When I was five years old,
I used to go to the library with my parents every Friday.
And I remember being really excited about this book,
and it was titled Astronomy And Astronauts.
There was something that just spoke to me.
It was very strange.
I remember reading a passage just about what it felt like
when the astronauts stepped outside, and how they looked at the Earth.
And I thought, "Oh, my gosh, I want to be a part of that.
"I want to see that."
And it stayed.
It wasn't one of those,
"Oh, I like dinosaurs," or, "I like this other thing."
It wasn't a phase.
It really spoke to something in my soul.
So in May '95, I applied to be an astronaut.
I thought, "OK, well, you know,
"I'll probably get a rejection letter.
"I'm only 26 years old."
But I'll frame it, and be proud that I finally applied.
But instead, I got a call.
3,000 people had applied, and I was one of 120
that they wanted to interview, and I lost it.
And I called everybody.
I called my mom, I called my sisters.
I was really, really excited.
But during the medical tests, it turns out I had kidney stones.
Back then, if your body shows the ability
to form even a single stone, it's a lifetime disqualification.
Lifetime disqualification from being an astronaut? Yeah.
So I... I remember being home that weekend and just crying.
And then Monday afternoon, Dwayne calls me,
the head of the selection office.
And he just said, "Are you OK?"
And I'm like, "No, I'm not OK!
"Would you be OK? My life is over."
And I just let it out.
And it was at that moment when I...
It's like I could hear myself,
and, um, and I thought...
"No. No, no, no, no, no.
"Um, this is not me.
"I am strong. I am fierce. I can handle anything."
And he said, "Ginger, have you ever considered
"working in mission operations, maybe as an astronaut trainer?"
"You know, for the International Space Station?"
The first stage of the International Space Station
is marking the beginning of a new era of international collaboration
to embark on what's been described
as humankind's most ambitious endeavour to date.
In the early days during the space race,
it would have been unthinkable. Now, in an effort to save money
and to show his support for Boris Yeltsin,
President Clinton has proposed
that Nasa work with the Russians in building a space station.
So I just kind of had to take some deep breaths and reconsider.
I can never go into space.
I can never visit the space station.
But if I started teaching the astronauts,
even though I can't go,
each one of them can, like, take a piece of me with them.
Something I've taught them. Something I brought to them.
And I thought, "OK, I can I can buy that.
"I can sell that to myself."
It's a pleasure to welcome the astronaut class of 1996.
This is the largest class of astronauts we've ever selected,
and we need them.
We are very soon going to begin
the assembly of the International Space Station,
and I can't wait to have them on board.
Good afternoon, I'm Dan Tani.
My hometown is Lombard, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago,
where I worked in an aerospace company.
I couldn't be more excited and proud to be here, and hi, Mom.
Good job, saying hi to Mom!
So, you know, I was, uh, eight years old
when Neil and Buzz landed on the moon.
And I remember everybody was space and astronaut crazy at that time.
But I certainly had no interest in space, or exploration.
Baseball player was absolutely what I wanted to be.
Then actually I wanted to be a stand-up comedian,
because one of my idols was George Carlin.
Two minutes before you die, you receive an audible warning.
"Two minutes. Get your shit together."
But my real interest was how people use machines.
I like the human interface of
how a ballpoint pen works, or how a shampoo dispenser works.
I love that stuff.
But one of the games you play as a senior is,
"Hey, where can I interview for free?"
And so I look at all the companies that are interviewing,
and one of them was a space company out in California.
I thought, "Well, let me go talk to them, because if I can get
"a free trip to Los Angeles, that'd be kind of fun."
Located in El Segundo, California,
Hughes Space and Communications Group is one of the largest
satellite manufacturers in the world.
It was during my spring break,
so it was snowing in Boston, and it was 75 degrees in Los Angeles.
And I went to the beach
and watched people roller skating up and down and playing volleyball.
And I thought, "I'd be silly to turn this down.
"I mean, from a lifestyle point of view,
"this is going to be a ton of fun."
