Is it possible to measure human progress? If it is, whose progress would you be measuring, and against whose criteria? Clearly there can be no objective, universal scale of achievement against which to assess how far we, as a species, have come. One could point to our shining cities, our technology, the immense strides we have made in every field of science as surely being hallmarks of progress, before remembering that these totems mean nothing to a huge number of people on this planet. For many, having clean water to drink is a major step forward. Not dying of diarrhea or disease at a young age is progress.
Is progress, therefore, a measure of how we, as humans, behave towards each other? Can we measure it by the number of bodies on the battlefield, or the bulging bellies of starving children? If this is to be our criterion, we certainly don't seem to be doing very well, for nothing seems to change very much in the endless story of human killing human. And if a scale of measurement never shows much change then surely it is not a very useful one. In fact, it seems that it's nearly impossible to find a way of measuring the progress of our species in a way that is truly representative and which everybody will recognise or accept.
But there was a moment, the briefest moment in history, when it seemed as if the whole planet were united in agreeing what progress means. That moment in July 1969 when humans, for the first time, were suddenly not divided by religion nor colour nor possessions. We were humans first, all else second, and nothing except that, during that fleeting glimpse of what was possible, seemed to matter. We spoke with one voice, a human voice, and that new-found voice said look how far we have come. Look what we can do.
That voice was soon silenced, of course, as America grew tired of moonwalks. It was impossible to repeat the glory of the first Moon landing, and glory was all that Apollo had offered. The Moon landings were not done for science - only one scientist, geologist Harrison Schmitt, ever went to the Moon - but simply to give the Russians a bloody nose over the humiliation of Sputnik and Gagarin. The idea of America beating the Russians to the Moon was dreamt up by President Kennedy more or less on the spur of the moment, and without consulting his closest advisers, still less those whose job it was to know if such a thing were even possible. Those experts were horrified to hear his famous speech committing NASA to such a seemingly impossible project.
But before the light faded, at the end of the sixties, everything seemed possible. We would soon have a permanent base on the Moon, and then reach out to Mars and beyond. Iconic films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey showed us space travel becoming majestic, humbling, commonplace. Here, surely, humans had found their progress scale: we could measure our development as a species by how far we could travel from the nest. Never mind, of course, what we did when we got there.
The Voice of America
Seventies cynicism bit down hard upon American space aspirations, almost killing them altogether. It is generally believed that the American public are only interested in space travel if it involves humans: the fantastic exploration of the solar system by robotic spacecraft does not excite them, so the belief has it, and they will not support the funding of robots as they supported Apollo or the shuttle. Although this belief has never really been tested, and certainly many space experts believe it to be false, one can perhaps see why it might be true: America needs its space heroes, its Captain Kirks, its Han Solos. That's what their popular culture tells them space travel should be all about: lantern-jawed heroes spreading The Voice of America throughout the galaxy. But The Voice has a peculiarly limited vocabulary: freedom, opportunity, enterprise, spirit, in case anybody doubted that the Great Adventure was the incarnation of American dreams, not human ones. It was as much High Chaparaal as High Frontier. But behind the flag waving, the fact was that, after Apollo, nobody in the US government really knew what manned space exploration was for, nor where it was going next. With a projected price tag of billions, humans certainly weren't going to Mars.
Russia's way of doing things in space could not have been more different. Where America went for spectacle and glory, Russia went for reliability and results. Where America took terrible risks with new technology, the Russians were using tried and tested hardware which they knew worked. Beaten to the Moon, the focus of the Russian space program had shifted to something a lot less glamorous but ultimately would contribute more towards their goal of reaching the stars: long-duration space flight in Earth orbit, in order to understand its effects on humans. In 1971 the Russians launched Salyut 1,the first in a series of nine space stations put into orbit between that year and 1982 and which were succeeded by Mir. Space endurance records were soon being smashed: the Americans were, once again, playing catch-up. With the chill winds of the Cold War blowing, Congress ordered NASA to put something, anything, up there in order to beat the Russians at their own game and to claim the glory of long-endurance spaceflights for America. There was no time, and precious little money, to design and build a space station from scratch, but the Americans did have a lot of old space hardware left over from Apollo and there had been plans around for a few years to modify the third stage of a Saturn V so it could be used as an orbiting space lab. Thus was Skylab born. It launched in 1973, with a crew of three, and included a solar observatory (which actually did make some remarkable discoveries about the Sun), a workshop and some other scientific experiments.
