At the ISS mission control in Moscow, staff are overseeing the Russian segment of the space station and scheduling Soyuz supply missions. Even on a routine day, in other rooms at the space centre, mission controllers are planning station procedures weeks and months ahead. “You see the people here, that’s just the tip of the iceberg of what’s happening.”Īround the world hundreds of other people are also working to support the mission. “We have to make sure they’re healthy, they’re safe, they have a sound platform to do the work we’ve sent them up there to do,” says Foster. It sits at the heart of the mission’s operations and oversees astronauts’ daily routines regardless of events on Earth. This room has been staffed continuously, around the clock, since the launch of the first sections of the ISS in 1998. “If anything pops up there, the computers on board the station have determined that something’s not working right and it’ll come up as either a black, yellow or red warning,” he says. He points out the blank middle section of one of the large screens at the front of the room. In front of us, some 20 people sit behind consoles surrounded by banks of computer screens displaying a mass of numbers, graphs and tables.įoster’s role is to coordinate control room and communications systems to make sure everything is working smoothly, but he has been allowed a break to chat to me. “The crew has just had lunch, it’s a routine day with not a lot of activity going on, which is good,” explains ground control officer Bill Foster, as we sit in the viewing gallery overlooking the ISS mission control room in Houston, Texas. However, since the picture is beamed live from the International Space Station (ISS), drama is not what the controllers on the ground are after.
Occasionally someone drifts into view, adjusts something, and then moves out of vision. On a huge screen at one end of a giant room is an image of a white-walled corridor, harshly lit by strip lights and cluttered with equipment, ducts and wires.
#International space station inside tv#
It could be the most boring reality TV show in the world, if the stakes were not so high.
Our space correspondent meets the controllers of the International Space Station as they steer away from deadly space junk and keep astronauts alive.
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