Original subtitles

NARRATOR: In the mid-sixties a small group of NASA engineers

start work on a radical idea.

To establish a permanent human presence

in the lethal environment of space.

JIM: We were doing something that man had never done before.

TOM: A facility that has to operate 24/7.

NARRATOR: A dream that will become the most expensive structure

ever built, costing 100 billion dollars.

ASTRONAUTS: That’s a view you don’t see every day!

NARRATOR: The International Space Station.

But to achieve this goal,

America must change the course of history.

RUSSIAN SPACE AGENCY: Houston, Flight (inaudible).

NARRATOR: And work with a former enemy.

TOM: The Russians were there with their space station

and we were not.

NARRATOR: Engineers must overcome seemingly impossible odds.

ASTRONAUTS: Let go! Let go!

GEORGE: It was very intense. Adrenaline was running very high.

RICK: We had a spacecraft up there

and we weren’t gonna give up on it.

PAUL: It was a perfect example of ingenuity in the moment.

NARRATOR: This is the story of the unsung heroes

who built the International Space Station.

[♪ theme music ♪]

♪ ♪

NARRATOR: August 2016.

250 miles above the Earth NASA astronauts

Jeff Williams and Kate Rubins

are undertaking a critical spacewalk.

ASTRONAUTS: Okay, I’m going to egress now

and then mate these cables in the egress position.

MISSION CONTROL: That sounds great Jeff, thanks.

NARRATOR: They must fit a docking adapter

that will allow both manned and unmanned spacecraft

from different countries

to visit the International Space Station.

ASTRONAUT: Cover’s loose.

ASTRONAUT 2: Okay, I will meet you at the back.

NARRATOR: It will be the latest addition to an outpost in space

that has been permanently occupied for sixteen years.

A 460-ton engineering marvel the size of a football field.

Traveling at 17,500 miles per hour, it orbits the Earth

every 90 minutes.

CATHLEEN: Anyone here on Earth can look up at an appointed moment

and see the International Space Station orbiting overhead,

and that is a great testimony to the engineering prowess

that went into it.

NARRATOR: 217 astronauts from fifteen countries have lived on board,

many of them gazing back at the Earth

from the extraordinary glass cupola.

♪ ♪

ROD: I’m awed by the fact that we’ve had crews in orbit

for all these years.

♪ ♪

NARRATOR: The term "space station" dates back to the 1920’s.

But it’s Second World War rocket pioneer Wernher Von Braun

who is among those imagining an orbiting space station.

Von Braun heads up a group of German rocket engineers

brought to the U.S. after World War II

to work on America’s early space program.

GEORGE: Dr. Von Braun had the vision and the dream

even at the very earliest days of human space flight.

NARRATOR: In 1952 he declares:

GERMAN VOICE: Development of the space station is as inevitable

as the rising sun.

NARRATOR: Von Braun envisages a huge 250-foot-wide wheel,

rotating slowly as it orbits the earth.

♪ ♪

It’s a vision that would be borrowed by movie maker

Stanley Kubrick for his sci-fi .

♪ ♪

By the mid-sixties NASA is consumed with

creating the rocket that will take men to the moon.

Building a space station isn’t a priority.

But at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama,

engineers, including George Hardy and Jim Splawn,

are looking beyond the space race and making new plans.

GEORGE: Apollo, we learned, to go to

a destination in space and return.

Now we wanted to learn about living in space

and living for extended periods of time.

NARRATOR: But the Apollo missions have been hugely expensive,

and from 1966 NASA’s budget is cut by 44%.

Engineers are forced to use their ingenuity

to design a space station on the cheap.

RICK: We just kept working on it until

something came up that we could say, yeah,

we think we’re gonna go do this and it’d probably work.

♪ ♪

NARRATOR: Their groundbreaking idea is to transform

the top section of a Saturn V rocket into a space station.

Engineers take their proposal -- named Skylab -- to NASA,

who give it the green light.

But now they face uncharted territory.

SPIKE: Skylab gave you an opportunity to have

a shirtsleeve environment to run experiments

over a long period of time, see how well men can survive

in space.