Neither Skylab nor Salyut was the majestic orbiting pinwheel so beloved of sci-fi. They were functional, basic, bestrewn with endless miles of cables, wires, pipes, tubes. They groaned and creaked constantly. Crews, who typically spent two or three months aboard, had a constant battle just to keep everything working. It is amazing that any useful science came out of either.
Much as it had during after Apollo 11, the American public soon tired of space, of seeing astronauts floating around in zero-g. Something else was needed to keep the public onside. In July 1975, during that curious (and temporary) thawing of American-Soviet relations known as detente, a Russian Soyuz docked with an American Apollo in orbit: the two crews, led by famed cosmonaut Alexei Leonov and Thomas Stafford respectively, carried out experiments together in an atmosphere of mutual suspicion and mistrust . It was a mission conceived as a symbol of co-operation between the superpowers. When the two spacecraft separated after two days, soon afterwards so did the two superpowers and the Cold War returned. In terms of manned spaceflight, apart from the latter Moon landings it was about as daring and exciting as it got in the 1970s. America had lost the will to continue the Great Adventure: Russia just carried on with the long-endurance research. In 1979, Skylab was "de-orbited" and most of it ended up in the Australian outback. And so more American dreams crashed to Earth.
New Dreams, New Designs
It seemed as if it were the end of an era. But in the background were two projects for maintaining a manned American presence in Earth orbit: the space shuttle and a permanently-manned space station called Freedom. The former had been conceived as a resuable and multi-purpose "space truck" which could be used to launch satellites in orbit, repair broken ones and to ferry cargo and astronauts to the space station. Its role as a satellite launcher would, it was claimed, so lower the cost of getting satellites into orbit that soon every spacefaring nation would be beating a path to the door of NASA, thus allowing at least some of the shuttle's development costs to be recovered. In the event, massive cost overruns meant that the shuttle proved too expensive for most countries to launch satellites from, and a lot of the work went to the French Ariane launcher.
The shuttle had gone through many different designs and configurations during the 1970s but had had its funding so emasculated by Congress that the final
version that launched in 1981 bore little resemblance to the original concept, leading to serious, and soon-to-be tragically vindicated, concerns about its safety. Freedom started its conceptual life as an orbiting laboratory. That idea was quickly dropped, perhaps because nobody could agree on exactly what research to carry out in orbit. The next idea was to use it as a manufacturing facility for so-called "super-chips", then as a docking gateway for missions to the Moon and Mars, then as a platform for medical research. It was typical of the way the Americans thought that they had made the decision to put a space station in orbit before having any idea why.
But it quickly became apparent that the cost of Freedom would be too prohibitive for America to complete alone. With the Cold War at an end, in 1992 the two superpowers signed an agreement for co-operation in space, meaning, among other things, that Americans would be allowed aboard Mir. But huge economic problems in Russia meant, as far an orbiting space station went, that even America and Russia between them could not foot the bill. So in 1993 negotiations opened between NASA. the Russian Federal Space Agency and the European Space Agency to co-build the space station, with eventually many other countries such as Japan and Canada contributing. The idea was that the basic design of the newly-renamed International Space Station would primarily be American, and its space partners would develop modules for it, thus sharing the cost. In late 1993 Congress gave NASA four billion dollars, which was then the estimated cost of developing and building the basic spacecraft.
Spiralling Costs
But that's when things started to go awry. NASA employed teams of contractors to come up with the design. None of the designs worked: they were either too expensive or not practical in terms of construction. But mostly they were just too ambitious. It would have been difficult for anybody to come up with a design for a space station without having a clear idea of what the space station was going to be for . Even at this stage, that crucial information was still missing.
Suddenly the initial $4Bn funding had all been spent, and there was still no final design, let alone any space station. NASA went cap-in-hand back to Congress, and were awarded an additional $4Bn. At this point, out of consideration to taxpayers Congress should have cancelled the project, but once you have made such a disastrous funding error it's always better to keep throwing more money at the problem rather than admit you made a mistake in funding it in the first place.
