Original subtitles

What an incredible sight.

A Hollywood special effect, you're thinking,

but no, it's for real.

It's the international space station.

250 miles above us right now it's being built

by just a few dozen astronauts.

If you'll come along with me, we'll go behind the scenes

and find out how these extraordinary people do it.

Okay Chris, I'm just gonna head on back

to the aft of the payload bay here.

Roger, I see ya.

What a beautiful view out the port side there.

Yeah, it's spectacular.

Working outside in the vacuum

of space is a dangerous business.

First, you calculate all the risks.

Then, you learn how to deal with them.

Uh, hey Chris, it looks like I've drifted

off structure here a little bit.

Try and pull myself back in.

Scott it looks like your tether is disconnected.

I show it coiling away from you.

Scott, you've headed out over the fourth nose

of the vehicle, looks like to me,

it looks like your off the port side,

they should maybe be able to see out windows

one, two, or three.

Okay, I'm going for the safer.

Okay, I agree.

Deploy on the hand the controller.

I see it.

'Kay, it swung out, bring it up to work envelop.

I got it in front of you, I see it.

Power on.

Got age, light.

Okay, looks like you're starting to correct now...

- Scanning to close. - Not far from the stop.

Looks nice, looks nice.

'Kay I've got it.

Your feet are clear.

Back on structure, okay,

let's get some tethers on.

Looks good, I concur.

Okay I see you got a good solid, your feet are clear below.

For you and me,

the virtual reality lab at the Johnson space center

might be the ultimate video game.

Do the death again.

We're back on. - I concur.

But if you're Scott parazynski

and Chris hadfield, it's where you learn

how to escape from your worst nightmare.

They're a construction team, one of many

that will fly a whole series of missions

to assemble the station in orbit.

Slow day at the office.

It takes many parts

to make a whole space station.

Some modules are so big and heavy,

there's just enough rocket power

to launch them one at a time.

They've been designed and built

by thousands of people in 16 different countries.

Some pieces are tested here at the Kennedy space center

in Florida, others in Russia.

But will they also fit together when they arrive in space?

The first station component was designed

and built in Russia.

It's called zarya.

It'll be boosted to orbit by the proton rocket,

with a thrust of two and a half million pounds,

you don't wanna be anywhere close by

when they light that fuse.

Proton is an expendable rocket.

After delivering zarya to orbit,

it'll fall back to earth into a safe zone.

Other station parts will be hauled up

by a fleet of ships of a very different design.

NASA's space shuttles.

They're more like high-tech deliver trucks.

One of these will close in on zayra,

then the crew will grab it with the shuttle's arm.

Houston endeavor,

we have zayra firmly attached to the orbiter...

- Good job, man. - We're half way home

for today. - Nice job, nice job.

It was a big moment for the crew,

especially astronaut Nancy currie, who operated the arm.

She sure didn't wanna miss.

That was the longest 15 minutes

of my entire life.

Okay, back to the procedures.

- Alright. - Alright.

The American module unity

is mounted in the cargo bay.

Cj, the pilot, fires the shuttle's thrusters

to push unity upward and made it to zarya.

Got a capture.

Houston endeavor,

we have capture of zarya.

To the crew, the good ship

has entered, that's terrific.

The international space station is born.

The shuttle will leave it here and return to earth.

My heart's beating wildly.

The foundation is laid.

Now it's up to the builders.

Their job is an extreme high-wire act,

like building the great Bridges

and cathedrals in times past.

The six million gallons of water in this tank

provide the closest thing there is

to working weightless.

You practice on life-size models of the station.

Before it's finally finished, these crews

will have made 160 spacewalks,

that's two and a half times all the previous

spacewalks ever done.

Critics say that's too many, the risk is too high.

Hey, handrails five one, five...

All eyes are the next flight.

The shuttle discovery will take the first

assembly crew to station.

The commander of the flight is Brian Duffy.

Pamela melroy is the pilot.

Wow, that feels...

We're in orbit 250 miles up.

Close enough to read the labels.

The station is 45 feet away.

That's Africa going by behind me.

We're getting ready to dock with our house in space.

Our crew is going to hook up the basics,

wiring, plumbing, and phone.

One of the key members of the team

is mission specialist koichi wakata.

When I was five years old

and I saw the Apollo lunar landing,

that was the start of my longing for space flight,

but I thought that kind of thing

was beyond my reach, something that was

at the time impossible to achieve or to do as a Japanese.

Koichi's installing the heart

of the station's systems.

It's called the z1 truss.

I was moving the robot arm

very slowly, since the z1 truss weighs about 18,000 pounds.

