The International Space Station

The commander of the ISS Mission 32, Sunita Williams, conducts a 25-minute tour of the ISS in November 2012.
LINK

Just seeing her and the other astronauts gliding through the passageways as if they were swimming is astonishing to an old science fiction fan such as I am. For all its faults, it is a Real Space Station. In orbit. Out there in Space.

Back in the old days, I was a Star Trek fan. I was a teenager when the original television series aired, with Captain Kirk, Scottie, Bones, Spock, and all the rest. My parents gave my sister and me special permission to stay up late this one night of the week to watch it with them on our black and white TV. Later on, I watched the Star Trek Next Generation series, and was a big fan of Deep Space Nine – for one thing, DS-9 included a character who took Religion seriously, something notably absent from the other incarnations of Star Trek, and from much of print science fiction.

For I devoured the books. I was a subscriber to the Science Fiction Book Club for decades, and likewise to the Analog science fiction magazine. Heinlein, Asimov, Poul Anderson, James White... later on Anne McCaffrey and the Pern novels (ah, Masterharper Robinton!!! And Menolly. And all the other harpers and musicians in those books... And the Dragons!!!). These days I read much less of the genre, indeed very little of it beyond the works of Carol Cherryh and Lois McMaster Bujold.

Among Bujold's early books was “Falling Free,” which I read in a four-part serialization in Analog with fabulous cover art based on the story by Michael Whelan (not, be it noted, the art from the later reprint that appears in the linked Wikipedia article, but rather this). Part of Bujold's point in this book was to explore what it would mean in a world of genetic engineering for one's engineering projects – living beings, in this case sentient beings – to become obsolete, a moral question that remains open. The characters who populate this story are the Quaddies – genetically engineered from Homo sapiens to be better suited for zero-gravity and life in space. Most easily noticed are their four arms (two of them in place of our legs). About the time that they are fully developed and there is a good-sized population ready to be sold and leased (for, being genetically-engineered corporate property, they are not “people” and thus have no rights), artificial gravity is invented, and the corporation is pulling the plug on the project, including killing all of the now-useless quaddies. It is a great story, and turns out well (the quaddies reappear in some of her later stories, including a character who is a four-handed keyboard musician, and most of all in the 2002 novel "Diplomatic Immunity," which takes place some two centuries later), but my point for today is that the ISS video puts me in mind of them. We humans are not well-suited for living in space. But oh, how splendid it is to go there!!!

At one point, Commander Williams takes us to the Cupola, where one can watch the Earth go by underneath. Words fail me.

The NASA program costs a lot of money (though an order of magnitude less than, say, bailing out the TBTF banks). No doubt the day will come when some penny-pinching Congress shuts it down. In 2009, NASA announced plans to end the ISS program in early 2016 (just three years from now!); the current President has said he would like to extend it to 2020. The Russians have plans to re-use their modules for a possible new station, but it may be that they will go it alone, without international cooperation. The European Space Agency, especially, has had a hard time coming up with funding for their part of the ISS, and the US is not in much better shape.

It will be hard to watch the dream die; a part of me will die with it.
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Here is the website for further information about the International Space Station. There are a variety of other videos, and lots of pictures. There is even a live video/audio stream where you can follow the day-to-day activity.