Running on the beach is grand; learning geology is commendable; jungle living is amusing; the centrifuge hurts; the spacecraft ground tests are useful; but one is not to fly until the simulator has told him he is ready.
Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys
Korolev, 21 April 2014
The Russian Mission Control Centre, TsUP, is located in Korolev, in the larger Moscow metropolitan area. I have only vague memories of my first visit here four years ago, but I immediately recognize the huge mosaic that looms over visitors in the entrance hall. It shows the pantheon of cosmonautics: the visionary genius Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who wrote the ideal rocket equation; the brilliant and clever chief-engineer Sergey Korolev, after whom the city is named; and the young pilot Gagarin, who lent his bravery and his smile to the Soviet endeavour to open the road into space.
We have a long day ahead of us. Upon our arrival, we are led from the foyer to a large meeting room. Terry, Anton and I sit down off to the sides, leaving the central seats for the prime crew. In front of us sit approximately twenty specialists, each of whom will discuss the mission with reference to their area of expertise. Initially, we speak about the Soyuz flight, and I learn lots of interesting details, from fuel consumption to the Sun’s angle of incidence at the time of docking. These are preliminary calculations, and the final updates will be given to us in Baikonur a few days before the launch. When the issues related to the Soyuz have been covered, the discussion moves on to ISS activities and details that regard only cosmonauts and their work on the Russian segment. I quickly lose interest, and my mind begins to wander.
This week will be dedicated mostly to revision in view of the coming exams, and the exams themselves will follow in rapid succession, beginning next Monday. I’ve already taken the one on the manual re-entry, which was brought forward to last week because there was some issue about the availability of the centrifuge. A great beginning – top marks – and a chance to get to grips with the formality of Russian exams. Before the next test, manual docking, we have a special appointment, one I’m eagerly awaiting: on Thursday, Terry, Anton and I will visit the headquarters of Energia, the company that manufactures the Soyuz. By rare and lucky coincidence, we’ll have a chance to meet our spaceship, face to face.
Star City, 24 April 2014
My birthday is only two days away, and the gifts are already arriving.
This morning, when I woke up, I found an email from Brigitte reporting on the medical board meeting: I was fit for long-duration spaceflight, no questions asked. I have never been particularly worried about the yearly medical assessments, but after the contretemps of last month, it’s a relief to know that my certification is now written down in black and white.
The most thrilling gift, though, is waiting for me here, in the big industrial warehouse where, after a slow gestation, the Soyuz vehicles and their cargo twins, the Progress, are born. Several of them are scattered around the building, some of them still in embryonic state, others at a more advanced stage of assembly. However, I have eyes for only one of them. Finally, the specialist who’s leading the way points it out. It stands in a vertical position, surrounded by blue scaffolding: Soyuz TMA-15M. There it is, large as life, the spaceship that will carry me into space. It’s nearly finished, and it’s so beautiful, at least to my affectionate eyes.
Russian engineering is actually a distillation of functions pared down to their essentials, unembellished, yet with the genius of technical intuition. Formalism and individual flair co-exist in a completely natural way, together with elements of craftsmanship that are rather touching: right next to our Soyuz, for example, homely women sit sewing the metallic fabric of the external thermal blanket. You would never come across the same scene in the ascetic clean rooms of Europe or the US.
There’s a raft of white-shirted specialists waiting for us on the scaffolding. Some are holding papers or notebooks, probably procedures and documents to sign, yet many seem to have nothing in particular to do; maybe our visit is forcing them to interrupt their activity. On the third floor, Terry, Anton and I take off our shoes, put on a chef’s hat and enter the orbital module on all fours. Things are familiar and strange all at once. It’s not the simulator, worn by years of use. Everything’s new here: the orbital module burns up as it re-enters the atmosphere, so nothing can be reused. Our homework for today is pretty simple: to check that there aren’t any obvious discrepancies with what we expected. Aided by a list, we check each of the features we’ll interact with during the flight, one by one, from the cargo straps to the carbon dioxide removal cartridges.
I move around the cramped space cautiously, taking care not to touch anything by mistake. It’s partly sensible precaution, since soon I’ll be entrusting my life to this assemblage of metal, pipes and electronics, and partly the behaviour of a guest who has the keys to someone else’s house. The day when we can truly take possession of our Soyuz has not arrived yet. This is only a fleeting encounter, a chance to say hello before the spaceship undertakes the long train journey headed for Baikonur.
Star City, 28 April 2014
Today is the day Anton and I take our manual docking exam, which will test our ability to manually bring the Soyuz into contact with the Space Station using only visual cues. I haven’t lost any sleep over it, but I’m fairly nervous. For some time, I’ve easily managed all the simulator scenarios Sasha’s presented, but all the same, this is a tricky exam. Since I’ve been in Star City, I’ve known two veteran astronauts who’ve had to repeat it, despite being expert and well prepared, because the speed was too high at the moment of docking: the maximum allowed is 15 centimetres per second, little more than 0.5 kilometres per hour – any faster and you fail.
