues getting to the moon and Beyond and how we got around those in the past as well as how we'll get over them in the future it really helps break down the strategy behind the plans we talked about here in terms of the lunar bases and lunar space stations curiosity stream of course is an awesome video service filled to the brim with science documentaries covering all kinds of topics from space and astronomy medicine physics history and much more it was created by some of the people who created the Discovery Channel remember back when the Discovery Channel actually had a whole lot of really cool science documentaries on it yeah it's like that you can get curiosity stream for as low as $2.99 a month but viewers of this channel if you sign up at curiosity stream calm slash Joe Scott can get one month for free seriously you haven't checked out curiosity stream but you 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Prague named Michael I like these things I get them all the time people compliment me you'll get compliments to answer so Joe it comes Lester please do like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here Google thinks you'll like this video cuz I did that one as well and there are others that you can find and if you go check those out and you'll like them I come back with videos every Monday and Thursday so please hit subscribe and you can be the first to see them alright with that I am taking off thank you guys so much for watching go out now have an eye-opening week and I'll see you next Monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 570,030

Keywords: answers with joe, space stations, space travel, space history, skylab, salyut 1, soyuz 11, mir space station, ISS, International space station, lop-g, deep space gateway, space hotels, bigelow aerospace

Id: 17i2kyEgjWE

Length: 14min 1sec (841 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 15 2019