They weren’t too sure what the long-term effects would be

until you experimented and found out.

NARRATOR: First they must bolt together their space station

using the third stage of the Saturn V rocket.

A telescope is attached to the old hydrogen storage tank,

which is stripped out so humans can live inside.

To make living in space more bearable,

it will have a few home comforts like a kitchen and a shower,

along with a laboratory and life support systems.

Two massive solar panel arrays will provide power.

JIM: The mood around the engineering staff was pure excitement.

NARRATOR: This full-size backup at

the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum

is testament to the engineers’ incredible ingenuity.

♪ ♪

But they now face the challenge of keeping a spacecraft

in orbit for up to a decade.

TOM: Here you have a facility that has to operate 24/7.

The maintainability and operability was

the real challenge. We’d never done that.

NARRATOR: To maintain Skylab, astronauts will be required

to undertake longer spacewalks than ever before.

JIM: This had never been pushed to the extreme of

being able to stay out over just a very short period of time,

like an hour or two.

♪ ♪

NARRATOR: To test those extremes, engineers must

first replicate zero gravity conditions on Earth.

JIM: We were trying to figure out,

how in the world can we simulate that?

NARRATOR: Jim and the team ponder the problem over a working lunch.

JIM: In the mid-60s most everybody brought their lunches.

We just called it the brown bag.

NARRATOR: A chance remark leads to a light bulb moment.

JIM: One of the guys commented that it had been a nice weekend,

they’d been to the swimming pool.

He said, have you guys ever watched

your wife swim underwater?

And we said, oh yeah, yeah, hey you bet, you bet.

He said, that’s not what I’m talking about.

What did her hair do?

Hair? Well I guess it just sort of floats.

He said, is that an idea?

And we took that comment, and that’s the way we got started,

underwater, simulating weightlessness.

♪ ♪

NARRATOR: The engineers waste no time.

A small pit at Alabama’s Marshall Space Flight Center

is filled with water to put their theory to the test.

But right away they hit a snag.

JIM: One of the first things that we had to figure out is

how can we compensate the flotation of a man

in a pressure suit once he goes underwater.

We decided that we can make a harness of lead weights

to put on him.

The weight counterbalances

the volume of air around the body inside the pressure suit.

NARRATOR: It works. Engineers make a man in a pressure suit

neutrally buoyant underwater -- neither rising nor sinking.

JIM: We decided that we should invite top management

to watch a test.

Go to the very top guy; and that was Dr. Wernher Von Braun.

When he saw what we were doing he’d say,

ja, ja, it’s good, it’s good, keep going, keep going!

NARRATOR: Von Braun gives the go-ahead

to upscale the experiment into a million-dollar project.

75 feet in diameter, 40 feet deep

and holding 1.3 million gallons, it’s officially called

the Neutral Buoyancy Simulator.

But it’s nicknamed the Big Tank.

JIM: Why such a big tank?

We had fabricated a full-scale mock-up of Skylab.

We could get all the ingredients there that we needed to have

for the training of the flight crew.

NARRATOR: Marshall’s Neutral Buoyancy Simulator

is a vital part of training astronauts to do

unscheduled repairs on Skylab in zero gravity.

But nobody could have imagined

just how critical it would become.

♪ ♪

May 14th, 1973.

The countdown approaches for America’s first space station --

Skylab, packed into the top section of a Saturn V rocket.

It’s the first step to the ultimate goal

of a permanent human presence in the most hostile environment

known to man.

MISSION CONTROL: Ignition sequence has started. 5, 4, 3...

[Engines ignite]

All engines running. We have liftoff.

♪ ♪

NARRATOR: But just 63 seconds after launch, Skylab is in trouble.

GEORGE: We started seeing telemetry

that there’d been a failure.

PAUL: As the rocket cleared the tower

and went up into the clouds, suddenly,

the aerodynamic forces grabbed a piece of this

micro-meteoroid shield that protected actual lab itself.

SPIKE: We had a big problem.