We’ve been in the simulator for more than three hours. Anton performed his four dockings, each of them perfect. We came out to stretch our legs for a few minutes, and then it was my turn to take the central seat. I completed the first two scenarios with full marks, and now I’m in the thick of the most difficult one: docking at the MIM-1 module without the main computer. MIM-1 is the actual module we’ll be docking to in space. It’s particularly tough because the target is rotated about 40° relative to the longitudinal axis of the ISS, so that you are continually correcting on two axes to compensate for the rotation of the Space Station. Yes – because the ISS is spinning as it rotates around the Earth: it brings the nose down, so to speak, to follow the curvature of the orbit and to maintain a constant attitude relative to the local vertical.
‘TsUP in Moscow, do I have permission to proceed to docking?’ I ask. I’ve completed the flyaround and I’m aligned with the port, about 70 metres away. Through my headphones comes Sasha’s authorization to proceed.
In addition to managing the simulator and loading the scenarios, Sasha is also playing the role of Mission Control for our simulated radio communications. Behind her, on two rows of chairs, sits the examining committee, which includes representatives from Energia who’ve come here for the occasion.
I push forward the lever under my left index finger to start the final approach and correct the alignment with ever greater precision, as the target grows larger in my viewer. I stop, as always, at about 2 metres distance, and I take my time aligning myself perfectly. I have to give continual braking thrusts, because the thrusters I’m using to correct the attitude also have a forward impulse component, a troublesome coupling for which you must compensate manually if the main computer has failed. When I feel ready, I give a two-second forward impulse while I keep working to maintain the alignment, deflecting the controls in brief pulses. Shortly before contact, I have an unsettling feeling: I’m going too fast. At the last moment, I hit the lever backwards, lightly, to give a braking impulse. A very good decision, and just in time: Sasha announces a contact speed of 12 centimetres per second.
Relieved, I prepare myself mentally for the fourth and final scenario: night docking. I follow the instructions to approach up to 70 metres, switch on the floodlight and wait for orbital night. As soon as it’s dark, I remove the solar filter from the viewer so I can see the illuminated target better. Flying is now more tiring. In order to keep the image within sight, I have to align my head perfectly with the periscope, and in the final approach, the light is blinding. When I stop 2 metres away, I’m blinking wildly, and I struggle not to allow my discomfort to rush me, since I know well that your sense of speed is distorted during a night docking. I need to be precise in halting the approach and then trust in those two seconds of impulse. And here I am, moving … a few seconds of holding my breath while I continue to correct the alignment, and finally … contact. At 8 centimetres per second, perfect!
I turn towards Anton, and we exchange a smile. Top marks for our crew. Maybe bad manners as far as the prime crew is concerned – there’s an unwritten rule that the prime crew should be given a chance to do better than their back-up. But never mind! Maksim and Reid certainly won’t hold it against us.
Star City, 4 May 2014
‘Good morning, Terry. Anton says he’s free at 2.00 p.m. Let’s meet here at the Profilaktorium.’
‘Perfect. My cottage is also an option. Big table, lots of space.’
My exam notes
‘OK, let’s go for your cottage. What number is it?’
‘Five. Oh no! I guess I’ve never had anybody over!’
‘Big day. You’d better do some cleaning!’
‘Should I get dressed?’
‘No. C’mon! It’s not THAT formal!’
My email exchange with Terry has the usual easy-going tone, but the content is unusual: a Sunday study appointment with the entire crew. We don’t often see Anton at the weekend because he’s usually busy with his family, but I insisted that we get together today for a few hours. I’ve already spent an entire day going over the books with Reid, reviewing all the emergency procedures, but I’ll be taking the Soyuz exam with Terry and Anton the day after tomorrow, and it’s important that we’re clear about the distribution of our tasks, above all in hectic situations such as a fire or rapid depressurization. Maybe it’s not really necessary, but a little team chair flying won’t do us any harm.
Up to now, the exams have all gone very well, and the final two were last week: the manual rendezvous, in which Anton flew four approaches from 3 kilometres to 100 metres away, and the one on the flight programme, an hour-long theoretical exam in which we answered questions about the sequence of operations and the content of communications with the Control Centre. The only ones left are two big simulations, each of them lasting a day: Soyuz and the Russian segment of the Space Station.
