Home (far!) away from home

HOME (FAR!) AWAY FROM HOME This summer rockets and shuttles are scheduled to carry into space the first building blocks of the new space station. Although its designers describe those blocks as giant Tinkertoys, the space station is an enormously complex endeavor. If completed as planned in the year 2003, this orbiting community will fulfill a dream first envisioned in 1857.

That's the year the Atlantic Monthly published Edward Everett Hale's story, "The Brick Moon," a science fiction account of an orbiting space base made of clay bricks hauled up from Earth.

The term "space station" was first used by the German scientist Hermann Oberth in 1923 to describe platforms in orbit that would be used to launch flights to the moon and other planets.

Partly to compete with the Soviet Union, President Ronald Reagan announced in 1983, that the U.S. would build an outpost in space named "Freedom." But the times changed. The Soviet Union broke apart. And the Russians became our friends.

The vision of the space station also changed. The new design was called "Alpha." When the Russians joined in the effort, a combination of the words "Russian" and "Alpha" produced the name "Ralpha," or "Ralph" for short.

By 1995, so many countries had become involved in the effort that clever acronyms no longer worked. The proposed space station became simply the International Space Station, or ISS, a name that most likely will be improved upon before the first crew moves in in 1999. Maybe we could borrow Mr. Hale's idea and call our new orbiting home, "The Tinkertoy Moon."