NARRATOR: The micro-meteoroid shield is mission-critical,

as it wraps around Skylab’s heart,

its laboratory and crew quarters.

Made from aluminum, it’s primarily designed

to protect astronauts from the impact of cosmic debris.

SPIKE: There was enough air trapped under it that expanded.

The vibration of the dynamic pressure

grabbed ahold of the top edge and ripped it off.

It was like peeling an orange.

GEORGE: It was bleak. I felt the mission was lost.

NARRATOR: The shield also performs a second critical function

-- doubling up as a sunshade.

Exposed to the sun in space, blistering temperatures will

soon make Skylab uninhabitable, destroying the mission.

GEORGE: As soon as we got on orbit

the temperatures started going up.

Temperatures got to 125, maybe 130 degrees.

TOM: All the environmental control systems,

the life support system, the food, the electronics,

communication systems, breathing systems.

GLYNN: Sooner rather than later they needed to get some way

to control the thermal conditions on the vehicle

or it would be lost in a number of days for human habitation.

NARRATOR: The engineers are now in a race against time.

Meanwhile, the crew, who were scheduled to launch

the following day, are grounded.

Tom Moser is part of the team

scrambling to save the roasting space station.

TOM: We devised a parasol that could be unfurled,

just like an umbrella.

NARRATOR: The parasol will shield Skylab from the sun’s extreme heat.

But engineers must create it from scratch.

GEORGE: Designing the parasol to operate in zero gravity

was a tricky operation.

We could calculate some of the effects that it would have,

but we haven’t got the time that you would normally have

when you’re designing space hardware.

NARRATOR: The team decides to use the same material that

protects astronauts from the heat of the sun.

But it’s useless unless they figure out how to make

a supporting structure.

JIM: It was like, what in the world do we have in our garages

or what can we go to a store and buy

that might help us do this?

NARRATOR: Then, inspiration strikes.

One of the engineers thinks fishing rods might work.

The plan is to fasten four of them together

to create the engineering prototype.

GEORGE: We needed a quick answer,

and I did think it was rather ingenious.

NARRATOR: Fortunately there’s a tiny airlock right next to

where the micro-meteoroid shield would have been.

The idea is for an astronaut to manually push the parasol

outside through this airlock.

Four spring-loaded arms will then be extended to deploy

the 24 foot by 22 foot makeshift fabric sun shield.

An inspired solution, if it works...

TOM: There was a huge time pressure to get that system

designed and built and put up there.

NARRATOR: The engineers manage to finish the parasol

in just ten days.

GEORGE: It was very intense. Adrenaline was running very high.

Even though there was risk, if there was a chance

that this would work, it needed to be tried.

♪ ♪

NARRATOR: May 25th, 1973.

The Skylab crew prepares for their delayed mission,

which is now a daunting rescue operation.

No one, least of all astronauts Pete Conrad, Joe Kerwin

and Paul Weitz, has any idea just how bad the damage

to Skylab is.

Or if they can save it.

GEORGE: Your adrenaline is up, your expectations are high.

You really couldn’t assess all the damage until you got there.

There was an urgency.

[Engines ignite]

SPIKE: A certain degree of apprehension:

What’s going to happen next?

ASTRONAUTS: Tally-ho the Skylab.

We got her in daylight at 1.5 miles, 29 feet per second.

MISSION CONTROL: Roger, Pete, copy.

NARRATOR: Closing in on the overheating space station,

Pete Conrad reports the damage to the two main solar panels

back to mission control.

ASTRONAUT: A brief description it is suspected solar wing 2

is gone, completely off the bird.

MISSION CONTROL: Roger, copy.

PAUL: The solar array, one of them is completely ripped off

trailing its own wires.

The other one is held down, kind of pinioned

by one of the straps of what’s left

of the micro-meteoroid shield.

NARRATOR: These images reveal the sun-blistered surface, exposed

where the micro-meteoroid shield peeled off.

As the astronauts dock, they’re faced

with an unprecedented challenge.

