“Houston We Have a Podcast” is the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, the home of human spaceflight, stationed in Houston, Texas. We bring space right to you! On this podcast, you’ll learn from some of the brightest minds of America’s space agency as they discuss topics in engineering, science, technology and more. You’ll hear firsthand from astronauts what it’s like to launch atop a rocket, live in space and re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere. And you’ll listen in to the more human side of space as our guests tell stories of behind-the-scenes moments never heard before.
Jerry Ross, former NASA astronaut, talks about the first mission to assemble the International Space Station and his experience conducting the mission’s three spacewalks. The milestone shuttle mission STS-88 brought the Unity module to join Zarya, the first element of the space station. This episode was recorded on September 5th, 2018.
Check out the Space Station Assembly Page to see information on assembly of the space station starting with the Zarya and Unity Modules.
Transcript
Gary Jordan (Host): Houston, We Have a Podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, Episode 73, The International Space Station Begins: Part 2. I’m Gary Jordan, and I’ll be your host today. On this podcast, we bring in the experts — NASA scientists, engineers, and astronauts — all to let you know the coolest information about what’s going on right here at NASA. So today is another very special episode because we’re celebrating the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the International Space Station, the ISS. A critical mission in this story is STS-88, the shuttle mission that brought the Unity module to join the first element Zarya in space. It was the first ISS assembly mission for the space shuttle, the first time ISS elements joined together, and the first spacewalks for ISS assembly and maintenance. STS-88 launched on December 4th and returned December 15th, 1998. So to tell this story, we’re bringing in Jerry Ross. He’s a former astronaut and flew with Mr. Cabana, Mr. Bob Cabana, the commander and currently the director of the Kennedy Space Center, on STS-88.
Ross went out with astronaut Jim Newman back during the mission for the first 3 spacewalks of ISS assembly and maintenance. To give you some idea of how cool that is, we’re over 200 now for ISS assembly and maintenance spacewalks at the time of this recording. So with no further delay, let’s jump right ahead to our talk with Mr. Jerry Ross for the 20th anniversary of the International Space Station and the milestone mission, STS-88. Enjoy.
[ Music ]
Host:Jerry, thank you so much for being here today. I really appreciate you actually taking the time to come on here.
Jerry Ross:I’m glad to be with you.
Host:So today, we’re going to be talking about a milestone mission, STS-88. This was a lot of firsts. This was the first time that, the first ISS assembly mission, the first ISS or International Space Station spacewalk to actually do assembly and maintenance. Very important milestone in the beginning of the International Space Station program. So I kind of wanted to start by just sort of setting the scene. This is late 1998 that we’re talking about. What is, what’s going on at NASA? Where are we coming from? What’s going on right now? What’s going on in 1998?
Jerry Ross:Okay. Well, for me personally, I’d been on one of the Mir missions, STS-74, where we’d gone up and visited the Mir station, and we actually added the docking module to the Mir station that all the subsequent space shuttle visits there used to dock to Mir station. After that was done, I went into a fairly lengthy period of leading the spacewalking team to try to figure out how we were going to build the Space Station from a spacewalking standpoint. We built a large cadre of crew members, and engineers, and flight controllers. We went through and evaluated every piece of hardware to make sure that we could physically do what we were supposed to do or what the engineers needed us to do to do the assembly and maintenance activities on that. We found many things that were not adequately designed, and sent those back to the program, and said, we can’t do that, and we worked hand in hand with them to figure out ways to fix things and to get things ready for us to be able to confidently build the station and maintain it.
Host:So this was coming from experiences on Mir too, right, because that was also a collaborative endeavor? You even said you were talking about the docking module that fit the U.S. shuttle to the Mir, right?
Jerry Ross:Right. We didn’t do any spacewalking on Mir, except for 1 or 2 times.
Host:Okay.
Jerry Ross:And that really didn’t feed into this effort. But certainly, what we did learn on Mir about longer-term stays in space, and the logistics of it, and how to do the care and feeding for the crew members that were up there for long periods of time, that’s all certainly folded into our thought processes, and our planning, and our execution of station once we started staffing it.
Host:Okay, so then, how did you even start with, if learning to spacewalk and knowing what you were going to do, to actually assemble the International Space Station?
Jerry Ross:Okay. Well, I had done 5 spacewalks already by that — I’m sorry, 4 spacewalks by that time already.
Host:There you go.
Jerry Ross:And after the Challenger accident, I started to campaign to start doing some more spacewalks, plan spacewalks because we had this wall of EVA that people were starting to talk about where we’d done almost no spacewalks at all in the shuttle program to date, and now we were talking about the entire assembly and survival of the International Space Station was going to be based upon having to do literally hundreds of spacewalks.
Host:Wow.
