An Inside Look at ‘Space Station’

This past Sunday, the space shuttle Endeavour attached the world’s largest solar wings to the international space station Alpha. Installed with the help of two spacewalking astronauts, these new solar panels will allow NASA to launch its lab module, Destiny, in January and will keep the station going for the next several years.

A new Discovery Channel special, “Inside the Space Station,” premiering Sunday, examines the technological marvel of Alpha.

Narrated by Liam Neeson, the hourlong documentary gives viewers a bird’s-eye view of what the finished space station will look like inside and out by using state-of-the-art computer-generated images, as well as how the astronauts in space will be constructing this ambitious project.

“Inside the Space Station” also is a Discovery Channel “Watch With the World” event that will air in prime time on the same night in 150 countries.

The international space station will be the largest structure ever built in space--356 feet wide by 290 feet long--and will be the third-brightest object in the night sky after the moon and Venus. Sixteen nations, including Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia, have joined together to build the station, which will house six scientific research laboratories. International crews of up to seven people will live there, rotating approximately every three to six months.

“Inside the Space Station” chronicles the grueling two-year training program the astronauts participated in, including a subzero boot camp in Alberta, Canada. The documentary also examines the technological advances being made, including the Robonaut, a state-of-the-art robot that will help the astronauts with projects outside the station.

Pierre De Lespinois (“The Challengers” and “The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne”), who directed and produced “Inside the Space Station,” recently talked about the documentary.

Question: Not only is the international space station a global endeavor, so is this documentary special.

Answer: It was a massive undertaking. Wherever you are at 9 p.m. around the world, it will air. It is in 32 different languages. Also, some of the international astronauts will speak in their own language. It was kind of a tricky puzzle to put together, and I think the expected audience is 330 million.

It shows you the shrinking of the world. . . . Around the world they are getting involved in space for the first time; the astronauts are their biggest heroes. They are huge. In Japan, they can hardly walk down the street. Any time the shuttle takes off, the rest of the world is watching because they have someone from their country involved.

Q: I was surprised that a lot of the astronauts are in their 50s.

A: These were the most polished people I have interviewed. They were amazing. They were very bright and very thorough. I was very impressed with them as a group and how they process information.

Q: Don’t they also have to have an incredible amount of courage?

A: No question. There is inherent risk in what they do--a huge risk. With the shuttle there is a 1-in-200 chance it will fail. You probably feel that every time you are on a launching pad. When they light all of those boosters, you can’t turn them off.

The fact there is going to be more spacewalking than there ever has been in our nation’s history and the fact they are doing it at 17,000 miles an hour as they fly around the Earth, there is a guarantee somewhere over the next five years as this is being built, there will be problems. But they have accepted the risk. They know exactly what they are doing and they feel responsible having behind them about 25,000 people who helped get them there. It was very inspiring to see these individuals.

Q: One of the astronauts who has traveled a lot in space talks about losing 14% of his bone mass during one of his trips. Would you talk about why that happens?

A: This is one of the things they are going to have to learn how to tackle if we do long journeys. If you don’t have the load of gravity on your bones, you actually grow. [In weightlessness, the reduced load on the spine results in expansion that causes the astronauts to become taller and leads to back pain and discomfort. The bones themselves lose strength and calcium dissolves away, and the bone mass drops 1% to 1.5% for every month in space.]

Q: This special must have taken a long time to produce.

A: Beyond the normal film production time, there was the bureaucracy time. There had to be a level of trust built [between the production and NASA], and the trust had to be built in a sense that they knew that we were professionals and we knew what we were doing as well as they did.

For example, in the underwater scenes [at the astronauts’ underwater training pool], we all had to be mixed-gas-certified because they don’t breathe oxygen in that pool, and the pool is deep enough to get the bends. We had to pass military physicals and do all the physical exams and written exams. Then they had to take every piece of our equipment so it could be certified and tested.

Q: Did the astronauts shoot all the footage in the shuttles or did one of your crew actually train to go up in the shuttle?

A: We all volunteered, but it is a two-year [training program]. I would do it in a second. The astronauts took the cameras up in space for us and shot [the footage]. They were given a minimum amount of batteries and eight tapes. We gave them a shot list of what we would like. We used footage over three shuttle missions. They did a great job.

Q: How is the international space station going to change the world?

A: This generation will never know a time from now that we didn’t live in space. That’s what is so important about the [space station]. One hundred years from now, they’ll look back at this as the point when man left the Earth. We will always have people in space living there now, and in 20 years we will be colonizing the moon, and in 30 years, Mars. So this is really the first step in leaving the planet and having a permanent presence in space.

* “Inside the Space Station” airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on the Discovery Channel. The network has rated it TV-G (suitable for all ages).