They must enter a spacecraft cooking at 130 degrees

Fahrenheit to deploy an untried device in zero gravity.

Failure will mean the loss of America’s first space station.

It’s the moment of truth for the fishing-rod-inspired parasol.

ASTRONAUT: So we are progressing slow but sure,

and everything so far is working.

NARRATOR: Engineering and flight teams in mission control

hold their breath.

♪ ♪

The makeshift parasol deploys without a problem.

ASTRONAUTS: We can see the ends of all the rods.

It’s completely free of anything.

There’s nothing hanging it up.

GEORGE: As the crew got the parasol out,

I mean, it was jubilation.

NARRATOR: But the celebrations are short-lived.

The station’s survival also depends on deploying

the one remaining solar panel.

PAUL: The solar panels for the Skylab is the way

that they have enough power to do any of the experiments,

to keep everything working, to keep it cool.

How they generate power for all of the equipment.

NARRATOR: Pete Conrad and Joe Kerwin now face

an extraordinarily demanding repair job.

A critical spacewalk to free the stuck solar panel.

PAUL: The only way to do that was to have two of the crew

go out and do a spacewalk; reach down to the base

of where that strap is holding onto the solar array,

cut it and then pull the solar array out.

♪ ♪

NARRATOR: It’s at this moment that Jim Splawn’s big tank at Marshall

comes into its own.

JIM: All the time that this was going on,

we had air to ground communications.

We were ready to help them in any way we could.

NARRATOR: In the water, a backup crew mirror

the astronauts’ every move.

Bob Crippen was part of the Skylab support team.

BOB: They had a device that was kind of a like a long pole

with a cutter on the end of it

like somebody might use to trim trees.

NARRATOR: But can a design based on a $65 tree pruner

really save a $2.5 billion space station?

♪ ♪

America’s dream of a long-term human presence in space

is on a knife edge.

If Pete Conrad and Joe Kerwin can’t free

Skylab’s one remaining large solar panel,

it won’t have enough power to survive.

Everything rests on a single spacewalk.

MISSION CONTROL: Skylab, we’re reading you loud and clear.

ASTRONAUT: Okay, Houston, we’re out there.

There looks like enough room to get the cutter.

PAUL: So the solar array, it’s been pinioned down

by a small strap that’s ripped off of

the micro-meteoroid shield.

BOB: Joe Kerwin was operating the device.

GEORGE: He was able to get into position and work the cutter.

BOB: Pete managed to put in an extra pressure on it.

ASTRONAUT: Let go! Let go!

BOB: He went flying away from the spacecraft.

NARRATOR: The only thing preventing Pete Conrad spiraling

into space is a 60-foot cord fixed to the airlock.

BOB: He was constrained by the umbilical, which held him in.

But you have to know Pete.

He would say "Wahoo" or something like that

when he went out flying.

ASTRONAUT: All right, that’s got it! [laughs]

BOB: That would have probably scared the Dickens

out of anybody else, but not Pete.

JIM: Pete Conrad said,

"This is just like the water tank at Marshall,

except it’s a little bit deeper,"

so that was a good compliment. It was a good compliment.

♪ ♪

GEORGE: The recovery of that mission was almost indescribable pride,

just to be a little part of it.

♪ ♪

NARRATOR: Two more crews will visit Skylab

to carry out scientific and medical experiments,

including the effects of weightlessness.

The last manned mission leaves Skylab in 1974.

Five years later, it slowly reenters the Earth’s atmosphere,

showering debris over the Australian outback.

GEORGE: It was a bit of sadness, I suppose,

but a great sense of satisfaction

on what had been accomplished.

NARRATOR: The legacy of Skylab’s engineers is a stepping stone

to meet the next epic challenge in space.

In 1984, President Reagan gives

a State of the Union address

that echoes John F. Kennedy’s historic moonshot goal.

PRESIDENT REAGAN: Tonight, I am directing NASA to develop

a permanently manned space station

and to do it within a decade.

[Applause]

NARRATOR: This orbiting space station will be named Freedom.

Canada, Japan and the European Space Agency

all sign up to the ambitious idea.