Jerry Ross:So we started to do some relatively simplistic spacewalks on some of the shuttle missions to gain experience on doing that because we’d lost a lot of the experienced people after the Challenger accident — engineers, flight controllers, and crew members — so we started doing that to build up our cadres of experience. And also, we started to develop some hardware that we could evaluate on orbit to see if it was going to be the kinds of equipment we thought we were going to need to do the assembly activities. And then, probably one of the biggest things I’d been campaigning for ever since my first flight was a new water tank. We had the WETF here, the Weightless Environment Training Facility, which was very small. It was only 25 feet deep, and about 30 feet across, and about 70 feet long. Basically, you could not put the incomplete payload bay mock-up of the space shuttle in there and have the payload be doors open and everything else. And we were going to need something that was incredibly larger than that. So for about 10 years, I would go to Washington every month or every, about twice a year to give presentations to see if we can get funding for this new facility.
Host:Which we now call the Neutral Buoyancy Lab?
Jerry Ross:Which we now call the Neutral Buoyancy Lab at the Sonny Carter Training Facility. Yeah.
Host:Wow.
Jerry Ross:So we got that in place, and I ended up being the lead of the team that certified it for configuration and use, and then we started doing the evaluations of the station hardware, piece by piece in there. Or we had 3 different crews of 2 people each that would do the evaluations, and we would record all of their comments on each and every specific task that they evaluated. And once all 3 of the teams had evaluated each piece of hardware, then we would have a sit-down session where we would come to a consensus on what was acceptable as is, what was causing us problems, but we could fix it, or by working around it, or maybe some minor tweaks. And then, every once in a while, we would identify some task, some item that was not capable of being done in its current configuration. And we would take those all back to the station program office, and discuss them, and come up with a satisfied solution, satisfactory solution. And then, once that solution had been implemented in the training hardware, we will go back in and evaluate it again to make sure it was all acceptable.
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:And so we did that for every piece of hardware that was going to fly on the station, every task, every black box that we were going to change out, and everything else. And we tried to select our crew members who were doing these evaluations so that we had a wide distribution of capabilities, of experience, and also body sizes and types because we never knew who, many years downstream, was going to be doing that assembly flight or was going to be charged with doing that maintenance activity. So we wanted to have any of the tasks that could be a, performed by anybody that might eventually get assigned to do it.
Host:Wow. So that’s an incredibly important job, then, once something is designed, to actually test it out and figure out if it’s going to work. I mean, you’re finding out things are not working in this lab, and that’s the place where you can actually test it.
Jerry Ross:You want to find it out on the ground and get fixed before you go launching into space and find out that it’s not going to work.
Host:Wow.
Jerry Ross:Likewise, we did a lot of, we fought for and got a lot of fit checking of hardware before we launched it into space.
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:And many times, we would, again, find where the bolt was not properly manufactured, and our wrench wouldn’t fit onto it, or the cable was too short, or the connector was a mismatch. It wouldn’t fit onto the mating connector that was going to go onto. So there was a lot — you know, I’ve always likened it to you see a duck or a swan gliding across a pond or something, and it looks like they’re just gliding with no effort at all, but if you see their feet paddling underneath the water, they’re really working hard. And that’s basically what we were doing for those several years leading up to the actual start of the assembly of the station.
Host:Yeah. A lot of important work going on. Now, yeah, I want to go back to the making sure that the suits and all the equipment is going to be fit. Is that what you’re talking about? You’re talking about the suits themselves are going to fit different bodies and the tools that they’re using are going to be able to be used? Is that all part of it?
Jerry Ross:Well, the suits was another issue.
Host:Okay.
Jerry Ross:We were primarily more worried about the tools, the wrenches, the things we were going to be using. Did they fit the proper interfaces?
Host:Okay.
Jerry Ross:And we didn’t only fit check the tool that we planned to use but all of the other possible tools that we could use as a backup if we lost the primary tool, or broke, or something like that. And we also wanted to make sure that all of the equipment fit together properly. We would mock up the hardware and stretch up the flight cable between the 2 places to make sure that the routing we were going to use, it was of adequate length and it was not going to be too stiff when you’re in zero, in cold temperatures of outer space–
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:So that you could properly bend it and align it to connect it up. So there was a lot of things going into it, and that’s probably one of the things that I and the rest of us that did that work were most pleased in is that we basically had no hiccups in all of the on-orbit assembly and maintenance activities. We’d resolved all those issues pretty much, and it was only the real surprises that we could not have thought of that causes some problems on orbit.
Host:Yeah, that’s incredibly important. Was there — now, this was an International Space Station that you were working on. Was there components of what was learned on Mir? I know they did do a couple spacewalks, so did you learn from them from that aspect, from their spacewalking experience and even mishaps like the collision?
Jerry Ross:Yeah. Well, we studied what they did. We looked at it.
Host:Okay.
Jerry Ross:We understood their hardware. We had people that went over and did dives in their water tank and in their space suit. And we understood their tools, and we communicated back and forth. I had sit-down sessions with their space suit designers. I got to go over there one time, and to get into their space suits, and to also do a test flying of their, they called it their space bicycle. It was our version, our version would’ve been the MMU, the Manned Maneuvering Unit. So it was a, you know, a backpack or rocket-powered backpack kind of thing, and so I got to experience that as well. So, you know, there were some good exchanges I thought going on during those years, and I thought those were beneficial to everybody.
