Science Officers on ISS

Abstract

The desire for a permanently-manned space station had existed for decades. Indeed, the idea had featured in the concepts of pioneering space theorists Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Hermann Oberth at the beginning of the twentieth century. Both Sergey Korolyov and Wernher von Braun had always placed a space station at the focal point of sustained manned space exploration, and so too had the military, whose plans had included bases on the Moon. The race for space was diverted into a race to the Moon in the 1960s before the age of space stations began in the early 1970s with the launch of Soviet Salyut stations and the American Skylab. While the Soviets continued with their quest for space via an expanding space station programme, the Americans switched their attention to the Space Shuttle reusable multi-launch system. The Shuttle was originally intended as part of a large infrastructure that included space stations and extended exploration of the Moon, but was the only part of this grand scheme to actually receive any funding. Thus, with nowhere to fly to, Shuttle was instead marketed as a versatile launching system capable of a multitude of tasks, including its potential use as a science platform for a variety of research fields. It was not until 1998 that President Reagan’s space station plan finally saw its first hardware reach orbit.1