The Watchtower: My Love Letter to the ISS’s Cupola Module on it’s 10th “Berth”-Day
In May 2015, an explosion with the force of a planet-sized nuclear bomb erupted on the surface of the sun, ejecting hundreds of millions of tons of magnetized particles toward the Earth. These particles were caught by Earth’s magnetic field and pulled toward the North and South Poles. Their sheer volume and energy excited the atoms of the atmosphere into a bright, colorful dance. Hurtling through this display at 4.8 miles per second was astronaut Terry Virts.
“I was floating through the middle of a living cloud of green radiation,” recalls Virts in his photobook View from Above. The experience, he says was, “Surreal, supernatural even, and one of the most unearthly experiences of my life… I will forever be grateful for the strokes of luck that made that experience possible.”
Virts was weightlessly floating in the International Space Station’s Cupola module, a domed observation tower with seven windows offering a 360-degree view of the exterior of the station and space beyond. The center window, the largest single pane ever put in space, looks down at the Earth as it turns below. The strokes of luck Virts mentions include the extension of his mission, the timing of the solar event that caused the unusually large auroras, and the orbital path of the station that brought him within the display. But perhaps the most fortuitous element of Virts’ experience, and the most essential, was the existence of the Cupola; during the module’s proposal and design, some in NASA’s leadership thought it superfluous and it was almost never launched.
In the nine years since its installation on the station, the Cupola has hosted many such incredible experiences for astronauts. The photos and videos they’ve taken within it and through its windows have helped to shape the cultural understanding of human spaceflight on Earth. But the experiential and cultural contributions of the module are nearly incidental; NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) designed the module for its more practical applications.
The Cupola was launched aboard the space shuttle Endeavor on February 8, 2010 — Virts’ first spaceflight. It is equipped with a robotics workstation, allowing astronauts to observe exterior robotic parts directly while they control them. They can also support colleagues on spacewalks and help with the docking and undocking of visiting spacecraft. Using the large central window, astronauts can make scientific observations and photographs of the Earth, and at night they can get clear looks at celestial objects as well.
“Multifunctionality is what NASA’s always looking for in the equipment that it flies,” says Jennifer Levasseur, a space history curator for the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum. Getting anything into space is costly and fuel intensive, so there are strict limits on what can be launched. Equipment that can fill many roles is ideal. This philosophy applies to astronauts as well — pilots, for instance, are trained in engineering and perform experiments for earthbound scientists of all disciplines.
“NASA wants one thing to serve lots of purposes,” Levasseur says. The Cupola really does that, and it has the added benefit of just being incredibly cool.”
In addition to the Cupola’s operational uses, it provides psychological benefits. In a NASA report on mitigating mental health issues on long-duration spaceflights, psychologist Anne Kearney notes the “overwhelming” support by astronauts to include windows. They offer astronauts, “a sense of perspective and ground one in reality.” Collections of windows like the Cupola that offer a three-dimensional, immersive experience are even better. Psychologists on the ground who regularly check in on the astronauts even prescribe time in the Cupola for its soothing properties.
“There’s this otherworldly perspective to it and the interaction that the astronauts have with it,” says Levasseur. “It’s not just a viewing place, it is a space. The astronauts always talk about it as something that you go into. You don’t go up to it. You go into it.” And they go into it at every opportunity.
“We try to do this as much as possible,” says Steve Swanson in a video tour of the station filmed in 2014 while gazing down at the Earth. “Unfortunately, we don’t get nearly as much time as we’d like. They make us do work.” This sentiment is widespread among ISS crewmembers and is doubly true for those whose hobbies take them to the module.
Astronaut Don Pettit is an avid photographer. His knowledge of photography and camera hardware far surpasses what NASA needs of their astronauts. Using spare parts aboard the ISS, he has created a tracker to take more stabilized images of the Earth. He also built a shade to block light from the rest of the station out of Cupola, allowing him to take better pictures at night. In addition to taking photos for scientific research and for public outreach as requested by NASA, Pettit has designed and conducted his own photography projects for personal artistic purposes.
As Kearney mentions in her report, hobbies like photography are an important way to keep astronauts happy and intellectually stimulated. But Pettit’s and others’ photos from the ISS have become important objects of cultural value for the rest of us on the ground. His time-lapse photography has been turned into stunning videos by collaborators, and he published his own photobook, Spaceborne.
“Space is a frontier,” said Pettit to an audience of photographers in 2012. “Photography is a wonderful medium to record scientific data, to record the knowledge that you discover there. [But] it’s also a good medium to record the experience.”
Pettit’s and others’ photos taken from within the Cupola have been able to help shape the public’s understanding of that experience. Astronauts often take self-portraits from within the module with the Earth below as a background. Group photos commemorating different missions and milestones are taken there as well.
“The images of the astronauts with the Cupola windows in the background and the Earth behind that, those are really significant in understanding the human body’s position and place in space,” says Levasseur.
Her doctoral work focused on the cultural impact of Apollo-era astronaut photography. In her dissertation, she gives special attention to Earthrise, the famous photo of Earth rising over the lunar surface taken by Apollo 8 astronauts as they rounded the far side of the moon.
“Earthrise became one of only a handful of defining visual moments of Apollo, combining the technical and mechanical with the ethereal and emotional… [It] became the single best visual expression of traditional notions of American cultural ideas during the so-called long ’60s. Americans travelled to the Moon and returned, ‘conquering’ the space ‘frontier.’”
Levasseur says the most culturally resonant photos taken form the Cupola today are those that depict the impact of human activity on the planet. Photos of extreme weather events like hurricanes, or comparison photos showing deforestation, are among the Cupola photos that have gone viral.
Photographs of human activity at night, light pollution from cities, or the striking differences in light coming from either side of the Korean border, are favorite subjects for both photographers and viewers. “The night photography becomes dramatic and influential in how we think about human activity and the impact that it’s had on the Earth,” she says.
It’s no coincidence that subjects that might stir conservation efforts are a favorite target of astronauts. Many have described what is known as the “overview effect,” the notion that looking down on the Earth from space highlights the planet’s preciousness and fragility in a way that causes a permanent change in perspective.
“We’re all flying through space together, as a team,” said astronaut Scott Kelly in a 2018 interview. “It gives you this perspective — people have described it as this ‘orbital perspective’ — on humanity, and you get this feeling that we just need to work better — much, much better — to solve our common problems.”
The space-shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003 interrupted construction of the ISS. As NASA recovered from the tragedy, the station’s development schedule was thrown into disarray. The addition of the Cupola, which had been in planning since the 1980s, was jeopardized. Compared to living quarters and science modules, some saw the Cupola as superfluous.
“It is like many other objects of its type: things that were seen by some, including NASA management, as accessories that then become really critical to our social and cultural understanding of space,” says Levasseur. “NASA underestimates the power and ability of those objects to make connections with people who don’t go into space.” She hopes that NASA will take these experiential, cultural, and artistic considerations into account when planning missions to Mars and beyond.
