PopSci Predicts: The Year Ahead

Supersizing the Space Station

The deadline: 2010. The key year to meeting that deadline: 2007

When the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated in 2003, only 49 percent of the International Space Station´s intended hardware was in place. The disaster led to the shuttle´s mandatory retirement in 2010 and, in so doing, created a hard deadline for the completion of the $100-billion ISS. If the orbital construction project is ever going to be the world-class research facility and moon/Mars stepping stone scientists first envisioned two decades ago, 2007 will be a very busy year indeed.

NASA has scheduled 14 more assembly missions to complete the ISS, five of them this year. If all five prove successful, by this December humanity´s only outpost in space will be 30 percent more massive, have 5,000 more cubic feet of space, generate nearly triple the power, and, most remarkably, boast two new state-of-the-art science labs.

Europe´s Columbus Lab and the Japanese Experiment Module (nicknamed Kibo) are the coming year´s marquee payloads. These billion-dollar bus-size modules will greatly expand the outpost´s research capabilities in terrestrial science (drug development and climate study, for example) and in work vital for long-duration missions to the moon and Mars, such as space medicine and radiation shielding. Also on the manifest: a Canadian-built robot called Dextre, for Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator. Once permanently affixed to the station, Dextre will use its two 11.5-foot-long, seven-jointed appendages to perform intricate repairs that would otherwise require spacewalks, giving astronauts more time to spend in the new labs.

This year´s efforts will be the most challenging series of space missions ever attempted-â€even more complex than Apollo,†says NASA spokesperson Allard Beutel. Given the troubled track record of both the ISS and the shuttle, it´s not surprising that many doubt the agency´s ability to pull it all off on schedule. â€The station and shuttle are always surprising us with new problems. The plan is not going to go right by the book,†warns Louis Friedman, director of the Planetary Society. â€It is very unlikely that we´re going to have that many successful flights on so tight a schedule. If we do, we´ll be lucky.†And we´ll see the troubled station become the long-promised training ground for the next generation of space travelers. -Rena Marie Pacella

The Year's Top 5 Space Launches

1. Themis Probes
   On January 21, NASA will send five small spacecraft into the heart of the violent geomagnetic disturbances in the Earth´s magnetosphere. The goal: to uncover how magnetic substorms in the region cause the colorful northern lights.
2. China´s Chang´e 1
   China´s first lunar orbiter will kick off the country´s ambitious moon program on April 17. During its year in orbit, the instrument-loaded probe will survey the lunar surface to prepare for an upcoming Chinese lander mission.
3. Dawn Spacecraft
   On June 21, NASA´s ion-propelled Dawn will take off for the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where it will study the two most massive space rocks in our solar system, Vesta and Ceres, which was recently promoted to dwarf-planet status.
4. Phoenix Mars Lander
   The low-cost NASA spacecraft will blast off toward the martian arctic in August to look for signs of life (present or past) in the ice that lies just beneath the Red Planet´s surface.
5. GLAST Telescope
   On October 7, the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope will launch into orbit and begin to observe our universe´s most fascinating phenomena, including black holes, quasars and neutron stars.