And koichi nails it.

Another piece perfectly in place.

Koichi, you the man.

Everybody was cheering me,

and somebody was saying, you are the man,

and, that was a great moment.

Have a 50 millimeter camera.

Okay, I've got a camera with a 50 millimeter.

Leroy chiao and bill mcarthur,

known as Billy Mac, get ready for the first spacewalk.

And three inch ratchet drawing

with a two inch extension on it.

In their suits, they can survive

up to eight hours in temperatures

of plus to minus 250 degrees.

About fifteen years ago, we had...

In conditions like that,

these guys are huge fans of Austin powers.

The commander gives Leroy and Billy Mac

their sendoff in the airlock before they move outside.

The second team, Jeff wisoff and Mike Lopez-alegria,

known as la, seal off the inside hatch behind them.

Their number one task is to deploy the next piece,

the station's communications antennae.

How cool is this?

They push it manually into place.

The all-important telephone is in.

Now, the wiring.

These cables are being laid out

for another crew to connect on a later flight.

They'll provide power to the science lab when it arrives.

You guys, the world series,

the Superbowl, ha, they don't know what pressure is.

Every day, I operated the robotic arm

to help by putting one spacewalker

at the tip of the robot arm to move him

to the location that he needs to do spacewalk activities.

Leroy's going to install

this toolbox for future crews to use.

Inside is an array of special tools

any home improvement fan would envy.

Woo-hoo!

Hey Mike, I'd try for maintaining a death grip

on the hand rails.

It's a strange feeling, my toes are curling right up.

Alright.

You always wanna be sure

you're securely anchored, but if you did come unhooked,

here's a device that could save your life.

It's a personal jet pack called safer.

It's also very cool.

It fits on your back and could power you back to safety.

We saw it put to the test in the virtual reality lab.

Go ahead and power to...

Now we're gonna try it out for real.

Jeff is riding on the arm watching,

in case anything goes wrong.

La, flying on the right, is now powered by his jet pack.

Just in case, he's attached by a thin wire.

But he didn't need it after all.

The test is a great success.

Discovery pulls away, leaving the space station in orbit.

So far, all the pieces have connected without a hitch.

At the top is zvezda, that's where the crews will live.

Below it is zarya, kind of a big

float-through closet for storage.

And at the bottom, the truss and the unity hilt,

where the next additions will be attached.

The station's now ready for people.

We're in Kazakhstan, at the Russian spaceport.

Yuri gagarin, the very first man in space,

launched from here.

40 years later, this crew is getting ready to live

on the space station.

Two are Russian cosmonauts,

Yuri gidzenko and Sergei krikalev.

The crew's commander is an American,

bill Shepard, known as shep.

His wife Beth is the astronaut fitness trainer.

I was fortunate in that I was there

in the capacity of his strength and conditioning coach,

whereas the Russian families were not able

to come at all, they stayed in star city.

In the glare of the world's press,

it isn't easy to find a few, last quiet moments

alone together.

This is the walkway they began

after the first cosmonaut flew,

everybody that flew has a tree here.

The Garrett's tree would be 40 years old now...

When shep and I were walking

down that row of trees, which is very historic,

it was just hard for me to believe

that we were finally here at this place,

because he had worked so hard, we had worked so hard,

for him to be there.

And for us to finally be there together,

to think about, you know, the people that have come and gone

and to know that this person next to me,

my husband, is gonna be a part of that history.

And that was a very special time for us.

Shep and his crew

will be gone in space for over four months.

The international space station

is a way for us to learn how we can go to other planets

and explore other ways to live outside earth.

I think that's really exciting, I wanted to go too.

The crew will launch

to station aboard a soyuz rocket,

the workhorse of the Russian space program.

An unbelievable 406 launches have gone from this path.

Very unexpected for me,

being out on the launchpad, very foggy day,

having several hundred people right at the base

of the rocket, which for an American launch

would be very unusual and unheard of.

Being able to have such close contact

with friends and family who are right there,

right in the middle of this final moments

before you're gonna go fly was really exciting,

really special.

After everything we went through,

seeing your face on launch day made it all worth it.

Let's go do it!

He was so happy.

Get those shuttles ready!

Imagine, three guys in their gear,

inside a capsule the size of a Volkswagen beetle,

and it's a two day trip.

Biggest risk is just getting out

of the earth's atmosphere to a safe orbit.

Once you're at the end of the powered flight

and you're floating around in orbit,

then you can sit back and say,

boy, I'm glad that we have gotten that done successfully.

Sitting in your couch with your knees bent up

almost to your chin for hours at a time,

it's pretty uncomfortable, but the soyuz is very reliable,

it's got a lot of capability to get you up into space

and get you back on a bad day.

