BECOMING AN ISS ASTRONAUT Astronaut candidates must have a college degree in engineering science or math They complete years of tough physical and mental preparation Training includes water survival and aircraft flight skills They must learn Russian Candidates learn how to put on bulky space suits Spacewalk practice takes place in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory It is the world’s largest indoor pool Candidates wear suits that keep them stable in the water The pool mimics conditions in microgravity Candidates practice moving around and doing repairs After being accepted astronauts learn specific mission skills They learn to repair equipment and conduct experiments 6 Despite this extreme speed they heard only their radios and the whirring of air circulating in their space suits The vivid blue and green Earth rotated below them The inky blackness of deep space loomed above Commander Whitson used bolts to secure the new computer On another part of the ISS Fischer installed two antennae The astronauts completed their jobs They returned to the airlock and re-entered the ISS
THE FIRST SPACE STATIONS In the 1970s both the Soviet Union and the United States built space stations The Soviet Union’s cylinder-shaped Salyut stations were the first The earliest Salyut station went into space in 1971 Solar panels collected the sun’s energy for power Cosmonauts traveled to Salyut on Soyuz spacecraft America’s Skylab station launched in 1973 Three crews visited it The first lived on Skylab for 28 days Salyut and Skylab were not permanent stations When objects orbit near Earth their orbits gradually get lower and lower They eventually dip into the atmosphere Without heat shielding they burn up Once their missions ended and astronauts left these early stations burned up in the atmosphere A PERMANENT SPACE STATION In 1986 the Soviet Union launched a space station called Mir It was designed to stay in space for many years Mir had separate sections called modules Astronauts from 7
Skylab was made up of a single large module several countries visited Mir They conducted research They learned about living and working in space In the 1980s President Ronald Reagan approved the construction of a permanent space station He invited other nations to join the project At first the 8
plan got off to a good start Canada Japan and the European Space Agency ESA agreed to contribute to the station But the cost kept growing To cut costs the station was redesigned Construction was delayed many years In 1991 the Soviet Union broke up into many separate countries The largest was Russia It took over the Soviet space program In 1993 PERSPECTIVES CITIZENS AGAINST THE ISS Not everyone was happy with the construction of the ISS In 1997 a group called the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste CCAGW argued that the ISS was too expensive At the time the ISS program cost 1 8 billion per year Funding it took money away from other space programs Other spacecraft were cancelled CCAGW pointed out that the United States was already heavily in debt It believed that money should be spent to reduce the debt rather than fund the ISS Russia joined the space station effort The project was named the International Space Station 9
