Shepherd, Krikalev and Gidzenko dock at the space station and float inside
Two years after the first piece of the International Space Station reached orbit, the complex was still an empty set of modules. Shuttles and Russian flights had added modules, but nobody lived aboard. On November 2, 2000, the Soyuz TM-31 capsule, launched from Baikonur two days earlier, docked at the aft port of the Zvezda Service Module at 09:21 UTC. Ninety minutes later, American commander William Shepherd opened the hatch, and he and cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko entered as the station's first resident crew.
Shepherd, a NASA astronaut, commanded a station built by the United States and Russia together, with two cosmonauts as his flight engineers. Americans had previously stayed in orbit only on shuttle visits. Shepherd's insistence on a ship's vocabulary, including the call sign "Alpha," carried a Navy tradition of command into space.
QHow long did it take the first station crew to switch on a food warmer that was scheduled for 30 minutes?
A day and a half. In the first month aboard, activating the food warmer in Zvezda's galley was planned as a half-hour job, and the astronauts needed roughly 36 hours to finish it. Electricity was limited, and some modules were left unheated. Electricity was limited, and some modules were left unheated. Shepherd made the same point about the pressure of the first weeks. A hot meal was one of the smaller tasks on the list, and it still ran far past its slot.
QWhich Russian space executive wanted the station's call sign to be "Beta" or "Mir 2" instead of "Alpha"?
Yuriy Semenov, president of Russian Space Corporation Energia, objected to "Alpha." He preferred "Beta" or "Mir 2," reasoning that Mir had been the first space station, so the new one should not carry the first-letter name. The crew asked for the call sign out of naval tradition. Shepherd and Krikalev, an American and a Russian, both favored "Alpha." The crew still requested and received authorization to use it, despite Semenov's objection.
QWhat did the first station crew do on Christmas Day and New Year's, 200-plus miles above the people they were calling?
On Christmas Day the crew was given the day off work. They opened presents that had arrived aboard the shuttle Endeavour and a Progress supply ship, then spoke to their families on the ground. At the turn of the year, Shepherd followed a naval tradition and wrote a poem on behalf of the crew for the New Year's entry in the station's log. Both days fell in a stretch of heavy workload. The ham radio contacts with schools and clubs, beginning with Luther Burbank School in southwest Chicago, were another way the crew stayed in touch with the ground.