The house will be dark when they arrive.

They can't be sure what lies in wait for them.

Their job is to open everything up for the first time,

then get it all working, be prepared for the unexpected.

They're set to go, but after two days in a capsule

with your knees in your chin,

you've got a few other priorities.

Put together an Ace soyuz pilot like Yuri,

Sergei, a man who's already logged

more than a year and a half in space,

and a Navy seal for a commander,

and you've got the right stuff for the job.

After we got the node open,

it started to seem like a really expansive place,

because we all have memories of being

in much more confined spaces like soyuz

and even the shuttle.

When I came to the zvezda for the first time,

it looked for me as home.

And that was a place where we stay and live and sleep.

I was thinking we were here...

It has life support equipment,

guidance and navigation, jets to control the station,

to move it around in space.

'Cause if it were here, we wouldn't be

seeing what we're seeing.

We have several windows looking down.

We have to exercise every day to stay fit.

And even after a relatively short flight,

you feel difference in your muscles.

When we did this exercise near the window,

every time you turn pedal, it flies several kilometers.

It's more impressive to say I ran the bike

from Paris to China.

Probably nicest thing in sleep compartment is window.

From space, you don't see any borders.

You really don't see it where United States ends

and then Mexico starts.

You feel yourself part of humankind,

not just man from one country, one city.

Of course on earth,

we take things like air and water for granted,

but here, the supply is limited.

You can't survive without it,

so you have to recycle it continuously.

You need a degree in plumbing to keep

all your life support systems running,

and breakdowns do happen.

In the future, crews traveling to other planets

will have to rely on repair skills like this.

There are no replacement parts available on Mars.

20 minutes more total.

Kday5fal, this is na1ss, go ahead with your question.

Absa, this is Adam giddlemond.

My question for you is what did it take

for you to become an astronaut, over.

What's the best way to become an astronaut?

To stay in school and be the best student you can.

That's because education is a lifelong thing,

it doesn't stop when you leave school and walk out the door,

it's something that'll go on for your whole life.

That's what we'd recommend.

Hi, I'm santosh bawani.

How do you take showers in space,

and if you use water, how does the...

On ham radio, kids all over the world

can talk to the crews about their home in space.

Soon, there's to be a huge new addition to it.

Back at Kennedy space center, destiny,

the station's science laboratory.

Perhaps its most important component

is loaded into the cargo bay of the orbiter Atlantis.

Shep, Yuri, and Sergei are about to have company.

Hey guys, come on in.

Atlantis is here

with the long-awaited laboratory.

Like kids in a candy store, the shuttle crew

gleefully explores the station for the first time.

Hey, good to see you.

In honor of the occasion,

they wear very special socks.

Hey Atlantis,

how is the stop at destiny?

Copy, a great first moment here.

And looks like all our hard work has really paid off,

it's a beautiful piece of hardware.

A lot of these flights

are transfer flights, and so we're transferring

various different supplies, we bring them

clothing and water, that's a water bag,

and every now and then we bring 'em a woman.

Atlantis, Houston, if you can ask

Roman please exactly what they did with that rack.

It'll take a few more flights

to get the lab up and running,

but when it's ready, we can do experiments

and make discoveries here in zero gravity

that we just can't back on earth.

Well done, well done.

J I go out walkin" after midnight »

j» out in the moonlight j

j just like we used to do j

js I'm always walkin" j»

j» after midnight, searchin' for you j»

js I walk for miles along the highway 2»

j» well, that's just my way »

j» of sayin' I love you 2»

js I'm always walkin" j»

Atlantis pulls away, cargo bay empty.

J» searching for you j»

There were probably times,

certainly over the holidays, when you were able

to correspond by email, talk over the radio

to friends and family on the ground.

You knew there were things going on

that you'd certainly like to be a part of

and you were missing.

Shep's been busy

dreaming up a Christmas surprise for Beth.

His name is captain.

Woo-hoo!

I picked up the little puppy,

and that's when shep told me merry Christmas.

Now shep's dog Jake,

who's missed him a lot, has a brand new pal.

With shep being gone a lot,

Jake was my buddy.

Captain is my special present from space.

Shep, Sergei and Yuri will soon be home.

The second crew is getting ready to take their place.

Just imagine what you might be feeling

in the last hours before your launch.

The beach near the launchpad provides

a haven for astronaut Susan helms.

I just kind of let my mind wander

as I'm walking along the beach,

looking at the waves, I notice dolphins out there.

These are the types of things I'm not gonna get to see

up close and personal for several months,

and I guess I realize now that I'm going to miss this.