So I moved to California, bought my convertible,
and, uh, living near the beach and just goofing around
in the design department of this aerospace company.
And that's where I ran across, you know, my buddy, Gus.
We were young. We had money. Uh, no commitments.
As nerds...
..it was amazing.
When we met at Hughes, DT was the young buck.
He was smarter than all of us.
But let's be very clear here.
He didn't give a rat's ass about space.
It was just an excuse to come live on the West Coast.
And if he denies that and says, "Oh, no, it's because I wanted
"to be an astronaut," he is lying.
Carlos is, uh... He's a lot of personality.
Right? And so when you're bringing a new friend in
or introducing Gus to somebody,
you have to sort of set the framework.
He's going to be a lot at the beginning,
but you stick with it because, uh, because once you get past that,
there's a lot of sincerity and a lot of,
uh, a lot of big heart going on behind it.
Space was a dodge for him. OK?
Space was like, "Uh, I'm doing this for the pay cheque.
"I don't care about any of this stuff."
Whereas someone like me, it's everything.
My mother claims when I was but a young toddler,
and I'd been fussing and carrying on and making trouble all day,
and then they put on this launch.
Three, two, one, zero. Ignition.
And apparently it was night and day.
I went from troublemaking, screaming, yelling, crying
to - whoosh! - locked on the TV.
Just locked on.
To her last breath, my mother claimed
that's when she knew that my destiny was determined.
"Get good grades, work hard, you're going to space, son."
ASTRONAUT: OK, I'm out. OK.
And for me, the shortest distance there
was studying to be a rocket scientist.
So, of course, I applied to the astronaut corps.
That rejection letter that I got, you know,
that was Nasa essentially laughing at me.
Now, again, I'm being overly melodramatic.
I had no shot at this. Didn't even make the first cut.
And then I moved to Houston,
and I applied two more times, and of course, failed there too.
So I applied a total of three times to be an astronaut.
Failed at every one.
What is it, do you think,
that successful candidates had that you didn't?
They have the right stuff. I don't.
They have the right stuff, I don't.
After I left Hughes, I got offered a job with a small
aerospace company outside of Washington, DC.
And somebody said, "Yeah, there's a notice up
"that they're taking applications for the new astronaut class."
What made you apply, do you think?
Why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't you send your application in?
I had no hope of becoming an astronaut.
I just wanted to play the game, participate.
You know, I say it's like you buy a lottery ticket and you put
in your back pocket and you forget about it.
And, you know,
all of a sudden you find out that your numbers got called,
and it's the shock of your life.
And then that's when the imagination started going crazy.
I was like, "Holy cow, I'm actually going to go to space."
The desire to be an astronaut started that moment.
I didn't have the desire until it became a real possibility.
Fucker!
I've dreamed about this. I've worked for it.
I've striven for it my whole life.
And he walks into it and they hand him the keys to the kingdom.
But there wasn't jealousy on my end.
I was just awestruck that he got in.
"This is incredible, Dan. Where do we go from here? Wow."
Made me kind of lose respect for Nasa.
That's...mostly kidding.
We're here at Nasa's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas,
where this mock-up is used for training.
The real thing was built in Russia, and so it's called the Zvezda,
which is Russian for star. Now, normally the crew would enter there.
That's the docking port.
And one of the first things they come to is the laboratory.
It's very much like a laboratory on an airliner.
When completed, the station will be
as large as about two football fields,
and will be able to be seen with the naked eye.
Um, those are just your regular...
When I was selected in '96,
we had not flown any element of the International Space Station yet,
but we were testing the first modules on the ground.
You know, there was 35 of us.
That's a huge number of new astronauts.
They needed a big class because they anticipate
a lot of flights and a lot of spacewalks,
and all of that was just music to our ears.
All right, we're starting off a little late. Wanted to give people
a chance to come in from the rain and grab a cup of coffee.
There are a number of different assemblies
and components we're going to talk about today.
