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More than 15 years after its first element was launched, the International Space Station
is now a round-the-clock laboratory that supports a crew of six working on cutting edge science.
It’s currently commanded by a man who first laid eyes on this station before the first
permanent crew arrived. Koichi Wakata: It’s wonderful to see that
the station has become such a wonderful scientific lab, and I’m so glad now to see that the
station is in the stage of full utilization, conducting variety of experiments in science
and technology, educational programs, observation of, in astronomy and also the Earth observation.
Steve Swanson: We don’t really know what we’re going to learn, but we know that we
have the potential to learn many, many different things, and it’s almost with basic science.
VO: Some of that research is conducted from the exterior of the station. For example,
from a perch on the station’s truss, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer gathers cosmic
particles for investigators who are looking into the very origins of our universe; other
instruments look down to study the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans and land masses. All
the while, the human crew members work in the station’s laboratories to help execute
experiments in a range of disciplines, while serving as test subjects for research on how
the human body is impacted by weightlessness, so scientists can figure out ways to help
them adapt during deep space missions of the future.
Rick Mastracchio: If we want to go on to Mars or asteroids or back to the moon or even further
out, we need to know what the body can handle and what it can’t, what, where it’s weakest
and how to protect the crew members from the radiation, from the weightlessness, all the
effects that, that space travel have on the human body.
Alexander Skvortsov: We have experiments that allow to monitor the condition of blood, of
different, the composition of different microelements in human blood; determine the degree of bone
mass loss
Mikhail Tyurin: The muscles, the tendons are affected, they are losing their elasticity,
something happens with your skin, with your cardiovascular system, and it adapts to zero
gravity as well and there are some serious changes, too.
VO: While tracking the changes undergone by the body, crew members are also testing a
variety of ways to counteract the negative effects, and they’re having some good results.
Mastracchio: ARED, the Advanced Resistive Exercise Device, basically a weight lifting
machine that we have on board the International Space Station now and it’s been up there
for, oh, a couple of years or so. People are coming back from space stronger than when
they left, in many cases, and we’re seeing great improvements in strength and bones,
bone density and things like that.
VO: But over time they keep finding new things to work on. For example, there is now research
directed specifically at changes to the eyes, and to the inner structure of a crew member’s
bones.
Swanson: We realize now that as we lose calcium once we get into space, um, that some of that
structure on the inner side is changing in ways that we didn’t realize, and we might
be losing strength in our bones even though we keep the same bone density.
Wakata: We will be measuring our physiological data related to the changes in the eye and
the brain due to the change in the intracranial pressure in the microgravity.
Maybe we can come up with countermeasures to cope with the situation.
VO: From time to time during their stay on board, each crew member will also work with
experiments in other scientific disciplines, from research into basic physics to learning
about how plants grow in space to the development of new technologies. On top of that, crew
members have day-to-day responsibility for keeping the station maintained and running
in good shape, and for handling as many as five visiting vehicles.
Oleg Artemyev: That means that we will be seeing cargo vehicles, unloading them, loading
them with trash, seeing them off.
VO: That should include the final European Space Agency Automated Transfer Vehicle, due
to arrive during Expedition 40. That increment begins in mid-May, when Wakata, Tyurin and
Mastracchio come home, and Swanson becomes commander; Expedition 40 welcomes three more
crew members at the end of that month: veteran station crew member Max Suraev, and first-time
flyers Reid Wiseman of NASA and German astronaut Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency.
They’ll continue the mission together, including making as many as four spacewalks from the
U.S. and Russian segments of the station, until Swanson and his Soyuz crewmates return
to Earth in September, wrapping up their contribution to an ongoing mission of exploration on this
vehicle, which has already lasted more than 15 years…
Swanson: So everybody’s always taken this risk just to go explore, see what else is
out there, maybe, maybe it’s for science, maybe it’s just to, you know, get another
land so get more resources, whatever it was during history, they always went off and did
stuff. And I think it’s still the same idea for us.