ROD: The goal is to provide a laboratory in space to do

science and engineering research to advance exploration.

[Engines firing]

NARRATOR: But tragedy is just around the corner.

MISSION CONTROL: Challenger, go with throttle up.

[Explosion]

NARRATOR: As the world reels from the Challenger disaster,

the American space program is put on hold.

♪ ♪

In contrast, their Cold War rival’s are thriving.

The Soviets have launched seven Salyut space stations.

JAY: Having not landed on the moon,

they focused their space program onto

how to do these long missions in Earth orbit.

NARRATOR: Just two weeks after Challenger, the Soviets launch

the first module of their new space station -- called Mir.

TOM: The Russians were there with their space station

and we were not.

NARRATOR: But in 1989 the beginning of the fall of communism

tips the Soviet space program

into financial and political turmoil.

America isn’t faring much better.

Space station Freedom is stuck at the design stage

thanks to holdups and budget cuts.

NASA needs a radical rethink if they’re to meet the goal

of the President.

♪ ♪

In 1993, America does what for decades

would have been unthinkable,

asking its former Cold War enemy Russia

to join forces on a newly named International Space Station,

or ISS.

CATHLEEN: Since the launch of the Mir the Soviets had

a near-permanent human presence in orbit,

and that taught them a great deal.

It was a vast resource that I don’t think

the Americans could have shied away from.

NARRATOR: NASA are charged with designing

the biggest-ever structure to be assembled in space.

Their solution is for a series of modular

or segmented sections to be joined together.

Rod Jones was a member of one of the ISS design teams.

ROD: What we learned from looking at the Mir

was that if you put modularity into your design,

you can extend and perpetuate the vehicle life

for a much longer period of time.

Modularity allows you to add things to the space station,

take things away. It allows you to shift functionality

around the space station.

NARRATOR: But can these former enemies work together

to create a new space station?

[Engines igniting]

June 27th, 1995.

Space Shuttle Atlantis lifts off to dock

with Russian space station Mir.

ASTRONAUTS: Capture confirmed. Capture is confirmed.

Atlantis is now docked with the Russian space station.

NARRATOR: It’s the first of nine missions that dock with Mir --

allowing the two countries to pave the way

for the International Space Station.

CATHLEEN: Mir became a destination for studying

the engineering, the science and human factors

in human space flight.

NARRATOR: With their old rivalries set aside,

construction of the ISS modules gets underway.

But their dream will be tested,

as both sides encounter a critical problem.

♪ ♪

The dawn of 1993.

America’s dream of a permanent human presence in space

is under threat.

With NASA strapped for cash,

the only way of realizing their goal

is to work with the Russians.

But a major engineering challenge stands in the way.

PAUL: Because we wanted to get the Russians on board

the International Space Station program,

we had to get them launching from their own launch sites,

and those are up at about 52 degrees latitude.

[Engines igniting]

NARRATOR: The Russians launch all their rockets

from Kazakhstan, into a 52-degree orbital angle.

And this is where the ISS will be assembled in space.

But for the Americans that presents a huge problem.

The space shuttle usually launches from Cape Kennedy,

into a much lower orbital angle of around 30 degrees.

The trouble is, to reach the greater 52-degree angle,

the shuttle loses the boost it gets from the Earth’s rotation

that helps fling it into orbit.

Bottom line, by carrying heavy ISS components, the shuttle

doesn’t have enough power to launch into the steeper angle.

BOB: To fly at those higher inclinations

and carry a large payload you need more power.

NARRATOR: Astronaut Mike Massimino is a veteran

of two shuttle missions.

MIKE: To get to that higher inclination requires more power,

which means more fuel, but you can’t add endless fuel,

because you’re constrained by the size of your tank.

NARRATOR: Engineers are forced to look at the only other option

-- make the shuttle lighter.

They calculate it needs to lose 13,500 pounds

to give it enough power to lift ISS components.

They shave nearly half by redesigning

the shuttle’s storage racks and even the crew seats.