When I became an instructor for the astronauts,
my first crew was Expedition One.
The Russian segment is the primary...
And that was the first crew that was training to fly
on board the International Space Station -
Yuri Gidzenko, Sergei Krikalev and Bill Shepherd.
So you're like 26, 27
when you were given Expedition One to take care of?
Yeah, yeah, I was young.
Feisty, uh, but young.
We were a little Expedition One family,
and we did everything together.
And I quickly realised that I needed to live in Russia,
because if I was going to be wherever the crew was,
they were in Russia 70% of the time.
So I put everything in storage and I moved out there.
I loved it. Oh, I loved it so much.
This is my room. I just cleaned it.
See? Computer's always on.
These are wonderful people with rich history
of human space flight that we have a lot to learn from.
We had not really worked on long-duration space flight missions.
Our Russian counterparts had the Mir space station,
so they understood it, and they'd been doing this a long time.
So space provided a common goal
where we could show the world
that the US and Russia can actually work together
and create something that people have never seen.
The most ambitious space project since America sent a man
to the moon starts in the early hours of tomorrow morning,
when a Russian rocket lifts the first of more than 100 separate
sections of the International Space Station into orbit.
I felt a little pride, a little ownership,
and I didn't look at this as a Russian vehicle.
This is our joint spacecraft.
# Ooh, shake it up, baby, now, shake it up, baby
# Twist and shout... #
We had a joint party with the Americans and Russians,
and there was toast after toast.
Because we were so excited, because this marked the very beginning.
# This little girl This little girl
# You know you twist so fine... #
Getting that one up meant this is... Our adventure begins.
The International Space Station
has taken a big step from dream to reality.
The crew of the shuttle Endeavour has put together
the project's first two major components.
They linked a US-built passageway to a Russian-built module.
Nasa utilised the Mir space station as a bridge to the ISS.
It gave us a lot of experience training for and going to live
on a space station.
So American astronauts had been spending six months there.
All of the reports we were getting back is, "That's a real slog."
Of course, they had the fire and the collision and depressurisation.
And so we knew that it had survived a couple catastrophic events.
You knew it was kind of old.
You knew the technology was a little outdated
and that, like your car, you know, at some point it just makes sense
to buy a new car than to keep fixing the stuff that's breaking.
It's... You want to drive the...
You want to drive the Lexus, or you want to drive the Lada?
The enormous international plan
to build a permanent scientific station in space
is not only behind schedule,
it may cost the United States much more than the US had planned.
Russia has fallen almost a year behind building
this critical section called the Service Module.
Many US officials say cooperation is still worth it,
even if it is expensive.
It keeps the Russians friendly,
and it helps bolster the US presence in space.
For the first time in more than ten years,
no human is orbiting the Earth.
That's because Russia's Mir space station is now empty.
Mir mission director Vladimir Solovyov
still hopes some extra money will be found
to keep it in space, but knows time has run out.
PHONE RINGS
I was at home and the phone rings,
and it's Mr Walt Anderson.
And he literally opens the conversation by saying,
"I'm thinking about buying a space station. I'd like you to help me."
"What?"
And it's a guy called Walt? Walt Anderson, correct.
A friend of yours? At that point I'd known him just over a decade.
Carlos was totally and absolutely certain
about the development of space,
that that was the right thing for mankind to do, and it was important.
And, uh, I agreed with him. So we got along pretty well.
I think if there's something important enough
in your life that you think about it more than anything else,
that's an obsession.
And are you obsessed?
Oh, yes.
The public belief was only Nasa can do space.
So if I can short-circuit that
by joining other like-minded individuals,
then I'm going to do it. You jump ship.
Where's my jetpack?
Where's my lunar colony?
Where's my flying car?
In the '90s, many of us were very frustrated,
and we decided to take matters into our own hands.
Hi, I'm Gus. I'm the one taking these shots.
Hi, Mom!
We called it New Space,
and we were a community preaching that it's not just governments
that can do space.
It's not just Nasa that can do space.
