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By Root 824 0

hard partying, and my friends Bill Harwood from CBS, Hugh Harris from NASA, Bill Larson from ABC, Colonel Bill Coleman from Fighter Pilots ‘R Lonely, Michael Cabbage from the Orlando Sentinel, Diana Boles from Cats Unlimited, Eddie Harrison from Sailors ‘R Us, and many other spaceflight vets wanted to keep the party spirit going. New Year’s Eve 2000 was approaching and such a special New Year deserved to be celebrated in a special place, so we rounded up all the old folks from the Mercury days we could find and pounded on the air force’s door. We wanted to welcome 2000 with a New Year’s Eve party on John Glenn’s historic Mercury launch pad. All the little naysayer lieutenant colonels trying to make bird colonels threw up their hands in total disbelief. (“These drunks will kill themselves on air force property. They’ll drive into the ditches, into buildings, it’ll just be awful, and I will not have this on my record.”) But a sharp and bright and fun-loving commanding brigadier general by the name of Randy Starbuck said, “Let them have Glenn’s pad,” and picked up his cap, walked through his office door, and with a knowing grin quickly left town.

The little naysayer lieutenant colonels were forgetting that our generation had always been responsible. As Americans, we didn’t take a backseat to anyone. We sent the first astronauts into orbit and to the moon, and we sure as hell weren’t about to destroy something as sacred as John Glenn’s launch pad.

Our buddy Ken Warren of the Cape’s public affairs office put on his cleanest and brightest Dallas Cowboys jersey and ran interference. Ken kicked and stomped and shoved the traffic-cop mentality aside. Five hundred old Mercury and Gemini and Apollo vets showed up along with a 1950s big band from Disney World, and we danced to the oldies, saying our good-byes to the 1900s and throwing our arms around the 2000s without dropping a single soiled napkin on historic ground.

When it was over, and the year 2000 was firmly in place, we drove off the military site without driving into a single ditch, singing, “We’ll always love you, General Starbuck.”

As the century turned, construction was getting underway on the International Space Station. The orbiting outpost was to be as large as two football fields set side by side, with Russia’s Zarya control module launched first atop one of that country’s huge Proton rockets. The second part followed two weeks later aboard America’s Space Shuttle Endeavour. The crew captured Zarya with the Shuttle’s robotic arm and mated it with part two, called the Unity Node. Another Space Shuttle delivered and outfitted the infant station with logistics and supplies, and yet another crew readied it for the arrival of its main segment, Russia’s Zvezda service module.

On July 12, 2000, Zvezda launched atop a Russian Proton and docked with Zarya and the Unity Node. Two more service flights were flown before the first crew, to live and work aboard the International Space Station, arrived on October 31, 2000.

Within weeks, astronauts and cosmonauts were in the swing of things, and the construction flights were jumping off American and Russian launch pads without a hitch. Mission after mission was building the station that would, when finished, include eight large cylindrical sections called modules.

The modules were carried from Earth separately in the cargo bays of America’s Space Shuttle fleet and on the nose of Russia’s Proton rockets, and construction spacewalkers connected each section in orbit. Eight giant solar panels were needed to supply enough electricity to power a small city after being mounted on 360 feet of metal framework. The first of four sets of solar arrays, and the backbone truss to support them, were carried to the station November 30, 2000. The heart of America’s operation aboard the station, the Destiny Laboratory, was attached to the station in February 2001, and Canada’s big robotic arm that would be used as a construction crane arrived the following April. More truss and backbone sections for the huge orbiting platform were sent up in