The International Space Station Begins: Part 1

**Gary Jordan** (0:00)
Houston, We Have a Podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA-Johnson Space Center, Episode 72, The International Space Station Begins, Part 1 I'm Gary Jordan, and I'll be your host today. On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, and astronauts, all to let you know the coolest information about what's going on here at NASA. So 20 years ago, on November 20, 1998, the first element of the International Space Station, called Zarya, was launched to space. It was the first step towards two decades of international cooperation, scientific research, and discovery. We're sort of used to talking about the International Space Station now. Crews come and go on long-duration journeys, and during each journey, the astronauts are conducting hundreds of experiments, doing spacewalks, and making it all look relatively routine. But of course, to get to this point, you had to start somewhere. And that was with Zarya, the first element of the Space Station, designed, constructed, and flown as a joint effort between Russia and NASA. It was a critical step and a critical module to provide power, propulsion, guidance, and all the essentials that would enable the first modules to be attached and to function properly. So with me to tell this story of the first element is Doug Drewry. He's the former FGB program manager and launch package manager for the mission. You hear us say FGB a lot. It stands for functional cargo block, but a G instead of a C since it's translated from Russian. Doug had a variety of jobs during his 22 years at NASA, including leading the joint US and Russian teams for the successful development and launch of Zarya. He's now the president and owner of his own aviation company. So with no further delay, let's jump right ahead to our talk with Doug Drewry to tell the story of our first steps in this, the 20th anniversary of the International Space Station.

**Doug Drewry** (1:42)
Enjoy.

**Gary Jordan** (2:08)
Doug, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today to celebrate 20 years of the International Space Station.

**Doug Drewry** (2:14)
Thanks for having me.

**Gary Jordan** (2:15)
All right. We're going to take it all the way back, and even beyond that, I think, because 20 years ago was the actual launch of Zarya, but it started even before that, and it started even before it was Zarya. So sort of set the scene.
Before this even came into place, what was happening at NASA?

**Doug Drewry** (2:34)
Where were we? Well, we started the space station back, way back, with Space Station Alpha. That evolved into Space Station Freedom. We went through several redesigns of Space Station Freedom. There was a major redesign a few years before we started talking to the Russians. It was called the Pre-Integrated Trust Redesign, where I ended up leading the MB3 and MBA, which was the S1 and P1 segments that are on orbit today. It's the Pre-Integrated Trust. And then we went up to our critical design review on that when there was another station redesign. We were, at the time, we were divided into work packages. JSC was work package two. I don't remember who had all the other work packages, but we had power being done out of one place and all these various things. So anyway, we were we were told to redesign and with a new inclination, we were supposed to go to 51.6 degrees of inclination, which we knew is where the Russians were flying. But of course, every time we queried that it was denied that anything to do with it, it was just supposed to be another redesign of the station, which we'd been through so many times before for budget cuts and this and that.
JSC did an option C, which was a single-launched orbit, an SLC option, which was basically modifying a shuttle external tank and fitting it out with various levels. Marshall took basically the freedom design, much like the current space station, and instead of back in the work package two days where we were launching outboard in, we were launching solar arrays first, then propulsion modules so we would have command and control on orbit. And we kind of built up to the point where we built the truss first and then added the pressurized modules and brought in crew. Marshall took the approach of bringing up the modules first, and then building outward on the truss to power them.

**Gary Jordan** (4:38)
So several different, I mean, this is a very dynamic time with the inner, this idea of a space station is there. But what, you know, how do we make this a possibility? And everyone's redesigning it, trying to come up with the right strategy. You're going through design reviews, but don't even know what what the space station is going to look like at this point. But you understand that maybe there's some collaboration coming down the road.