We got these crazy, insane entrepreneurs
with these crazy, insane ideas,
and they band together to show the world
that private companies could do great things in space.
The problem was, who's got money
that wants to put it in commercial space?
There was only one game in town.
Walt Anderson.
You know, one of the most successful entrepreneurs I've ever known.
And do you know how he made his money? Telecoms.
At a time when telecoms were exploding in growth,
he rode that wave, man.
So you make your money in telecoms,
and then you throw all of it away in space.
To me, the idea that we would save the Mir
and use it for commercial
and scientific purposes was an interesting idea.
I mean, who doesn't want to own a space station?
And we quickly agreed,
well, we got to go out and meet the Russians.
We wanted to impress them.
We wanted to show them we were real and had some resources.
So we thought taking the private jet was a good...good move.
The brief in Russia is very simple.
Can they work with a Western partner?
Are they thinking that we can do this deal together,
or they're going to throw us out on our ass?
They sent a car for us, drove us out to their headquarters,
which a few years before would have been a closed place
that no Westerner could ever think about going in.
We are ready.
As soon as that door opens, we're under tremendous pressure,
and we know that we're being studied.
We know that they're looking for any weakness.
But it started out very tense.
I mean, obviously, the geopolitical relationship
between Russia and America has always been fraught,
and it was a difficult time in terms of trust.
We can worry about that later. So we could form a company.
That company could, uh, we could
set up this shareholding relationship between us.
But we weren't there as Americans.
We were there as, uh, developers of space for all mankind.
And that's the... That's the approach we took.
I understand you have some need for both the commitment,
number one, but actually to see some real money, because commitments...
You've some problems with commitments before
from some other people.
Um, this agreement has to be pretty well worked out,
and I think that's going to take a while.
Surprisingly, the positions we staked out
turned out to be compatible.
You know, we had very similar goals.
They wanted to save the Mir.
Walt Anderson, his desire is to dare mighty things,
and to dare mighty things would be
to set up with your private banker in advance
that there will be a code phrase,
and when that code phrase is proffered, bam!
Speed of light, US$7 million transfers from Walt to the Russians.
What was the code word?
I don't remember.
Carlos probably does.
Mir for peace.
To success. Yeah, to success.
The Russian space programme, once a crown jewel of communism,
has gone completely capitalist.
This morning, an American entrepreneur signed a contract
to lease Mir from the Russians.
There are customers that want to do pharmaceutical manufacturing.
There are people who want to travel to the Mir as space tourists.
All those things are possible.
Ordinary Americans will compete for one chance of a lifetime.
A trip into space.
Destination: Mir on NBC.
I remember hearing about MirCorp
and his involvement in his new passion.
"We're going to do it. We're going to do it, DT, we're going to do it."
I remember being sceptical.
But, you know, you never underestimate Gus, right?
He's a big dreamer,
and some of those dreams can come true.
Had anything like this been proposed before?
I mean, is this new territory? At that point?
No, I had never heard of anything like that before,
especially the commercialisation aspect.
You know, buying something that the government owns
and then running it as a for-profit company, that was completely new.
The possibilities have long been apparent
for the cash-strapped Russian space programme.
Cosmonauts and commercials,
product placement at mission control.
Put your logo on a Russian rocket.
This is just one small step for mankind,
but a giant leap for Pizza Hut.
But wait, isn't Mir
that creaky old space station the Russians were going to ditch?
It is, but engineers say its worst problems are fixable.
Whenever you buy a building, the site survey is critical, right?
You send out someone to evaluate the building,
the foundation, the structure, the electrical,
and then you make the go/no go decision.
We needed to see if it's worth saving.
Hence the first flight.
Who went?
Two privately hired cosmonauts,
paid for by a private company, MirCorp.
A few months ago, it looked like the Mir's days were numbered.
But cosmonauts Sergei Zalyotin and Aleksandr Kaleri
are under orders to patch it up and keep it orbiting.