But they still need to lose another 7,000 pounds.

Myron Pessin was chief engineer for the shuttle’s external tank.

MYRON: The demands on us were extreme to get that 7,000 pounds.

NARRATOR: So engineers come up with a radical solution.

Make a new external tank from a revolutionary metal alloy

called Weldalite.

MYRON: These aluminum lithium alloys were

higher strength and lighter.

NARRATOR: But Weldalite is so new

it’s barely beyond the development stage.

MYRON: The material properties were still somewhat uncertain.

But we all felt it was an acceptable risk to go forward

with this because of the national need for it.

NARRATOR: In February 1998 NASA takes delivery of the shuttle’s

new super lightweight external tank.

Now assembly of the largest and most expensive structure

in space can begin.

But to succeed, the 15 different ISS modules

must be docked precisely 250 miles above the earth.

MIKE: You had all these different pieces

that needed to fit together in space.

I thought to myself, there’s no way that this stuff

is all gonna work.

You know, you can’t get things to fit together in,

you know, in your kitchen.

How are we gonna get this to work in space

with different countries and different languages

and rocket ships and all this other stuff?

How’s it gonna work?

NARRATOR: On November 20th the Russians take the first step.

[Engines igniting]

MISSION CONTROL: Liftoff of the Proton rocket

of the Zarya Control module.

The International Space Station is underway.

NARRATOR: Zarya will provide the initial propulsion and power

for the ISS, along with communications systems

and docking ports for future modules.

♪ ♪

The pressure is now on the Americans.

For the ISS to progress any further, the first U.S. module,

the Unity Node, must be connected to Zarya

in the lethal vacuum of space.

December 4th, 1998.

Commander Robert Cabana and his crew

prepare for an unprecedented mission.

MISSION CONTROL: We have main engines start.

4, 3, 2, 1, liftoff of the Space Shuttle Endeavor,

with the first American element

of the International Space Station,

uniting our efforts in space.

NARRATOR: Two days later they rendezvous with Zarya;

unload the Unity Node;

and inch it toward the Russian module.

ASTRONAUTS: Houston, Endeavor, we have capture of Zarya.

NARRATOR: The first stage of the ISS is born.

Engineers have enabled two former enemies

to build a permanent structure in space.

♪ ♪

These two modules are the first of what will grow

into an enormous 15-module space station.

Seven modules are delivered from the U.S., five by Russia,

two by Japan, and one from Europe.

But there are limits to what you can cram into a space shuttle.

Transporting this giant jigsaw into space

will be an epic challenge.

ROD: We made the modules as big as we could,

to fit them in the shuttle.

The length of a module, it became like a baloney slice,

how much can you afford to launch?

And that’s where you cut it off.

NARRATOR: It takes thirteen years, 37 shuttle flights,

160 spacewalks and over a thousand hours

to construct the ISS in orbit.

But building it is only half the battle.

♪ ♪

Allowing astronauts to be self- sufficient in space long-term

creates a new raft of engineering challenges.

JENNIFER: So this is almost a liter of water,

and to get this into space is about 48,000 US dollars.

NARRATOR: But there’s another source of water on the ISS:

the astronauts themselves.

♪ ♪

Jennifer Pruitt is part of the team who designed

this ingenious assembly to distill urine

by creating artificial gravity.

JENNIFER: This whole part is the centrifuge that’ll spin.

So the urine will be sprayed out along the back wall

as it spins.

The heavy dense fluid will stick to the wall,

and the lighter steam as it evaporates out

will be sucked through the center through that mesh

on to the next part of the system.

So at the end this is the good clean urine distillate

that you get.

This is what will go on to the water processor assembly later

on and then will be the water that the astronauts will drink.

NARRATOR: Since its installation on the ISS in 2008,

85% of the water in urine has been recycled in this way.

Just hours after peeing, an astronaut

can be drinking fresh water.

JENNIFER: That’s what’s great about space station.

This is something that had never been done before,

but it is so important for long term humans into space.

NARRATOR: Smart engineering like this has allowed the ISS

to be permanently inhabited since the year 2000

by hundreds of astronauts.