And there was still no what for either. A new purpose for the ISS was suddenly mooted : it would be to grow oversized protein cystals in zero-g, which would make it a lot easier to study proteins and hence come up with new and more effective medicines. NASA even put together a promotional video about it, in an attempt to keep taxpayers onside. But biologists pointed out that there was little evidence that crystals grown in orbit would be much bigger than those grown on the ground, so there were no clear benefits, as well as it being an incredibly expensive way of growing them. The idea was quietly dropped: it was demonstrated later that protein crystals grown in orbit really were little bigger than what could be achieved on the ground.
The costs kept getting bigger, and the decisions more questionable. NASA had calculated that it would cost $100m a year to keep the ISS supplied with fresh water, so clearly some sort of recycling system was needed which could turn urine, sweat and condensation into drinkable water. Their Russian counterparts said look, we have such a system, we've been using it for ten years in space and it works. No thank you, said the Americans, we will develop our own system, and reached for the extra four billion dollars Congress had just given them. So in the end, the Russians would use their system on board their own ISS modules, and the Americans theirs on their own bits of the ISS. When NASA was asked by Congress why they didn't use the proven Russian recycling system, they replied that they wanted their own system in case the Russian one failed. The fact that Russia had been using their system for more than a decade without a single failure seems not to have counted for anything. The old mistrust would take a long while to dissipate.....
The Black Hole
Now $12Bn had been spent with no final design, no space station to show for it, and no end in sight. NASA raised the estimated cost to $20Bn, but this was obviously unlikely to be the last word. The ISS project was beginning to impact other NASA projects financially too, with several unmanned probes being cancelled. NASA had a black hole at the heart of their operations. Yet it was too late, and too admitting of gross errors, for the ISS to be cancelled.
Construction of the ISS finally began in November 1998 when a Russian Proton rocket launched the Zarya module, which provided propulsion, orientation control, communications and electrical power, but which lacked long-term life-support functions. It was envisaged that the construction would require some 25 shuttle missions over five years, with the ISS being completed by 2003. And that deadline may be have been met if Russia had not done something unthinkable: it ran out of money. With no roubles being injected into the project, the Americans had to bail the Russians out in order to keep the construction going. In fact, during the construction phase of the ISS, Russia had to be bailed out by American taxpayers three times, costing billions. The costs just kept rising and the years kept coming and going. The ISS was not finally completed until this year, 2011: the total cost, including that of re-supplying the station, is now estimated at $96Bn
over 30 years. That's exactly 12 times the original estimated cost of design and construction. How much useful science will be done during the life of the ISS? It's impossible to say. Russia and Italy, as well as NASA, have their own laboratory modules aboard the ISS, but information about their exact purpose and projected results is a little vague. The Americans seem now to have redefined the purpose of their part of the ISS as for doing research into the long-term effects of zero-g on the human body, which is ironic considering they could have participated in this research decades earlier if Cold War stupidity and paranoia had not kept American and Russian scientists apart. And although NASA's original plan was to have a crew of ten astronauts on board the ISS, the massive cost overrun has necessitated scaling that back to three, with another three crew members from partner countries. It's difficult to see, therefore, what time those three NASA astronauts will have available to do science.
What Was It All For?
It's not all bad though: the ISS has demonstrated how countries can co-operate in space endeavours, and more importantly share the costs, which will be an absolute necessity for any missions to Mars (current NASA estimate: $400Bn). What does the saga of the ISS say about human progress? We've flown no further from the nest in forty years, so does this mean that human progress has stopped advancing? Perhaps. But the ISS may, in centuries to come, be seen as the project which gave us the tools and methods to voyage further out, despite its appalling management, cost and lack of focus. If the main purpose of the ISS has been to get nations working together in peace at the cutting edge of exploration and science, perhaps it's been worth it. If humans' true destiny is to leave the Earth and live among the stars, as many believe, then perhaps we are now truly on our way.
Or maybe the story of the long gap between Apollo and the ISS has demonstrated that human progress is not linear, that it arrives in fits and starts, with long periods when nothing very much happens. A sort of punctuated evolution, if you like. But perhaps we already knew that.
For me, there is one image which sums up human progress. It has a beauty and a tranquility that is truly moving. It's an image of astronaut Tracey Caldwell Dyson gazing down at the Earth from the viewport of the ISS. One cannot know what she is thinking, but her expression is one of peace, of contentment, of wonder. Surely she is reflecting on how far we have come. Below is her home, out there the stars: and there she is, between earth and sky, past and future, dreams and destiny.
Credit: Expedition 24 Crew, NASA