Early this morning, two cosmonauts suited up
for a mission few people thought would happen again -
a manned flight to Mir.
Thanks to MirCorp,
Russia's national space programme is back in business.
The cosmonauts know they're heading for a crumbling
14-year-old space station
which has been plagued by accidents and breakdowns.
So, of course they found a lot of problems, we expected that.
But there was no show stopper.
There's nothing here that would prevent us from doing MirCorp.
The building will stand. It's that simple.
Today, MirCorp marks a first.
Manned space flights are being made available to private citizens
through a business oriented, nongovernmental company.
This is the moment we dreamed of our whole lives.
A regular person going to space.
This is business plan 101. First customer.
59-year-old Dennis Tito, a Californian millionaire businessman,
is in training to be a cosmonaut, Russian style.
We negotiated a deal with him to be the first tourist on the Mir.
He signed an agreement, and we were feeling positive.
I always followed space. I always loved space.
I always imagined what it would be like
to look at the Earth from space.
We were getting newspapers all over the world.
There is no bad news.
Everyone thought it was very cool to have a private space station.
And in fact, even the Nasa employees thought it was kind of cool.
When you got higher into the political side of Nasa
and the White House, it was different.
It really surprised me later
to learn how unhappy they were about our business.
For years, supporting the crew as they trained
for the International Space Station,
it seemed launch was always right around the corner.
But something would usually happen, and our launch would get delayed.
Everyone knew they were going to launch at some point,
but it really wasn't real yet.
But when we got in that plane
to go from Star City to Baikonur, Kazakhstan, that meant it is real.
Because we're going to be launching in a couple of weeks.
I had been told what to expect when we were there,
and the rich traditions
that our Russian and Kazakhstan counterparts had.
SINGING
And I'd heard about the dancing and the singing
and the celebration that they tend to have.
So these are students from the local area, I was told.
Oh! This one, I remember. I was going to ask if you had her.
She sang I Will Survive,
and I thought maybe not the most appropriate song choice
prior to launch.
Oh, my God, I can't believe you have her.
Are you serious?
She was good, though.
It really wasn't until the night before
where the emotion of it all hit me.
Sergei Krikalev first, Yuri Gidzenko in the middle,
and Bill Shepherd heading to the launchpad.
Once they went off to the launchpad...
..they did their standard pose.
They always go up the ladder and they turn back
and they do their standard crew photo pose.
And then they go up the stairs and they disappear.
They went inside the hatch and they closed the hatch.
It's actually the very launchpad that has been used
for every crewed launch from Baikonur,
including that of the first human to be sent into space,
Yuri Gagarin, almost 40 years ago.
And there was something inside me that kind of lost it a little bit,
and I started hyperventilating because I couldn't see them.
And there was a gentleman that came up and he's like, "Oh, it's OK.
"Come with me. Come with me."
So he starts parting the crowd, and it was really tightly packed.
And he's like, "Eto mama ekipazha. Eto mama ekipazha."
Which means, "It's the mother of the crew".
"It's the mother of the crew."
And he finally fights my way up front,
and there's a smaller TV screen,
and he's like, "Smotri, smotri. V'se khorosho."
You know, "Look at them, look at them.
"Everything's OK."
And I could see them now inside their capsule.
And then all of a sudden I'm like, "OK," like...
But it was... I feel like an idiot.
It was the silliest thing, because I knew they were safe.
I know that they're trained and I know that they're ready.
But I wasn't ready.
I had spent so much time focusing on them
that I didn't realise what this whole experience
was going to do to me. And, um, I was terrified.
Minus ten seconds...
What if something happens?
My babies were going off to space.
..three, two, one.
We have ignition. We have ignition and lift-off.
Lift-off of the Soyuz rocket,
beginning the first expedition to the International Space Station
and setting the stage for permanent human presence in space.
The Soyuz launch from Kazakhstan symbolises
a way of life in space that could last for a while.
The crewmen aboard will be the first resident crew
of the International Space Station, and will stay there for four months.
