The International Space Station is, many times over, the most complex, expensive thing ever built in space. What Keith points out is that it's not only a technical achievement, but an administrative, policy, and, above all, human achievement.
The ISS: like nothing else (NASA photo)
He writes, "Where is the one place where a multi-national program has operated - smoothly - as a real partnership - with no real problems between the partners? Answer: the International Space Station."
Nations that don't always like each other have partnered successfully and with minimal problems. While oddities crop up, like the absurd Russian claim of NASA sabotage, the crews invariably get along and get science done along with gathering knowledge about how to operate and maintain enormously complex structures in space. People can argue about the tradeoff between the ISS and other needs, in space or on Earth. The ISS program's cost ($100B+, with the + varying enormously depending on what you count) is enormous by any measure. What can't be argued is that the only way to learn what's needed to assemble and operate huge spacecraft is by doing it. Smaller-scale experiments and ground simulations, we have learned, did not prepare us for all that's involved with the ISS. From the microbe/mold problems to growing food in space to the amazing achievement of repairing a solar array never designed for spacewalking astronauts to repair, the ISS has taught us something new every day.
NASA's Chris Cassidy prepares a microsatellite deployment system in the Japanese-built Kibo module (photo NASA)
To return to Keith's point, those lessons extend beyond the hardware. On Earth, the U.S. is furnishing weapons to Ukraine to defend itself from Russian-backed separatist attacks. On the ISS? People are saying "Good morning" in three or four languages and sharing pudding snacks while they prepare for a future in space. The original space station program, a U.S.-led North American-Japanese-European affair, was expanded with the addition of former enemy Russia after the Cold War ended. There wre political and policy reasons, but it gave us all something in common, too. Decades after the USSR rejected President Kennedy's offer of a joint lunar program, here are astronauts from Iowa and Moscow looking together down at the Earth and out to the stars.
Obviously these people are carefully (if not infallibly) screened and prepared, and they have much in common before they ever launch. But it all works. If was can cooperate n the ISS, maybe there's a lesson for Spaceship Earth.
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