Host:Yeah, definitely. Now, leading up to the mission, your, this particular mission, STS-88, this is the assembly, the first assembly mission of the Space Station. You’ve been preparing for this, because you, like you said, you’re practicing all the spacewalking techniques, maneuvers, hardware to make sure that, in orbit, this mission, that it’s actually going to work. So tell me about the first day, you know, getting ready for launch.
Jerry Ross:Well, we did that a couple times.
Host:Yep. [laughter] Had to scrub the first time, right?
Jerry Ross:Yeah, we got to scrub the first time, unfortunately. There was a switch that didn’t act like it should have, and it caused a bobble in the hydraulic pressure on one of the systems, and the guys on the ground wanted more time to make sure that they understood what had happened and why it had happened.
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:So we scrubbed the first opportunity, and we came back the second day, and they were able to get off the ground. It was my sixth launch, so it was nothing real surprising, but–
Host:Right.
Jerry Ross:But it was always exciting event, thrilling event, somewhat scary in some ways because there’s a whole lot of things that all had to work right.
Host:Yes.
Jerry Ross:And you just really, you were confident that everybody had done their job right, but you didn’t know if everything was going to go as planned.
Host:[laughs] Now, how about actually rendezvousing with Zarya? This is the first element of the Space Station. It was up there, and your job was to connect it to the American module, the Unity node.
Jerry Ross:Right, right.
Host:So that coming into sight, was that kind of a important milestone for you? Or I guess you had seen other things in space. How was that for you?
Jerry Ross:Well, it was an exciting event, as we approached it and could finally see it visually.
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:I have to tell you, the whole crew met at Bob Cabana’s home here in the Clear Lake area the night that Zarya launched into space. And we watched that on live TV fairly late in the evening here, and we were excited because when we knew that it had got safely onto orbit that our mission was going to proceed about 2 weeks after that. So–
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:We were excited about that, but once we got onto orbit, of course, the first thing we did was to pick up the Node 1 with the 2 pressurized mating adapters on it, which we’d carried up in the payload bay. And we picked it up and put it onto the top of the docking port out in the, our payload bay.
Host:Right.
Jerry Ross:And then, we proceeded to proceed on to the rendezvous with Zarya.
Host:That’s right.
Jerry Ross:And as we got closer and closer then, it was an interesting task because we had to fly it down into the payload bay, but we couldn’t actually see it anymore because, with the Node 1 sticking up out of the payload bay on a docking module right there, right behind the windows, we couldn’t see Zarya once it got close enough into us. And so we had to use TV cameras to totally follow that. And of course, we had enough TV cameras properly positioned to help us with that task, but, again, it was kind of a, an eerie feeling to know there’s this other piece of structure out there that wasn’t very far away–
Host:Right.
Jerry Ross:And we couldn’t really see it, except through the TV cameras.
Host:Wow. Yeah, that, and then, also, there was the component of actually fitting them together. It wasn’t just a nice, little, you know, pull it in and touch it. You actually had to boost into it, right?
Jerry Ross:Right. Well, we did the same thing when we put the Node 1 onto the docking board–
Host:Oh, you did?
Jerry Ross:We did a firing of the thrusters, which made sure that the capture latches were seated properly.
Host:Okay.
Jerry Ross:And we could pull everything together and secure it. So as we got closer and closer to Zarya, then Nancy Currie had the robotic arm up, and there’s a camera on the end of the end effector there that was looking out, and we could, that gave us a relative distance that Zarya had come down into the payload bay or towards the payload bay.
Host:Okay.
Jerry Ross:So that was one way that he’d kind of get that dimension. And so once we got there, she then would finally move the arm over and grab onto the grapple fixture on Zarya, and we had it.
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:And then, she maneuvered it around, and we put it onto the top, aligned it properly with the PMA on the top of the Node 1, and then we, again, fired the thrusters on the shuttle towards Zarya–
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:And that caused it to slam into the mating adapter and on the capsule latches to close.
Host:Wow. Boom. And now, they’re together, right?
Jerry Ross:Yeah.
Host:But the job’s not over.
Jerry Ross:The job is not done yet. [laughter] We learned something pretty interesting here. In fact, it was something that I had learned on STS-74 when we put the docking port onto the docking adapter on the outside of Space Shuttle Atlantis when we were getting ready to dock to Mir. When we did that, as we had held the docking adapter on top of our docking port on 74 and slammed the thrusters to put things together, then, as we started to pull it down so that we could lock the hooks around the perimeter of the mating interface, the robotic arm was stiff enough that it was causing it not to properly align. So we finally had to figure out that we had to release the robotic arm so that it could come down and properly align. So the same thing on STS-88. As we started to pull the docking adapter or mechanism down so that we could secure around the perimeter with the hooks, it was misaligning itself.
And we tried that a couple times, and I said, I remember this. [laughter] This happened on STS-74.
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:We’re going to have to release it or at least loosen up the capture mechanism so that we can allow it to properly align itself, and come down, and seat properly. And of course, Nancy Currie wasn’t too excited about releasing it once [laughs] she had grabbed onto it.
Host:She’s like, but I have it.
