Location
Howard Johnson Plaza-Hotel, Columbia/ Enterprise Rooms
Start Date
24-4-1996 2:00 PM
End Date
24-4-1996 5:00 PM
Description
Last summer the world witnessed an event that was over two years in the making, but twenty years overdue--the docking of the American space shuttle Atlantis to the Russian space station Mir. A poll conducted by Space News ranked it as the number one news story of the year. Other newspapers printed excavated time capsules of the Apollo-Soyuz mission. What caused these two nations to awake from their “Rip Van Winkle” state of sleep and more importantly, how will the current Shuttle-Mir program build foundations for future joint programs into the 21st century? The wake-up calls were a product of disarmament and economics. The Cold War was over and space exploration had become too expensive for any one nation to go it alone. Russia had an operational space station, but limited funds to go further. The United States had tentative funding, but no space station. A joint program based on solid technical advances became good scientific and foreign policy. Kennedy Space Center (KSC) has become the center of implementation for a major portion of the Shuttle-Mir program. All the hardware, modification, manifest changes and flight acceptance testing come together at KSC and are implemented prior to the launch of each successful mission.
Paper Session II-B - Shuttle- MIR a KSC Perspective
Howard Johnson Plaza-Hotel, Columbia/ Enterprise Rooms
Last summer the world witnessed an event that was over two years in the making, but twenty years overdue--the docking of the American space shuttle Atlantis to the Russian space station Mir. A poll conducted by Space News ranked it as the number one news story of the year. Other newspapers printed excavated time capsules of the Apollo-Soyuz mission. What caused these two nations to awake from their “Rip Van Winkle” state of sleep and more importantly, how will the current Shuttle-Mir program build foundations for future joint programs into the 21st century? The wake-up calls were a product of disarmament and economics. The Cold War was over and space exploration had become too expensive for any one nation to go it alone. Russia had an operational space station, but limited funds to go further. The United States had tentative funding, but no space station. A joint program based on solid technical advances became good scientific and foreign policy. Kennedy Space Center (KSC) has become the center of implementation for a major portion of the Shuttle-Mir program. All the hardware, modification, manifest changes and flight acceptance testing come together at KSC and are implemented prior to the launch of each successful mission.
Comments
Space Station/ MIR Report
Session Chairman: Bill Bates, Chief of Staff, ISSA, NASA, Johnson Space Center
Session Organizer: Vanessa Stromer