After they dock in two days,
they will be the first in a series of crews
that will occupy the station for more than ten years.
Commander Shepherd had the prerogative
of being the first to enter the station,
but he has deferred in an offer of conciliation
and respect of the partnership
to allow his Russian crew member to enter the station first.
Let's look upon this
as the real opening of the international space frontier,
not just for a country, but for Russia,
America, Europe, Japan,
Canada and all that are to follow.
The moment they opened that hatch
and set foot in that module, we set a clock.
We are living on the International Space Station,
and there won't be a time where we don't have people living in space.
That was our intention when we designed the space station,
to always have people on board.
I knew that I was taking part in history.
Very few people get the opportunity to do that.
We are here, and we are here to stay.
Last year, the Russians announced they would
scrap their old space station, Mir,
and focus resources on the new International Space Station.
Instead they're now repairing Mir.
Russia's revival of Mir is a slap in the face at Nasa.
This debacle has already delayed the International Space Station
for over two years and cost us several billions of dollars.
Nasa were pissed. They were like,
"Here's this mosquito buzzing around us.
"Somebody swat it."
Nasa was given a priority by the President of United States.
The International Space Station is
the way we're going to go forward in partnership with the Russians,
to maintain peace in the world.
We have a unique opportunity to cast aside
the suspicions and doubts that used to plague our nations.
Russia is not the enemy of the United States.
And for that to happen, we need Mir to go into the ocean.
Swat these fuckers.
The most powerful entity on Earth, the US government,
is going to put a cross on your face.
And they're not going to miss, babe. They're not going to miss.
If we found that the Russians
were going to fund Mir and continue its operation
and not fund the International Space Station,
there would be very serious levels of concern on our part.
And I remember I was in a cafe just reading the Times,
and, "Holy cow! What is this?"
"American mega-millionaire gets Russki space heap!
"Sells joyrides to fellow tycoons. Nasa fumes!"
There's Uncle Sam crying,
and there's Wacky Walt doing the deal with the Russians.
That was the first. And then came all the other ones.
Here, watch this. This is actual official Nasa footage
of the space station Mir.
And we're supposed to feel good about this?
You know what I'm talking about?
This is what this is. It's a Hyundai!
Politics always wins.
Why not just sort of use the Mir?
I mean, you could have.
But where is the national pride in that?
Where is the sense of accomplishment?
In that the US needed to demonstrate their leadership
in human space flight by creating a space station of their own
and, you know, embracing the US spirit of being collaborative
and working with many nations
and flying astronauts from different countries
and flying scientific experiments from different countries.
We couldn't have done that
by just using the Mir space station,
because we couldn't control what the overall purpose was,
or the overall vision for the Mir space station.
So we needed to create our own.
Having our own space station would be our way of demonstrating
that we are the leaders in human space flight...
..and that we are going to continue to lead
moving forward to moon and Mars.
And it's the beginning of the end for the Russian space station Mir.
This morning a Russian rocket took off,
sending the final unmanned cargo ship to the Mir.
The ship is carrying fuel that will be used
to nudge the Mir out of orbit
and, according to plan, into the Pacific Ocean.
The operation seems to be going without a hitch.
The live pictures on the screen behind me
are the last that will ever be seen from Mir.
People ask me, would I do it again?
And I say, "Yes, I would do it again."
I mean, we hadn't achieved everything we wanted to do,
but we did get the first citizen explorer to space.
Dennis Tito finished his training, but the Mir wasn't there for him,
so he got to go to the Russian side of the ISS.
Now, Nasa was very pissy about that and difficult,
but the Russians had built much of the station,
so had every right to bring a passenger up.
That was something.
It was a tiny bit of positivity in an overall negative situation.
245 miles up, a Soyuz spacecraft
docks with the International Space Station today,
which opens its hatch to the tourist Nasa doesn't want.
Dennis Tito, smiling broadly, after convincing the Russians
he had the right stuff - $20 million of his own money.
Look, it played out the way it had to play out.