Jerry Ross:Yeah, I’ve got it. I don’t want to release it. [laughter] But eventually, the ground came to the same resolution or conclusion, and after we did that, then everything came together fine, and we had our, the foundation of the International Space Station, the cornerstone of the International Space Station mechanically connected together.
Host:There you go. And at this time, you were preparing for your big role, which was actually going out in a space suit and actually connecting everything.
Jerry Ross:Yeah, we had a total of 3 spacewalks scheduled–
Host:Right.
Jerry Ross:For this flight to do all those external assembly activities.
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:We did the first 2, and then we went inside the station for a while before we completed the third spacewalk.
Host:There you go. So the first 2, right, so at least the very first one, you had 40 connectors, I believe it was, that you actually had to–
Jerry Ross:Yeah, I don’t remember the exact count. It was a lot of them. [laughter] I remember that. It was electrically hooking up the node to the pressurized mating adapters and making the connections between the Russian segment, the FGB–
Host:Right.
Jerry Ross:And the U.S. Node 1. So there was a lot of activity going on out there. And I will never forget there was 1 cable that I had wanted to fit check, which was the one that went from the Russian segment down to the U.S. segment. And the Russians wouldn’t allow me to do a fit check of that one. And it was the one that I didn’t know if I was going to be able to make it stretch far enough to connect [laughs] to that. But we got it connected, and–
Host:You got it?
Jerry Ross:Yeah. [laughter]
Host:Wow. Okay, so, you know, going back to your first statement of actually running through this in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory–
Jerry Ross:Right.
Host:Did everything kind of go according to plan based on what you practiced?
Jerry Ross:Yeah, pretty much.
Host:Okay.
Jerry Ross:We did, we had developed the choreographing, if you will, of how we were going to do things, and Jim Newman and I just went through it, basically, as it was called out for in a checklist. And Rick Sturckow was our IV guy that checked off everything and kept us informed on what the next steps were. And it basically went pretty much as planned.
Host:There you go.
Jerry Ross:Yeah.
Host:So I think after that first EVA is when you actually went back inside, and they actually turned on the systems. And lo and behold, everything turned out pretty well.
Jerry Ross:Things powered up, right?
Host:Yeah. So that second one, I think — I was watching some of the video of the spacewalk that you did — there was some antennas that didn’t deploy properly on I think it was FGB–
Jerry Ross:Yeah.
Host:And you had to kind of go in and shimmy them out. Looking at them deploy, they deploy–
Jerry Ross:They buzzed right out of there, didn’t they?
Host:Yeah, they deployed pretty quickly. How was that? I mean, that was–
Jerry Ross:Well, that was pretty cool. See, we had–
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:We were supposed to go up to the very top of Zarya on the third spacewalk–
Host:Right.
Jerry Ross:To install a hand rail and do some other things up there. And they were apprehensive to let us transfer ourselves right past where that antenna was hung up, and it hadn’t deployed properly.
Host:Oh, yeah?
Jerry Ross:So they wanted to see if we could free those so that we could have free access up to the top of Zarya. So these antennas were kind of like a ribbon antenna that was coiled very tightly around a spool. And it was kind of like, you know, a metal tape measure. It was kind of that kind of an idea. And for some reason, it hadn’t released properly when it got on orbit. So we had a fairly long-handled device that I can’t remember what it was for now, but it was for some contingency thing. And we got on to the end of the robotic arm, and on the second spacewalk, Jim Newman was on the end of the robotic arm, and he took this device, and he wrapped on the side of this antenna. And eventually, it sprung free, and a spool went whizzing past the tail of the orbiter, and the antenna blade came out, and it must’ve been 10 feet long, something like that. 8, 10 feet long.
Host:Wow.
Jerry Ross:So it was pretty impressive. [laughs] And I, if I remember correctly, Jim didn’t even get to see it come out because he had rapped on it a couple times, and he was looking around for something, and the thing went zooming past him. [laughter]
Host:Yeah, I remember you, in the video you narrated, you said, “And don’t blink here,” right. [laughter] Because you’re going to miss it. It did deploy pretty fast. But after that, that’s 2 spacewalks, right. Now, you’re going back–
Jerry Ross:Yeah, let me just go back.
Host:Oh, go ahead, go ahead.
Jerry Ross:The other, probably one of the major things we did on that spacewalk was to add some early communication antennas–
Host:Okay.
Jerry Ross:Onto the 2 side ports of the Node 1.
Host:Okay.
Jerry Ross:And those then allowed us to command the vehicle and talk to the vehicle from here in Houston.
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:At one time, it was all going to be relayed through the Russian ground station there in Moscow. So we, at one time, were not going to go into the Space Station at all. And then, they said, well, we got some things we want you to open up the hatch and throw this stuff in and then close the hatch. And then, they decided they were going to add these 2 communication antennas–
Host:Okay.
Jerry Ross:That were going to be mounted on the outside. And so then, we had to have some electronics to install on the inside to hook everything up and make it work.
Host:Okay.
Jerry Ross:So eventually, we plan to go inside of the Node 1.
Host:Find out a business case to actually go in.