Right now I'm starting to feel a little bit

homesick about earth, even though I haven't left it yet.

Before launch, the beach house retreat

near the Kennedy spaceport is a quiet escape

for Susan's crew mates, Yuri usachev and Jim voss.

The beach is such a beautiful place,

it does give you a good feeling

for the wide expanses of the earth

that we won't have while we're in the space station.

Yuri, the expedition two crew commander,

is Russian.

Susan and Jim are American mission specialists.

They'll launch to the station aboard the shuttle discovery.

The suit feels good.

What I'll really miss are the normal things I like to do,

like working in my garage or working on my airplane,

taking a little time to be alone and to work quietly.

I expect that when I get up there,

every evening before I got to bed

I'm gonna wanna write some notes to people

and hope that they get sent down

while we're sleeping and they write back.

The great thing about having trained together

for three or four years is that

Jim, Yuri, and I have become a bit of a family,

and we have come to sense each other's moods and feelings,

to the point where when one person ends up

having difficulties of some kind

and they need to get away, the rest of us understand.

Expedition, you are up above the stars.

Ct, tlt, you have been cleared, all clear.

T20, may the dawn of this new day

illuminate your expedition to our home among the stars.

15, copied, thank you.

T minus 12, all systems

aboard discovery are a go.

11, this mission continuing a permanent

human presence in space.

10, nine,

eight, seven, engines start.

Houston is now controlling,

the roll maneuver is complete and discovery

is now in a heads down, wing clip position

carrying the next resident crew

to the international space station.

Two days later,

discovery has caught up with the station

and closes for docking.

Expedition two is ready to relieve expedition one.

Shep and the crew get

a spectacular view from destiny's window.

That's all I gave you,

is that gonna be in there?

The first time I came into station,

of course the first impression is

my gosh, this is so big.

And then I was surprised with how much work

expedition one had accomplished,

particularly with the laboratory.

Jim, Yuri and Susan

are already at work in the lab.

They can grow large crystals here

that we can't grow in earth's gravity.

By studying how they have formed,

we can learn how to make more effective medicines

to cure diseases.

If we ever expect to go Mars,

we have to understand how the human body will react

to a really long flight.

The human research facility will be

an excellent source for performing human experiments

to make sure we understand what happens

to the human body in space.

It has ultrasound technology, it's got storage

for many other meters and sensors

that we can attach to the human body to wear,

then send the data down the scientists on the earth

so they can analyze it.

It's time for the departing commander

to brief his successor.

Shep and his crew have done their job brilliantly.

They're handing over a station

that's completely up and running,

ready to realize its true potential.

An American and a Russian

kind of exchanging this job.

It was to me a historic chapter in space,

a reflection of what humans can accomplish.

With a last look

at their dwelling in space, the crew heads home.

The new tenants have already done some interior decorating.

I brought about 40 snapshots.

'Course, my wife and my daughter and my friends,

my dog Cody.

The popcorn came up already popped.

Once and a while, some pieces get away from us,

but they generally float up to the filters,

we can just clean them out when we do our weakly cleaning.

Yury vladimirovich usachov,

extremely experienced cosmonaut.

He likes working with his hands with tools

and just a really nice guy.

They're so much alike,

the two of them, it was really funny,

each of them would come up with ideas on occasion

and get the other one sucked in to working

on some sort of home project.

They're a couple of hardware guys, and I'm a software girl.

It's great to live in zero g, because you basically can

become the world's best sportsman.

You can lift up things like these bags of water,

which weigh probably over a hundred pounds a piece

and just move them like they're feathers.

And so it's really nice for someone like me,

who's never been much of an athlete

to be able to do all these superhuman things

in space that I normally wouldn't get to do.

The express rec

Susan is installing contains experiments

that could show us the way to more powerful

computer chips or lighter metals.

Yuri just discovered one day

that the onion had a small sprout

growing out the top, so we placed it

in a plastic bag with a washcloth wrapped around it,

it sprouted, roots are growing.

It was nice to have it around,

not so much to eat, but just to see a green, growing plant.

The mace experiment is how Susan

entertained herself on the weekends.

Yeah, I really like working with this experiment,

it was like playing with a big toy,

it had moving parts and a brain.

When you launch a satellite into space,

the control system is the designer's best guess

of how it should control its own sensors and appendages.

This experiment was trying to understand

how you could design a control system

to teach itself to work better.

Over honshu island in Japan,

the shuttle endeavor has arrived

with a shipping container in its cargo bay.

It's one of three high-tech moving vans

built by the Italian space agency.

This one's called raffaello.