Star City, 6 May 2014
The morning started out calm, almost boring. Dima familiarized us with having up to twenty different failures in one simulator session; only five are expected on the exam. The first one came towards noon, more than three hours into our simulated flight. At 40 metres from the Space Station, a double malfunction with the Kurs system caused the computer to abort the automatic approach and to initiate a separation manoeuvre. The computer is programmed to do this for safety’s sake, but our task is to interrupt that manoeuvre and to proceed with the approach in manual mode. While Anton was flying us in, I prepared myself for possible docking-system malfunctions, suspecting that we’d have to deal with at least one other failure before we arrived at the Space Station. The docking system has a suite of sensors and an ingenious working logic, but it’s somewhat convoluted, and there are only seconds to recognize a possible problem and determine the action to be taken. Indeed: after the receiving mechanism on ISS already had a solid grip on our docking probe, a malfunction made the Soyuz believe it had touched the wrong place, so it ignited the thrusters for moving away, attempting to pull the 450-tonne Space Station along with it. We inhibited that automatic response too, and then continued to perform the procedure manually until we got the hooks closed. Now the lunch break is announced. ‘War is war, but lunch is served on time.’ Russians love to recite this saying of uncertain origin.
A van takes us to the cafeteria, perhaps once a sort of officers’ club. There’s a table laid for us, and at an adjacent one sit Alex, Reid and Maksim, who are today dealing with the exam on the Russian segment of the Space Station. They’re curious to know which scenario we were given, since it means they won’t have it tomorrow, but we don’t have much to say yet. The more serious failures await us this afternoon, during our re-entry to Earth. After a fantastic borscht, followed by fish, potatoes and a couple of sweet pierogi – buns filled with cooked apple – it’s time to return to the simulator and put on our Sokol suits again. I try to regain my concentration quickly, because the next half hour is critical, and we’ll soon know if we’ve chosen an envelope with an especially challenging scenario.
We take up our seats in the simulator and prepare for departure from the Space Station, performing the leak checks and confirming the activation of the automatic undocking sequence. While the computer pressurizes the propellant tanks, I watch the telemetry attentively, ready to catch any indications of leakage: nothing, all is nominal. We are therefore ready to undock.
The smoke appears almost immediately, and right away we realize that it’s going to be a frenzied afternoon. Anton calls out, ‘Close and lock your visors,’ which our six hands are already doing in unison. It’s my responsibility to lower the lever next to my left shoulder, the one that opens the suits’ oxygen supply and halts the air circulation, preventing the smoke from contaminating our Sokols. A continuous flow of oxygen is necessary to allow us to breathe, to keep our visors from fogging up and to keep us from overheating. Yet it’s also dangerous: only a small part of the oxygen that enters our suits is consumed by our breathing; the rest flows out into the cabin through the regulator valve, and this increases the flammability of the air in the descent module. We must depressurize and let all the air out into space when the oxygen concentration reaches 40 per cent, and not a moment later. It’s a race against time.
As soon as possible, Anton launches Program 5, an automatic sequence that will set us up for a ballistic re-entry. I take Form 14 out of my kneeboard, looking for the right time to ignite the engine for this orbit. We have barely twenty minutes left. If we don’t make it in time, we’ll have to wait for the next orbit. An extra hour and a half in a depressurized capsule isn’t a very tempting proposition.
Anton and I start to execute different procedures simultaneously, each trying to keep an eye on what the other is doing. Not checking each other’s work increases the risk of error, but we don’t have a choice in this scenario: time is too short. While Anton focuses on monitoring Program 5, I execute all the actions preparatory to depressurization. Terry, who’s a whiz at mental arithmetic, keeps tabs on the partial pressure of oxygen and gives me an estimate of the time I have left to release the air from the cabin. When the moment comes, I turn a locknut and raise the cover on the two command buttons which, when activated in sequence, will open the relief valve in the descent module.
‘Ready for depressurization?’
‘Ready,’ say Anton and Terry.
Command 20, followed by command 21. With the simulator’s typical precision, the pressure gauge immediately begins to fall.
At this point, I rejoin Anton in the descent procedure. Program 5 is automatically taking care of the orientation of the Soyuz along the local vertical, but too slowly. While Anton and I discuss whether we should take over manually to speed up the process, a new alarm jolts us out of this uncertainty: the main computer has failed. We have to switch to the back-up computer, with its more limited capacity, and manually perform not only the orientation, but also the engine ignition and the separation sequence. At least we don’t expect any further surprises: we’ve just managed the fifth and last failure, which put an angular rate sensor out of action.
Meanwhile, our suits are getting hotter and hotter. Luckily, a dozen procedures pages later, when we’re virtually hanging from the parachute with only a few simple actions left to execute, the committee takes pity on us and declares the exam over. We have permission to leave the simulator and take a shower. I’m tired and hot, but really satisfied. I expect they’ll point out a couple of minor mistakes, but I’m convinced that we did a good job overall. We are a well-honed team.
