PHOTOS BY NASA
Twenty-five years ago, a former U.S. Navy SEAL and two Russian cosmonauts paved the way for others to live for long durations on the International Space Station (ISS). Five crews already had docked at the ISS, but the longest previous stay was only a week.
When the Expedition 1 crew arrived for a four-month mission on November 2, 2000, it opened a new chapter in human space flight and kicked off a quarter-century of continuous human presence on the space station.
The crew consisted of seasoned space veterans with interesting life experiences. Expedition Commander William “Bill” Shepherd, a former Navy SEAL and mechanical engineer, was the first military person admitted to NASA’s astronaut training program who was not an aviator. Prior to commanding Expedition 1, he served as a mission specialist on three space shuttle flights. He also leaned on his Navy background to help direct the underwater salvage operations after the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, according to NASA.
Yuri Gidzenko, a pilot and lieutenant colonel in the Russian Air Force, served as commander of the Soyuz TM-31 spacecraft that lifted the Expedition 1 crew from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on October 31, 2000, on its way to the ISS. Gidzenko had served as commander of the Euromir 95 expedition’s 35-day stay on Russia’s Mir space station.
The third member of the crew had serious wear on his space suit. Russian flight engineer Sergei Krikalev found himself stranded on Mir during the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The country that sent him to space no longer existed by the time he was ready to come home, so his return was delayed by bureaucratic stagnation. He ended up spending 311 days on Mir — twice as long as the then-Soviet government had intended.
Working from a ‘single brain’
Developing a training regimen that worked for astronauts from Russia and the United States would be key to success. After all, they would live and work together for 136 days. The crew needed to set up systems for future international crews to use, so their work would guide the next 30 years of experiments. Krikalev recalled that the crew — with language barriers and different training backgrounds — initially faced difficulty, according to a 20-year anniversary account by the news site space.com.
The process of problem-solving together, however, forged a cohesive team over time. Shepherd met with hardware developers and asked questions. When Krikalev arrived later, he repeated the same three to four questions. “We were just like, oh my God, they’re sharing a brain now, these two,” said Ginger Kerrick, who was the Russian training integration instructor for Expedition 1, according to the space.com report.
Shepherd initially thought the entire crew would speak English because the U.S. had agreed with other partners that English would be the standard language on the ISS. But he quickly realized the futility of that approach. “The key element of making a space station work was to understand why the Russians approached problems a certain way,” he said. “And the only method by which we were really going to get to that was if we could talk to all these people in Russian.”
In the end, the men spoke a mixture of Russian and English and relied on diagrams and schematic drawings of mechanical systems. Many of the diagrams created to simplify communication are still used on the space station today.
Different strengths
More than learning to communicate, the Expedition 1 crew had to learn to think alike. Going into training, the U.S. lagged Russia in terms of the theoretical knowledge of the systems. “They (Russians) had less of a reliance on diagrams and documentation because the people teaching the classes were experts and knew that information inside and out,” Kerrick said, according to space.com. “Whereas on the U.S. side, we were all starting up and so we were developing materials, and we didn’t have the expertise.”
During training, Shepherd learned about spending long durations in space from the Russians, who had been living and working aboard the Mir space station since 1986. The Russians had things to learn, too. “We learned that we could use more computer-generated lessons or mock-up simulators,” Krikalev said. “Before that, computers were not as available, and we had to have all these diagrams in our head.”
While workdays were filled with setting up systems and conducting scientific experiments, the crew ended most days with entertainment, quite often a movie. NASA accounts said that after watching “2010” — the sequel to “2001: A Space Odyssey” — Shepherd commented, “[There is] something strange about watching a movie about a space expedition when you’re actually on a space expedition.”
Still, shared experiences further bonded the crew. “Yuri and I were really the two military guys,” Shepherd told NASA’s “Houston, We Have a Podcast” in an episode released in February 2021. “One of my most interesting moments with Yuri in space was looking at the Earth, and he was saying, ‘OK, I was a MiG-21 pilot, and I was stationed here.’ And half an orbit later, I would say, ‘OK, I was a Navy SEAL, and we were here, here and here.’”
The end of an era approaches
The constant presence on the ISS will come to an end in 2030. The ISS has been orbiting 402 kilometers above Earth since its first modules launched in 1998. But what goes up often comes down, and NASA plans to crash the ISS into the ocean at the end of 2030 and replace it with a station that is owned, built and operated by a private company.
Phil McAlister, then director of the Commercial Space Division of NASA, told NPR’s “Morning Edition” in 2024 that NASA does not want to own in perpetuity everything in low Earth orbit. “We want to turn those things over to other organizations that could potentially do it more cost-effectively, and then focus our research and activities on deep space exploration,” McAlister told NPR.
He said it is more cost-effective for NASA to acquire a new station with new technology and then purchase services from commercial entities. “I kind of see this as like an automobile,” McAlister said. “When we bought that automobile in 1999, it was state of the art. And it has been great. And it serves us well and continues to be safe. But it’s getting older. It’s getting harder to find spare parts.”