♪ ♪

But lingering in orbit exposes space stations

to a potentially catastrophic event.

A high-speed impact.

♪ ♪

November 2016.

The International Space Station

celebrates sixteen years of full-time habitation.

It’s traveled more than 2.5 billion miles

and been visited by 85 manned missions.

A phenomenal engineering achievement.

But even the ISS is not immune

to a nightmare scenario.

MIKE: There are just a couple of things that

you’re really worried about when you’re in space.

You’re always kind of like, all right, kind of living on edge.

One is a fire. That would be bad.

The major problem is, if you got hit,

you would be in a life-threatening situation.

NARRATOR: More than a hundred million fragments of debris

orbit our planet traveling up to 17,500 miles per hour.

At those speeds even the tiniest piece can do serious damage.

A fleck of paint gouged this crater

into the windshield of a space shuttle.

Damage to the ISS is unavoidable.

DANA: The International Space Station, it’s getting hit.

It’s getting hit all the time. This is a major risk.

NARRATOR: The ISS is protected by a layer of shielding.

The frame is made of two thin plates of aluminum.

The outer bumper layer causes debris to fragment on impact.

Inside are six layers of ceramic fiber

and Kevlar fabric stuffing.

An inner layer of aluminum catches what’s left

of the energy of the impact.

It’s a huge advance in shield design

since the single layer of aluminum used to protect Skylab.

At the NASA Johnson Space Center, Dana Lear

is using a high-pressure gas gun to test-fire a particle

at a potential new layer.

If successful, it could be a new first line of defense

for the ISS.

[Impact]

♪ ♪

DANA: Okay, there’s a small hole here in this outer layer

we call the bumper shield.

This is the first layer that’s encountered by space debris.

When it passes through that bumper it actually

tears the particle up.

So, let me take the outer bumper off.

The second layer, it’s not perforated, and you can see

that the particle has been broken up

into small particulates.

NARRATOR: There are seven layers of this new material being tested.

A metal alloy that’s 90% iron.

DANA: If we go down to the last layer, you can see that

we haven’t penetrated any further into the shield,

and certainly didn’t penetrate down to the pressure wall.

So, this works really good.

♪ ♪

NARRATOR: Like Wernher Von Braun sixty-five years ago,

visionary engineers today see space stations as

a stepping stone to explore distant worlds.

MIKE: We learned very valuable lessons putting together

the space station.

That’s going to be invaluable experience

of how to engineer a big project on a place like Mars.

NARRATOR: April 8th, 2016.

[Engines igniting]

A SpaceX cargo rocket launches a revolutionary new piece

of technology that could change the way

we build space stations in the future.

MIKE: In space engineering, because you’re limited

by the amount of weight you can take with you,

you need to miniaturize as much as possible.

MISSION CONTROL: Good morning from Mission Control Houston.

We bring you the installation of

the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module referred to as BEAM.

NARRATOR: BEAM is a lightweight, flat-pack module,

flown to the ISS in a small package, attached

and then expanded.

Instead of heavy aluminum, BEAM is made from layers

of insulating material covered with a silica fiber cloth.

It also has an ingenious key feature.

NATHAN: During the expansion we had rip stitch straps.

They would essentially open up

and allow the module to gradually expand.

So it was pretty awesome.

ASTRONAUTS: ISP success, DVC complete.

MISSION CONTROL: Houston copy.

NARRATOR: If successful, BEAM will undergo a two-year trial

on board the ISS.

NATHAN: This is a stepping stone to see humans

on Mars eventually.

♪ ♪

NARRATOR: The soaring achievement of the ISS owes an enormous debt

to a previous generation of NASA engineers.

Their ingenuity triumphed over

seemingly insurmountable obstacles to save

America’s first space station.

RICK: We had some challenges, but we managed to overcome them.

GEORGE: Some of NASA’s greatest days.

JIM: You can look back now and you just gotta grin a little bit

because it was such a success story.

And it’s all about the people pulling together

and getting the big job done.