Jerry Ross:Yeah. [laughs] But then, the Russians said, well, we don’t have any need for you to go in to the FGB, so we don’t think you’re going to do that.
Host:Okay.
Jerry Ross:And then, we do said, well, I think we ought to go do that, you know.
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:And then, finally, when Sergei Krikalev was assigned to the crew, the Russians said, okay, you know, we’re going to have one of our guys here. It’s okay if you guys go up into the, into that part.
Host:Right.
Jerry Ross:And it’s good we did because they found out that after the FGB had launched, they had a battery charged that had failed. And so we carried up a spare battery charger, and Sergei and Nancy spent a part of one of our days working inside the station, changing that out. And also, Sergei found that one of the air circulation ducts was blocked by some plastic that had been left in there inadvertently, I guess. And he knew what things should sound like, and it didn’t sound that way, so he did a little investigation, and found that plastic, and removed it, and caused the air circulation to be restored properly.
Host:Yeah. Sounds like a lot of things were coming up last minute coming up to the final flight, right. Things were changing and evolving–
Jerry Ross:Right.
Host:Including finding out these problems that you had to fix.
Jerry Ross:Right.
Host:So now, the mission plan is to actually, part of it is to go in and do a lot of this work.
Jerry Ross:Absolutely.
Host:You said that you were in there for 2 days, was it?
Jerry Ross:Well, I think so. It was 1, I think it was 2 days we were in there. It may have been 1, but I was remembering 2.
Host:Okay.
Jerry Ross:But we went in there with power drivers and removed a whole lot of bolts that had been installed for launch but needed to be removed for on-orbit operations. We installed those 2 electronic units for the antennas to function properly. We had to hook up all the cables to everything to do that. We went down into the Russian segment, and did some placement of some things there, and changed out that bad battery controller, and other things. So we stayed busy in there for the time we were there.
Host:Definitely. Now, going in for the first time, that was a big deal as well, right?
Jerry Ross:Very cool.
Host:Yes.
Jerry Ross:Very cool.
Host:How was that, opening the hatch for the first time?
Jerry Ross:Well, it was really neat. It’s like you walk in the front door of your new house for the first time, you know. It was very empty. I mean, there was nothing in there.
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:And now, if you look at pictures on orbit, it’s cram packed with stuff. You can’t hardly move through it.
Host:Oh, yeah. Cables, and bags, and laptops. Yeah.
Jerry Ross:Yeah. In fact, at one point, we took Nancy Currie, who’s very small, and we carefully placed her out in the middle of the Node 1 so she couldn’t touch anything [laughs] and left her there, and she was kind of like a cat, you know, kind of trying to land on its 4 feet. You know, she’s trying to move around and get somewhere, and she couldn’t. She was trapped out in the middle.
Host:Wow.
Jerry Ross:It was pretty cool.
Host:[laughs] Now, doing the runs in the MBL, I’m sure you’ve practiced actually — did you have Space Station mock-ups in the buoyancy lab as well?
Jerry Ross:Yes.
Host:So you kind of had an expectation of what it was going to be like?
Jerry Ross:Right.
Host:Did it kind of meet your expectations, or was it, did it seem–
Jerry Ross:No, everything was pretty much as expected. Thank goodness.
Host:Okay.
Jerry Ross:I mean, you don’t like surprises, and that’s why you go to the effort of building fairly high-fidelity mock-ups to put into the water tank, and they’re full scale so that you know what you’re dealing with so that you make sure that you can reach everything you need to reach and all that. So it’s a very important part of the preparation for a flight.
Host:Definitely. Was there, being there, being in the real thing, in orbit, was there anything that really stuck out and impressed you?
Jerry Ross:I think the thing that ultimately impressed me was, after all these years of effort, and thinking, and redesigning, and everything else, we were here and we were starting the process.
Host:Yep.
Jerry Ross:And I was just thrilled to be selected to be part of the team to lay the cornerstones of the International Space Station.
Host:Yeah, there you go. It was, it actually came together. He was the physical thing.
Jerry Ross:Right.
Host:Right? So you opened up the hatches. This was a cool moment that I remember — you know, entering for the first time, figuring out who was going to be the first person on the Space Station, right, because one of these firsts was first time people entering the thing. So what happened there?
Jerry Ross:Well, I think Bob Cabana probably, our commander, probably had a idea, but he never really let on to the rest of the crew. And what he did I thought was exactly what should’ve been done. He, as the commander of the crew, invited Sergei Krikalev, our international partner on that flight, to enter into the Node 1 and then enter the FGB together. And I thought that was a great way to demonstrate and to start the international relationships on the station.
Host:Right, because there are a lot of moments leading up to this, right? First, we have Apollo-Soyuz, where we’re actually collaborating for the first time in space. Then, we have the whole shuttle Mir thing. Now, International Space Station. We’re all working together towards it. But again, you know, the job’s not over, right. You’re in there for 2 days. You have a lot of work to do on the inside, but you still have 1 more spacewalk.
Jerry Ross:One more spacewalk to go, right.
Host:Yeah. So this was the one where you actually went on the, I guess the top, right. Based on where the payload bay was and where the Zarya was, you actually had to go all the way up to the top.