—
It wasn’t quite time to celebrate – we still had one more exam the following day – but that evening I felt mildly euphoric. I was so happy: many people had come up to congratulate us. We’d made a fantastic impression. After a lifetime spent dreaming about going into space, I had got to the place where I was finally prepared. They were going to put me in charge of a spaceship, at least partially, in my capacity as flight engineer, in the knowledge that I was able to look after it. Wasn’t this the most important goal? I was so pleased that actually going into space seemed like a minor detail now.
The next day, Terry, Anton and I showed up early in the Space Station mock-up hall for our exam on the Russian segment. ‘Esteemed committee, the back-up crew for ISS Expedition 40/41 is ready for the exam,’ Anton declared. I knew the routine by now. The six panel members, all of them space veterans, stood in a row in front of us. There were two NASA representatives: Suni, who’d come to Russia after her mission as commander of the ISS to run NASA operations in Star City, and Dan Burbank, who’d arrived from Houston especially for the exams. The last time Dan and Anton had been in this situation, they were on the same side of the table as crewmates. I suspect that Dan would have been happy to change places.
I selected one of the four white envelopes neatly lined up on the table, and all three of us signed it before climbing the stairs to the Service Module mock-up, where we waited for the simulation to begin. The envelope contained a series of malfunctions, and apart from one emergency scenario, they concerned Anton alone. For Terry and me it was a simple exam: all they expected from us was that we perform daily activities such as food preparation, using the water dispenser and the toilet, changing the container for urine and solid waste. I had to open and close some hatches, use various Russian computer screens, replace some filters and take a water sample for on-board analysis. As we expected, halfway through the afternoon there was an emergency scenario. A call on the radio alerted us that Mission Control could observe on the telemetry data a pressure drop inside the Space Station. We checked the unwieldy analogue pressure gauge – the instructors controlled it via radio according to the demands of the simulation – and of course we confirmed that the needle was moving towards lower pressures. We triggered the rapid depressurization alarm to initiate the automatic response from the on-board computer; we reset the communication system so we could receive Houston and Moscow on all channels; and we quickly moved into the Soyuz in order to ensure, above all, that our lifeboat wasn’t the one leaking, and to calculate our reserve time, or the amount of time left before we would have to evacuate the Space Station if we couldn’t isolate the leak. Retreating to the Soyuz for several minutes would have another advantage: it would allow the Russian airflow sensors to work undisturbed. With a bit of luck, they would automatically identify the affected module. They’re not completely reliable, and for this reason we often simulate scenarios in which we have to find the leak manually, isolating each module one by one. But that day I’d chosen the lucky envelope: the airflow sensors successfully located the leak. Quick emergency resolution, exam over.
After a debriefing in a crowded room, it was time to celebrate the prime crew, who had meanwhile completed their own Soyuz exam. It was the first of many occasions over the next three weeks in which we would find ourselves gathered around a groaning table drinking toasts to Alex, Reid and Maksim with glasses of vodka and cognac: to the success of their mission, the love of their families, the professionalism of the instructors who’d prepared them, the strength of friendship in the international ISS community, and occasionally, to us, the back-up crew. Per tradition, we were jokingly urged to behave in such a way that no one would have considered us suitable for replacing the prime crew. This final toast was a relic of the past, when the back-up crew generally didn’t yet have its own assignment. We did, though, and we were content to wait our turn, six months down the line. Far from envying my friends who were so close to launch, I expected the coming weeks to be some of the happiest of my life.
The festivities went on until late, and in fact the next morning we showed up rather sleepy to the meeting with the committee who would officially acknowledge our exam results. Formally we weren’t ready to fly, not yet, but we were ‘admitted to the next stage of training in Baikonur’. Only a few days before the launch, another committee would officially confirm us as prime crew and back-up. However, in actual fact only a serious and unforeseen event would keep Alex, Reid or Maksim from leaving for space. We would shadow them right up to the launchpad, and on the night of 28 May, we would watch them shoot into the sky in pursuit of the International Space Station.
After the meeting with the committee and a long press conference, it was time to take part in a series of ritual events. Like all the Space Station crews that had come before us, we, too, signed the visitors’ book in Yuri Gagarin’s office, faithfully reconstructed in the Star City museum, and placed red carnations on his tomb at the foot of the Kremlin wall. But I don’t know if other crews had our good fortune. On that splendid spring day, the sky was clear, and Red Square was completely deserted. Access roads were blocked by barriers in preparation for the next day’s celebrations: 9 May is Victory Day (Den’ Pobedy). We entered the square from the south, next to Saint Basil’s Cathedral, its colours sparkling in the clear light as if it wanted to join in the festive atmosphere. I thought back to my first visit to Red Square on a grey, autumnal Sunday fourteen years before, when Saint Basil had been swallowed by a rainy sky and young women in red mini-skirts and stiletto heels braved the cold to sell cans of Coca-Cola to passers-by. At the time, I never imagined that one day I’d walk through a bright and empty Red Square accompanied by people with whom I was sharing the greatest adventure of my life.