Inside it, astronauts from three countries are at work.

Chris hadfield is Canadian,

yury lonchakov was born in Kazakhstan,

and umberto guidoni is from Rome.

Working space really makes people bonding,

and I guess the fact that many countries

are working on building the space station

is bringing the culture and the history

of each country into space station,

and somehow, we change a little bit, each of us.

It's not just an adventuresome place to live,

but actually, a pleasant and challenging

and interesting place to live.

I would really like the opportunity

to spend part of my life there.

What struck me, though, was to watch the crew

that's living there, to see them view earth

as a separate place.

Earth is something completely separate from them.

It's an interesting step, I think, for humans

to get to the point where you are now

separated from your mother and you are

starting to view yourself as more of a single,

separate entity heading off into the rest of the universe.

If we were to have to leave

the space station in the soyuz vehicle,

we'd put on the sokal suits.

All the material that's in the front of the suit

is where you get into the suit,

so you gather it up and then you wrap two rubber bands

around it to seal it so that it holds pressure.

To get inside is a real challenge.

It's one of these types of capsules

where you've got three humans

laying side by side like sardines.

The Russians on occasion do provide two soyuz spacecraft,

and there's usually just one prime parking spot,

so we need to do a little bit of choreography

in order to get the right soyuz in the right place.

All three crew members need to be in the soyuz

in the event there's a risk of needing

to make an emergency de-orbit.

The trickiest part was the re-docking,

where you're going to a different port,

and you've got a different point of view

of the space station than you had before.

All of us double checked, triple checked everything

to make sure that when we got to the new docking port

that we were going to have the ability to get back inside.

That to me was the most tense part.

Things have been known to break

on the outside of the space station.

You have to have a way to get outside

and repair the item.

An airlock is required to be able to do that.

The station robotic arm is what I used

to lift the airlock out of the shuttle's payload bay.

The joint airlock is basically like a room

that we can use to go outside,

it's like a porch on your space station,

and its whole function in life is to allow us

to do spacewalks from the space station

while the shuttle is not there.

At the control station

where you're operating the arm, there's no window

where you can look and see the arm in motion.

There is no automatic collision control

on that robotic arm, and all of your wits

and talents are required in order to keep

from ramming it into the side of the space station.

Video cameras are our most trustworthy friends.

It's remarkable to me that we've been able

to build these things thousands of miles apart

in different countries using different systems

and put them together in space and for them to work.

The robotic arm worked perfectly.

You could not have asked

for a more perfect piece of hardware.

Inside, the crew moves

the airlock's inner hatch into position.

Now you can take a walk outside the station

whenever you need to, but first,

you have to get your body ready.

If you don't, you get crippling pains called the bends.

Now, I'm a diver, and every diver knows

you don't ever wanna get the bends.

Astronaut Mike gernhardt is also a diver.

Before going outside, he breathes pure oxygen

while he's exercising.

That'll get the pain-causing nitrogen bubbles

out of his blood much faster.

The front door to the station is now opened.

Its construction is ongoing, and soon additions

from Europe and Japan will enhance

this incredibly versatile and unique laboratory.

Here, we can expand our knowledge

of things that affect our daily lives

and learn how natural events and people

are affecting our fragile environment.

That's worth all the risks and something to celebrate.

Hey yury.

Hey Atlantis, it's Houston,

somewhere in the world it's still Janet's birthday.

Good job, sport.

Who wants some m&ms?

Come on, over here.

Yury.

Yury got it that time.

Janet.

Steve.

That's gonna scorch, scorch, scorch.

J» when this old world starts getting me down j

j» and people are just too much for me to face j»

> I climb way up to the top of the stairs »

j» and all my cares just drift right into space j

j» on the roof, it's peaceful as can be j

J» let me tell you now 2»

j» when I come home feelin' tired and beat j»

j» I go up where the air is fresh and sweet j

j» up on the roof »

j» I get away from the hustling crowd j»

j» and all that rat-race noise down in the street j»

j» up on the roof »

j» at night the stars put on a show for free »

j» and darling, you can share it all with me j»

j» I keep a-tellin' you j

j» right smack dab in the middle of town j

space is a very special place.

Without gravity, you can see and feel

and try things you can't do anywhere else.

In search of a better life on earth

and away from earth.

J» there's room enough for two j»

j» up on the roof »

j» oh, come on baby j»

j» up on the roof »

one day, you too may visit the space station.

You might be an engineer, inventing a whole new technology.

You could be a doctor or an ecologist studying the earth,

or you could be planning a trip to another planet.

This is your test bed.

Only tomorrow knows what you'll discover.