Jerry Ross:Yeah, it did look like a long ways up once we got there. [laughter] But before that was done, we had another antenna that we had to release, and I, it was my turn to be on the end of the robotic arm for this. And I’m sitting there rapping on this thing that, and it’s not coming out, so I’m rapping harder and harder. [laughs] And the ground I think was getting a little bit nervous as to how much energy I was putting into this thing. And finally, about the time they’re telling me to stop was when it came out, and I went, yay.
Host:Yeah. [laughter] It’s done.
Jerry Ross:Yeah.
Host:So you had that right, then you went on to the top. You installed some–
Jerry Ross:Yeah. Then, we crawled all the way to the top, and we installed this hand rail, which would bridge a gap that would allow it to connect up directly with hand rails on the next part that came up, the service module. And while we were up there, it was nighttime for a good share of that time. And so looking back now at the payload bay, all you can see was the little lights in the payload bay and stuff on the orbiter, and–
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:Going, wow, that’s quite a ways down there. [laughter] Never mind that we’re 200 miles in space, but–
Host:Right, yeah.
Jerry Ross:You know, looking back down at the orbiter, it looked like it was quite a ways down. But the other thing was, while we were up there, we saw the Russians had mounted a couple of exposure trays, experiments on the outside of the FGB. And they had just about shooken free. They were just a little bit from becoming free and floating off.
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:And so I found that, and I informed the ground, and I asked if I could, you know, re-secure them, and it took quite a while for them going back and forth with the Russian ground control station before they finally gave me the okay to do it. Of course, I’d already done it [laughter] by the time we got there, okay.
Host:Sure, yeah.
Jerry Ross:But it gave us, gave Jim and me probably about 30 to 40 minutes just kind of sitting up there at the top of the station and just hanging out, which was great because we were enjoying looking at the universe and–
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:Everything else. It was pretty cool.
Host:So how was that view? You were able to see stars, and the Earth below–
Jerry Ross:Oh, yeah.
Host:And everything?
Jerry Ross:Yeah. At night in particular, you can see lots of stars. I mean, you can see–
Host:Oh, wow.
Jerry Ross:Everything. And of course, you’re going around the world, so you can see stars that people in the Southern Hemisphere see that we never get to see up here.
Host:That’s right.
Jerry Ross:So you get to see a lot of stuff. I don’t think we did on this particular pass, but sometimes you can see an aurora in the Southern Hemisphere or the Northern Hemisphere, and–
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:It’s pretty awesome to view. No doubt about it.
Host:So that last spacewalk, I think there was another thing that you did. Was it a test of the SAFER? You were talking about the Manned Mobility Unit before, but you actually tested that out.
Jerry Ross:Yeah. I had been, early in my career, I had worked with Bruce McCandless on the final development of the Manned Maneuvering Unit.
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:And then, I had been the support crew member and the capsule communicator for all the flights that flew the Manned Maneuvering Unit.
Host:Okay.
Jerry Ross:So I was very comfortable and familiar with it. And as we got ready to fly assemblies of the station, I argued for the development of this new SAFER device–
Host:Okay.
Jerry Ross:Which I saw as a self-rescue device — a parachute, if you will–
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:That if a crew member became detached and was floating away from the station or the shuttle even, they could activate this system, and fly themselves back to the structure, and reattach themselves.
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:So we had a test of that on, a prototype version of that on an earlier flight, and it had demonstrated very capable performance. We had designed and built the final flight hardware, and our flight was the first one to carry it. And I argued that there was enough changes in it that we ought to test it out to make sure that it was going to work as advertised if and when we needed it.
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:So towards the end of our last, the third spacewalk, Jim Newman had my tether loosely held so I had some slack, and I set myself a drift out in the middle of the payload bay, and activated the SAFER unit, and then did some quick flying around just to evaluate that it worked.
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:And we found a couple of problems with it–
Host:Okay.
Jerry Ross:That I’m glad we, therefore, did test it.
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:And we were able to fix those minor problems and now have a very trusted self-rescue device that the crew members wear when they go outside on spacewalks.
Host:Very important work that you’re doing on this first few spacewalks, the first 3 of Space Station assembly and maintenance. I think we crossed 200 not too long again.
Jerry Ross:I know. Pretty amazing.
Host:So, yeah. There’s a lot that we’ve learned, and you kind of set those milestones. That’s incredible. So it’s not too long after this where you’re actually detaching from the Space Station. You let it go. You installed all the communications. Everything is up and running. Now, it’s time to come home, right?
Jerry Ross:Right. And that was kind of a bittersweet moment because–
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:You know, we’d successfully did everything that we planned to do. The station was up and functioning, but it was kind of like you’ve got this new baby, and you’re going to leave it and go home. [laughter] But it was an awesome sight to see. We took a lot of pictures as we undocked and separated, and I think the whole crew was very pleased with how things are going.
Host:Yeah, for sure. I think you did a couple more things before actually coming home. Deploying some satellites, I think.
Jerry Ross:Yeah, we had a couple small satellites.