It was a great, audacious dream.
It wasn't meant to be from the very, very, very beginning.
25 years later, I think there's a strong argument that can be made.
We're now...
..where MirCorp was 25 years ago, except it's working.
Richard Branson is sending people to space.
Jeff Bezos is sending people to space.
Elon Musk is sending people to space.
The dam has burst. There's no looking back.
That's why, you know, when you ask me, you know,
"How disappointed were you you didn't become an astronaut?
"How disappointed were you that this company failed?
"How disappointed were you with MirCorp?
"Why did you step away?"
It is essentially my life history
that most of the things that I participate in
are going to fail, and that's OK.
You know, there are some places in your life
that you never expect to be, and standing here at this mic
is one of them, and I'm really obviously excited to be here.
Thank you all for coming out. This is an absolute dream come true.
And believe me, it's as exciting and fun as you think it is.
Wild horses couldn't have kept me
from seeing my best buddy DT launch into space.
Or as we put it, "Dan goes on a business trip."
We're on our way. We're almost to the Cape now.
We're pumped. We're ready.
We were giddy.
We were nervous. We were expecting
the greatest show of our lives. And we got it, man.
Can't describe it, man. Got to be there.
We're at three miles. The closest any human is.
DT is just being latched in right as we speak.
20... 30 minutes, roughly, countdown time. Yeah. Right? Yeah.
There is a certain feeling of,
"Well, if I can't go, I'm glad a buddy I know gets to go."
We felt, in our own naive way, like, you know,
we're kind of part of the entourage.
Ten, nine, eight...
This is it, I feel it. You got it? We're on board.
CHEERING
Oh, my God!
Oh!
We did it! We're locked. That was cool.
Look, it's up there. Check it out. We're in it.
Oh, look.
Woo-hoo-hoo!
I'm, uh, you can't see me because the tank's there,
but I'm at the tip of this, uh, big fireball.
Probably now is the time I'm thinking,
"Holy cow, I'm sitting in a freakin' space shuttle."
All of a sudden, you're in space.
Looking at my home planet, you get this pride of ownership of,
"I can't believe I'm from there.
"I'm so happy to be a citizen of that planet."
And there's what looks like a bright star on the horizon.
And, hey, that's the station. We're 50km away.
We talk about it when we practise it, simulate it.
But once you see it for real,
"Wow. That's really cool. Here we come."
Pretty soon you can see the solar arrays,
and then you get closer and closer.
And at some point you're thinking, "We're really close to this thing."
It's taking up the whole window, and you're going to touch it.
You're going to dock to it.
It's like you're going to Oz, you know?
It's glimmering, it's beautiful.
It's an incredible thing
that we humans have made in an incredibly hostile environment.
It was quite, quite something. It's really fantastic.
0.12, 0.12. There's eight inches.
Four inches.
Two.
BEEPING
Timer's running. Forward jib fell off.
Which station is better?
The space station was designed so that neither the US nor Russia
could operate the vehicle independent of one another.
It was intended to be able to withstand any political turmoil
that might exist between our countries at any given time.
The power system, those huge solar arrays that you see,
that power, the entire space station is controlled by the US side.
The propulsion system, however,
is managed on the Russian side of the vehicle.
So the US keeps the power running
and our Russian counterparts make sure that we can stay
in orbit with the right propulsion.
Ultimately, it was designed to function only if we're cooperating.
Well done, whoever thought of that.
Because it's helped us survive a couple of bumps in the road.
I love that part about it.
But there are things that we didn't predict.
Things we weren't prepared for.
NEWSREADER: A new war started. It involves Russia.
Hundreds of people...
As many as 20,000 Russian soldiers...
Russia is poised with its military forces...
As we went over the eastern part of Ukraine, all of a sudden,
there were little red flashes, and we were watching bombs go off.
We were literally watching people being killed from space.
The Open University has produced an interactive flip book
offering extraordinary insights into the human exploration of space.
To discover more, scan the QR code or visit...