'City in space' moving toward reality

By John Holliman
E-mail: jholliman@cnn.com

February 4, 1998
Web posted at: 10:08 a.m. EST (1508 GMT)

(CNN) -- Did you know that the first element of the new international space station is on its way to the launch pad in Khazakstan right now? I was at the Russian space factory in Moscow a couple of months ago and saw the FGB, or Functional Cargo Block, on the factory floor as final modifications were being made. It's going to have the ability to be refueled in space, and it's got enough rocket power to stay in orbit by itself until the first crew comes to live a year from now.

The Functional Cargo Block

The second piece of hardware is called Node One. It's basically a huge ball with doors on all possible sides. It's a connecting tunnel, which will be attached to the FGB and allow the shuttle to dock with the station in the future. CNN viewers saw me walking around the node more than a year ago when it was being built at the Boeing factory at Huntsville, Alabama, and again two weeks ago as technicians attached docking adapters to two of its doors.

I talked to Bill Shepherd, the astronaut who will command the station beginning next February. He is training in Star City, Russia, and at NASA's Johnson Space Center for his launch to Mir, on a Russian Soyuz rocket.

Shepherd has spent more than a year learning the Russian language, but he's still not as fluent as he wants to be. His two crew members will be Russian cosmonauts. Yuri Gidzenko, who will command the Soyuz flight to Mir, and Sergei Krikalev, who will act as flight engineer on Soyuz and the station, have been training with Shepherd since they were assigned to be the first crew.

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NASA announced its budget for the next fiscal year this week. No big surprises. no big cuts, but no big increases in the budget either. The critics who say NASA is taking money away from space shuttle safety to spend it on the space station might take heart from the budget numbers. I won't go through them here, but you can take a look at www.nasa.gov.

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John Glenn still has not finalized a plan for training to get him ready for an October shuttle flight, but he tells me he's confident he'll be able to get ready for flight and continue to serve in the Senate.

Glenn

He says he's already got all the flight manuals for the shuttle and has studied them from cover to cover. He's also working with scientists from the National Institutes of Health and others to plan the medical experiments, which he will conduct and which will be conducted on him during his week-and-a-half flight.

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I try to stay away from numbers in writing for TV or for the Internet, but a couple of recent ones are fascinating to me. First, your response to this column has knocked the socks off me and others at CNN Interactive. When it premiered last week, you responded by the tens of thousands. Thanks for that. And many of you messaged me via e-mail to offer suggestions on things to talk about, and congratulations to CNN Interactive for providing a weekly space column. I spent all my free time this past weekend trying to respond to all of you who wrote, and I'll keep doing that.

There's a new, more efficient way to get in touch with me for the future: The new e-mail address is jholliman@cnn.com. You can link easily and unless the volume of e-mail becomes overwhelming, I'll stay in touch from wherever I am.

The other number that I want to share today comes from a CNN survey of the American people conducted last weekend. Occasionally we ask the sample group in our survey whether NASA is doing a good job. Something has happened to change your minds on NASA's performance. Here's the question: how would you rate the job being done by NASA, the U.S. space agency? In 1993 43 percent of you said NASA was doing a good or excellent job, today, the percentage giving NASA an excellent or good mark has gone up to 67 percent. I wonder what's happened since 1993. What do you think?

'John Holliman's View from Space' is posted each Wednesday in CNN Interactive's Space section.

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