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:Almost like getaway, special kind of things, but they were contained in the cans there along the forward starboard side of the shuttle. And I think Rick Sturckow was the guy that deployed those, if I remember correctly.
Host:There you go. Yeah, so then, coming home, you, mission complete, right. You actually installed Unity onto Zarya, and everything was, went according to plan, so it was a very successful mission. Did you feel accomplished? Did you–
Jerry Ross:Yeah, I think the whole crew was very pleased with how things went.
Host:Okay.
Jerry Ross:And I think we also had kind of a collective exhaling [laughter] — because, you know, we knew that this entire Space Station program–
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:Really was on our backs to get it off and going properly and–
Host:Right.
Jerry Ross:Successfully. So I think we felt collectively a lot of satisfaction but also some relief that everything had gone so well.
Host:Yeah. Now, you had I think 1 more mission, right, where–
Jerry Ross:Right.
Host:Went to space, but you stuck around NASA for quite some time.
Jerry Ross:Correct.
Host:Yeah. So what was, what were you doing during that, those, you know, those years?
Jerry Ross:Okay, so my last flight was another Space Station assembly flight. It was STS-110. And we went up and added the S0 truss element to the station, the center section of the truss. And we did a total of 4 spacewalks on that mission. Two different teams went outside, and I went outside on the second and fourth spacewalks with Lee Morin.
Host:Okay.
Jerry Ross:And Lee and I were the first pair of grandparents to do spacewalks together.
Host:[laughs] All right.
Jerry Ross:And so the rest of the crew called us the silver team.
Host:[laughs] Wonderful.
Jerry Ross:Yeah. So then, after that, they put me into a management position as the head of the Vehicle Integration Test Team, or VITT. And as such, I led a team of engineers, some who worked here at the Johnson Space Center and another set that worked down at the Kennedy Space Center, and we provided a lot of direct engineering support to crews getting ready to fly into space. And sometimes, when crews couldn’t go to the cape to do fit checks on hardware or to some other manufacturing facility around the country or, in fact, around the world, some of our people would go to those places and do those fit checks I talked about earlier with the flight hardware to make sure that everything was proper, that everything was dimensioned properly, and that everything was going to fit as planned. And we would also verify the labeling was as the checklist said the labeling was going to be and a lot of other things. We looked for sharp edges that could cause problems to crew members and maybe damage their space suits and things like that. So there was a lot of things like that we did. We also then, I operated, I was the head of the crew quarantine facility down at the cape.
Host:Okay.
Jerry Ross:Which was the astronaut hotel during the time they’re in quarantine before launches.
Host:Right.
Jerry Ross:So I was down there for every practice countdown that we had or TCDT, terminal countdown test. Was there with them during the period of time they’re in quarantine prior to the launch. I would ride in the Astrovan with them out to the launch control center, where I get off before they proceeded on out to the launch pad. I was up on the roof of the launch control center with their families during the launches. And then, I met them at the hatch when they got off the vehicle after landing and helped to extract them and their hardware that needed to come off with them, and brought them back to the crew quarters, and helped them get through their post-landing activities, which included the physical exam and things like that. Get them to their post-flight press conferences at the cape and then put them on airplanes and send them back here to Houston.
Host:All right.
Jerry Ross:Yeah.
Host:Yeah, a lot of the, that human factors is the important thing that you were doing there — making sure that the crew was going to be safe and that everything worked for the human element. But, yeah, you were right by their side, and you had a lot of spaceflight experience. I’m sure you were sharing that with them.
Jerry Ross:No, I, it was keeping me as close to the flying game as I could stay, which was a delight to me. And also, I think having somebody with my background and experience I think was a benefit to the crews coming down there because I could understand what they were going through, and what they felt, and what things to try to protect them from that, you know, from interferences from the outside, or things like that. So I think it was all beneficial to the crews.
Host:So you were very close to the crew, but you stayed at NASA to actually see the Space Station program through to the completion of assembly, right?
Jerry Ross:Yeah, I was here from every space shuttle flight from before the first ones through the last one.
Host:There you go.
Jerry Ross:And I was here through the inception of several different versions of space stations before we finally got to build the International Space Station. And I left after assembly complete on it, so got to see a lot of fascinating things.
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:I didn’t get to walk on the Moon, but I still got a lot of other things I got to do.
Host:You got, yeah, you got, have insane milestones here, but, you know, just seeing, being a part of the first assembly mission — actually, like you said, laying the, kind of the groundwork for what was to be the full, completed International Space Station, now, and you got to see it through. How was that whole process just realizing — I saw [laughs] after your post-flight, I think they had some computer graphic imaging of what they thought the Space Station was going to look like, and it showed the completed product. After your mission, which was the first assembly mission, just kind of floating through space, and then kind of saying how that virtual image compares to the real thing, you know. You actually saw it through.
Jerry Ross:Yeah. Yeah, that was I guess one of several frustrations I had, but one of the frustrations I had was I would’ve liked to have done at least one more mission close to the end of the assembly process.
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:You know, having been there on the first one, having been there on the first one of the second phase, which was the start of the truss assembly–
Host:Right.
