Assembling and Supplying the ISS: The Space Shuttle Fulfills Its Mission (Springer Praxis Books)

This book tells the story of the International Space Station from the perspective of the space shuttle's involvement in how the assembly and re-supply of the station evolved. It captures how the intricate and wide-reaching infrastructure required by each mission was managed and provides a comprehensive view of the relationship between the shuttle and ISS. The success in assembling the ISS over a period of 13 years came after gaining experience by sending the space shuttle to the Russian Mir space station in a three-year period during the second half of the 1990s, and after years of detailed study and evaluation. This book reviews those developments and how years of planning, hopes and dreams were turned into reality between 1995 and 2011. It provides detailed reviews of the space shuttle missions at space stations, including how the skills were developed to achieve these missions, what happened on those flights, and how lessons learned from one mission were applied to subsequent operations. Note that no mission failed in its main objective across nine Mir dockings and one rendezvous mission and 37 shuttle flights to the ISS. The smoothness and reliability of actual station operations masks the years of hard work that went into each mission both in space and on the ground. Using first-hand research, personal interviews and contemporary sources, an alternative story of the space shuttle is portrayed.