The countdown is progressing in earnest for the first crew to inhabit the new International Space Station in early November. Next week, the Space Shuttle Atlantis will ferry supplies to the orbiting station, which is still under construction. Who will be the first astronauts to move in?

What's it like to meet an astronaut? That's what I wondered as I flew to Houston, Texas, to visit the Johnson Space Center as a special guest of the JASON Project's "Going to Extremes" expedition.

For me, meeting an astronaut was the equivalent of meeting Michael Jordan or Robin Williams or Michelle Kwan. But, unlike these other well-known people, I've never been fully convinced that astronauts are real. I needed much more direct experience with the world of space travel to be fully convinced.

Astronauts certainly weren't real in the 1940s when I was young, and when space travel was the stuff of Buck Rogers--the Star Trek of my generation. In 1969, I watched Neil Armstrong's televised walk on the moon, and though my mind kept saying it was really happening, all my instincts were screaming that it couldn't be true.

I met Commander William M. Shepherd, or "Shep" as he is called by his associates, at a dinner the night before my visit to the Space Center. I was deeply interested in learning about him and his work. What surprised me was that he was also interested in hearing about my work in education. I soon understood why. Shep's work is a constant learning and problem-solving process. And, because he is usually working with others as a team, he is also involved in helping others to learn. He is a teacher.

Shep has already flown three missions for NASA and logged more than 440 hours in space. He has been training since 1996 with two Russian cosmonauts (Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev) for a mission in early November to be the first crew to live and work aboard the International Space Station, now being constructed in Earth orbit. They train about an hour from Moscow at an old monastery that once served as a top-secret facility for Soviet-era astronauts.

On this mission, Shep will spend almost four months aboard the International Space Station. During that time, three space shuttle assembly missions will dock with the Space Station and provide new components for it.

Shep enthusiastically described the special learning challenges of working effectively with two colleagues from a different country, a different space program, and a different linguistic background. He sees it as an extraordinary achievement that Russians and Americans can effectively collaborate to make the mission happen. As he pointed out to me with a very big smile, "It is wonderful working together with people I used to think I had to fight. Now we are dedicated to working together to make the Space Station happen."

I asked Shep why he believes the International Space Station is important. He believes that it shows that humans have the capacity to go elsewhere in the solar system. Because the logistics of travel in our solar system and beyond require a mission-staging station outside of Earth's atmosphere, the Space Station provides a foundation for all further space exploration.

It is also, he added, very important as a symbol of international cooperation on Earth. Many nations are sharing the risk of the project and the task of gathering the necessary financial resources to carry it. That teamwork has important long-term implications for international collaborative efforts to address and solve worldwide problems.

I asked Shep why they had to build the Space Station in orbit. Why couldn't they build it on Earth and just ship it up into orbit? He told me that the Space Station is much too big to put into orbit as a finished product. How big? Well, when finished, the overall dimensions will be about 356 feet by 290 feet.

• About how many football fields would cover the same area?

Clearly I had not been thinking big enough. Shep assured me that my visit to the Space Center the next day would help me get a better sense of the scale of the project.

The next day, with Shep as a guide, I joined other people from the JASON Project on a guided tour of full-size training models of some of the pieces of the Space Station and of the space shuttle. We were able to walk into and through these models and really begin to feel what it might be like to occupy them in space

The Space Station will contain six research laboratories, in addition to crew quarters. While the interior spaces are a bit cramped (especially for my 6-foot, 2-inch height), the total volume of space that will eventually be available to the astronauts is large (the interior pressurized space will be about the same as the space in a 747 aircraft--about 43,000 cubic feet).

• How does that volume of space compare to the volume of space in your home?

You can catch a glimpse of what I saw on my walk by taking a virtual tour.

With a model of the space shuttle right next to the model of the Space Station modules, it was easy to see how each module could be put in the shuttle's huge cargo bay and then taken out for assembly in space. An opportunity to crawl into the crew and cockpit area of the shuttle gave me a realistic sense of the shuttle crew's work space. Now the whole Space Station project was becoming real enough for me that I could even imagine myself signing up for the next trip.

But I wasn't done yet. I next had a chance to tour and view the Space Center's gigantic "swimming pool," where astronauts train for various space tasks in conditions of neutral buoyancy. Once again, I saw full-size models of Space Station modules, but this time, they were immersed in the pool. The Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory is 202 feet long, 102 feet wide, and 40 feet deep. It holds 6.2 million gallons of water.

• To get an understanding of how large this volume is, find out the volume of water in a swimming pool in your school or community. How many pools of your size would fit in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL)?

Astronauts, wearing SCUBA gear, spend up to five hours a day in this tank and take as many as 12 days to practice one particular task they will carry out in space. Since I love being underwater, I felt that work in the NBL might be the best part of astronaut training for me.

• What do you think is the major difference between working underwater and working in space? Is working in space easier or harder?
  
  

During our continuing conversation, Shep shared some valuable perspectives on education. He told of a time when he was teaching art classes to Navy SEAL trainees. The purpose of the classes was to give the trainees some basic skills in drawing and sketching so they could create visual images of things when conditions did not permit the use of cameras. He was surprised that very few could draw well. Most seemed stuck at the skill level of a second- or third-grader. It concerned Shep that an educational system could seemingly arrest the natural development of young learners. And he wondered if the same phenomenon might also happen to children in other subjects.

Shep believes that the demands of today's work world (especially jobs requiring advanced skills) are currently not being met because of a lack of well-prepared and well-trained people. This reflects problems in our educational process going back about 20 years. It seems then, that the challenge for education today is to have a strong vision of what the future will require of our students 20 years from now and to make our educational system effectively serve that vision.

Finally, he feels that we must fully embrace the concept that a person's education in today's world is a lifelong endeavor. Thus, education during the first 12 years must be a strong preparation for a life of continuous learning.

I asked Shep what he sees as the next exciting development in technology in his work. Shep imagines a time in the future when data from the Space Station or from a space mission can be shared directly with people in their homes. When they look at the data from space, they would be able to understand it, and they might react to what is happening and offer thoughts and advice to the astronauts.

I told Shep that I looked forward to the day I might hear from him from space. And I wished him good fortune on his upcoming mission to the International Space Station.

Learn More

More Links

• You can track the path of the International Space Station, both now and when Shep and his crew are living there.

Related Resources

• Get International Space Station : A Space Mission (Countdown to Space).

Dr. Henry Olds is a long-time space buff who, thanks to his tour of the Johnson Space Center, will follow Shepherd's mission with a new appreciation for the challenges involved.