Jerry Ross:I would have liked to have been there, up there 1 more time close to the final configuration, so like gone out and crawled around on all of that structure [laughter] and had a good time out there. It’s pretty amazing.
Host:So, you know, now seeing that it is completed and being, you know, we’re talking about utilization now is the term we’re using because ultimately, what it was built for was as a research laboratory.
Jerry Ross:Right.
Host:We’re doing a lot of research now. Seeing what we’re doing, is it everything that we’ve, that we built it for based on what, in the initial plan?
Jerry Ross:You know, I think so. I am not as closely aware of what’s going on now as I used to be when I was here, certainly. But yes, I think that we’re doing a lot of very important research up there.
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:I think one of the things that a lot of people may not understand is that a lot of the work we’re doing up there is doing things that will enable us to go eventually to the Moon and then on to Mars.
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:You know, we’re looking at what happens to the human body over longer and longer stays on orbit, and we’re looking at ways to counteract things that are of bad consequence to doing that. We’re looking at developing systems that are more efficient, that are, that last longer so that you don’t have to have a lot of maintenance and/or spare parts for them–
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:That are basically 100% closed circuit so that you don’t have to bring a whole lot of water, and oxygen, and things like that with you when you go further and further into space. We’re looking at all those kinds of things, and I think it’s the right step, and I think we’re back now looking at going back to the Moon, establishing a permanent or semi-permanent presence there, understand how to use the resources on the surface of the Moon to allow us to stay there for longer periods of time to build structures, to harvest the ice water, and to use it for, you know, our drinking water, for maybe growing crops, for maybe manufacturing rocket fuels, things like that. Those are all the things that I think are key and critical to us eventually being able to go on to Mars.
Host:Yes.
Jerry Ross:And certainly, having highly reliable systems that are going to be operating for years at a time without any problems is what we need.
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:You know, under current technology, it’s about 9 months to Mars, another 9 months back after you’ve spent a year or so in the vicinity of Mars, or on one of its moons, or on its surface. And so you need highly reliable systems. You need totally closed-cycle systems so that you don’t have to carry a whole lot of water, oxygen, food, things like that with you.
Host:Yeah. That’s a lot of considerations. Now, you’re an experienced space flyer yourself. You did a lot of spacewalks, but you also did new things. You practiced them in the pool and then executed them, and they went according to plan in space. Based on your experiences, thinking about these missions to the Moon and Mars for the future explorers, what pieces of advice do you have for them?
Jerry Ross:Do what works. [laughs] And we know what works.
Host:Okay.
Jerry Ross:Unfortunately, we have a, basically, a whole new — it’s not unfortunately — but we, the fact is we do have basically a whole new generation of people here — engineers, flight controllers, even crew members.
Host:Right.
Jerry Ross:And to some extent, even the management structure is basically turned over. So I hope that they don’t try to reinvent wheels. I hope that they will look at what has worked in the past and apply those lessons learned so that things will go hopefully smoothly and safely.
Host:Yeah. A lot of knowledge here, so we should definitely use it for things in the future to get that reliability that you’re talking about.
Jerry Ross:Yeah, not saying that everything we did was totally 100% right or totally 100% transfer to what they’re going to do–
Host:Yeah.
Jerry Ross:But don’t lose that expertise and that knowledge.
Host:Absolutely.
Jerry Ross:Yeah.
Host:Well, Jerry, this has been a wonderful conversation. Really just an honor to talk to you today and talk about this, the beginning of the International Space Station now. We’re 20 years in the future and just to see everything that it’s done and everything we’re going to do because of it is just a fascinating time, so I appreciate you coming on.
Jerry Ross:Been my pleasure. Thanks.
[ Music ]
Host:Hey, thanks for sticking around. So today, we talked with Mr. Jerry Ross. We went back in time, then visited STS-88, and that’ll complete our 2-part series on the beginnings of the International Space Station, starting first with Zarya and Doug Drewry. You can go back and listen to Episode 72 for that conversation. Otherwise, you can check out some of our other NASA podcasts. If you check out Rocket Ranch, they also talk to Bob Cabana, who was referenced many times during this podcasts, and they have an episode for the 20th anniversary of the International Space Station. You can also check out some of the other NASA podcasts we have. Most recently, we have On a Mission from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. We have the Invisible Network that talks about space communication. Also have NASA in Silicon Valley and Gravity Assist. You can tune into the live coverage of some of the launches and landings of astronauts and cosmonauts that are continuing to live and work aboard the International Space Station, some coming up here very soon. So you can check out NASA.gov/NTV for the latest schedule on that. Otherwise, you could follow us on social media — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Check out the NASA account. Check out the International Space Station pages. And use the hashtag #AskNASA on your favorite platform. Send in an idea for the show. Make sure to mention it’s for Houston, We Have a Podcast. We’ll find it and bring it in as an episode. This episode was recorded on September 5th, 2018 thanks to Alex Perryman, Pat Ryan, Norah Moran, Kelly Humphries, and Brandi Dean. Thanks for joining us for this 2-part series on the beginning of the International Space Station. We’ll see you next week.