The American Way vs. The Russian Way

Yesterday, I went to NASA Ames Research Center for a live television viewing of STS-132 , the final planned flight of space shuttle Atlantis (local news video here). A more beautiful launch I can't remember - and Ames' giant projection screen and powerful sound system certainly enhanced the experience.

Astronaut Karol J. "Bo" Bobko, himself a former Space Shuttle Commander and veteran of three space flights, explained checklist events leading up to liftoff. As is customary during shuttle launch events at Ames, an expert speaker addressed the gathering crowd prior to coming out of the nine minute hold. This time it was Ken Souza, a former director of space biology programs at Ames.

Ken showed slides on the history of biological space research at Ames, including involvement in the biological films experiment being launched 0n STS-132. He explained the science behind the experiment, much of which probably went over the heads of most of the audience.

But then he showed a slide that almost knocked me over in my seat. I wish I had a copy of it for this blog, but there is plenty of other information to allow me to reconstruct its contents for you. The slide depicted the history of certain biological research capsules launched into space. With the exception of three (Biosphere I, II, and III) the biological research spacecraft are all Russian.

And they are all based on the Vostok Spacecraft. And they are still flying.

Think about that: a modern spacecraft that looks almost exactly like the original Vostok that took Yuri Gargarin into space in 1961, ushering in the era of human spaceflight, and still in use!

Let's examine the progression of the Soviet/Russian biological research spacecraft over the last 80 years. That's not a typo -- we're going to start in the 1930's.

Here are two example feats in the history of spaceflight:

September 30, 1933 -- Russian balloon "USSR-1" reached 60,695 feet, but ascent never became an official record; crewed by Georgi Prokivief, Ernest Birnbaum, and Konstantine Godrenow. (USSR)

January 30, 1934 -- Russian balloon "Osaviakhim" reached 73,000 feet, but crew died when gondola fell free; crewed by Paul F. Fedoseyenko, Andrei B. Wasienko (or, Vasenko), and Ilya Usyskin. (USSR)

You can read a fair treatment of USSR-1 here. What's notable, in terms of Russian spacecraft design, is the gondola. You can see it in the postage stamp below (the spherical object below the balloon).

Note also that there were crews of three in the gondolas. And while the gondola was significantly larger than the spacecraft yet to come, the shape , manufacturing/assembly practices, and test methodology are similar to way things were done for spacecraft much later.



Experimentation with pressure vessels continued in the next decades. Sergei Korolev sent pressurized packages containing dogs and other animals in pods attached to the side of the Russian version of the German V-2 (the R-1, as seen below) in the late 1940's. These were suborbital flights.

With the advent of the R-7 in 1955, payloads were devised to achieve earth orbit. Satellites devised for biological payloads (animal or human) would require the requisite life support subsystems, dictating the size and weight constraints. Sputnik 2 carried the dog "Laika" and required a payload capsule no larger than that for Sputnik 1. Here's a nice overview of Laika and the animal Cold Warriors who paved the way for humans in space.

For human payloads, however, a larger capsule was required. Enter the Vostok, an austere yet functional and producible human spacecraft.

Originally designed for unmanned photographic reconnaissance, the design was adapted to sustain a single cosmonaut on multi-orbit missions around the earth.

The designed proved adaptable to just about anything the Soviets decided to do with it: human spaceflight, unmanned instrumented earth satellite, materials processing experiments, earth resources sensing, and biological specimen research. The Vostok design lent itself to these and other applications, and the Soviets took full advantage of it.

The spherical reentry module enabled the return of the payload safely to the surface. It was pressurized and could sustain living specimens until recovery. It was compact. It benefited from common facilities and tooling that has become a hallmark of Russian engineering. It was robust.

And now we come to a variant of the Vostok which is still in use to this day. It's called Bion, and it has flown specimens to space and back since 1973, roughly every two years. The research conducted has added immensely to the body of knowledge for space medicine and other fields of biology. (You can order a great book about the Bion here.)


This brings us back to the original premise of this post, which was a discussion by Ken Souza regarding biological space research. I spoke to Ken after the shuttle launch and asked him about the significance of the Bion spacecraft. He told me that without the Bion, the United States could not have conducted much of the long term exposure experiments on biological specimens over the last 40 years.

How profound is that! We think of the United States as a leader in all spaceflight, much less human spaceflight, yet a former NASA director indicates that without a Russian spacecraft, our understanding of the effects of the space environment on many different types of life, from microbes to primates, would be unknown today.

Why is this so? While the United States has maintained a human presence in space over the last 50 years, research in the field of life sciences always faces budgetary and policy obstacles.

After the three Biosphere flights between 1966 and 1969, US biological space research was confined largely to experiments on Skylab (1973-1974), two-week space shuttle flights (1983-2000) and the ISS (2000- present). You can see the historical extent of animal biological space research here.

The ISS was looked upon as a boon to biological research at its inception. After the Columbia disaster in 2003, and the redirection of the Space Program towards exploration of the moon, Mars and beyond, emphasis on basic research was diminished. This is ironic, given that the primary goal of Constellation was to send astronauts on longer and longer missions into deep space.

Well, if you can't figure out how to keep an astronaut healthy in deep space, you can't leave him on the moon for extended periods of time. You can't send him to Mars. He will die of radiation related illness. Proper shielding is necessary, of course. But might it also be useful to know the limits of exposure, and if there is a potential medical solution?

Do you think that a medical solution that prevents an astronaut from getting cancer on the long trip to and from Mars would be beneficial to the rest of us here on earth?

That's what it's all about. I can't think of a better spin-off from the Space Program than a cure for cancer. But you can't fathom it without sustained basic research, peer reviewed by the international scientific community. And you get that research by sending biological specimens into the space environment and studying the associated effects. You do this so that future human spacefarers can be suitably protected and can conduct their missions successfully, and live to tell about it.

There are three new Bion-M missions coming up soon, starting in 2012. The venerable Vostok still has life - well into the 21st Century. That's the Russian way of spacecraft design. If a design is useful and robust, don't throw it away in favor of a completely new system. That is not the way of spacecraft design in the United States. The replacement of proven space systems with dissimilar innovations may spark revolutions in design, but at significant cost and, as in the case of the Saturn V, significant loss of sustained progress.

The Bion is but one example of the Russians' philosophy of continuous refinement of spacecraft. We will discuss others in future posts. For now, let's hope that the new direction of the U.S. Space Program utilizes the ISS to the fullest extent possible for biological space research. It will help us all, in the end.