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In the footsteps of Gagarin

Emma Bayley, Focus magazine, November 2001

On the night of 22 August this year, if you were looking up at a clear sky, you might have seen a large point of light chased by a much smaller point, moving speedily across the heavens from the west horizon to the east in a matter of minutes. This would have been the International Space Station (ISS) – which orbits Earth once every 90 minutes and is the third-brightest object in the night sky after the Moon and Venus – being pursued by a Russian Progress cargo vehicle bringing supplies to the new crew on board. The unmanned Progress-5 craft linked up to the Zvezda service module of the ISS at 09:51 GMT on 23 August, two days after it was launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Stocking up for orbit

Later that day, Station Commander Frank Culbertson (American), Pilot Vladimir Dezhurov (Russian) and Flight Engineer Mikhail Tyurin (Russian) opened the hatches between the two vehicles and unloaded around 3000 lbs of supplies and personal items. For Expedition Three, the third group of astronauts and cosmonauts to take up residency on the fledgling ISS, this was an important psychological moment. Stowing away these provisions marked the start of a four to five month stay in a home 240 miles (385 km) above Earth, where there is no gravity, and no easy escape.

As you read this, the several weeks they have already spent there will have taken a toll on their bodies. In zero gravity, astronauts and cosmonauts rapidly lose muscle tone, despite working out for at least two hours a day using exercise machines on board the station. Their food, although much improved since the unappetising freeze-dried cubes and powders of early space flights, still becomes monotonous after a few weeks (imagine eating aeroplane food for that long). And after a hard day’s work doing science experiments and labouring over the ongoing construction of the station, they can’t flop into a nice comfortable bed, but must learn to kip while floating in a sleeping bag.

Within this physically challenging context, they have to be mentally sharp at all times. They must hold in their heads instantly accessible knowledge of the station’s many onboard systems – life-support, motion control, communications – and be prepared for any situation that could arise from being at the frontline of the largest international peacetime project in human history. They are stuck with just two companions for months, yet they must remain psychologically strong. At any time, there could be an emergency requiring them to immediately evacuate the station in the Soyuz capsule on standby and hurtle back down to Earth. They would re-enter the atmosphere around two days later at speeds of several thousand miles an hour, and crash-land in an uncertain location.

All this means that the survival of cosmonauts and astronauts and the success of this extraordinary project – essentially a gigantic construction and social experiment in space – depends on a long, hard and complicated training, lasting around seven years. When it comes to building space stations and preparing people for extended stays in zero-g, the Russians are by far the most knowledgeable, and arguably the great pioneers of space exploration. For them, the application of science to space has been a defining characteristic and source of national pride and historic achievement since their country was remoulded by the Russian Revolution in 1918.

Ahead in the space race

The Americans may have beaten the Russians to the moon to demonstrate their technological superiority in the paranoid and hostile era of the Cold War, but it was in Russia that man’s future in space was first seriously conceived, by a visionary called Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. In 1911, he enunciated his most famous prophecy: “Mankind will not remain forever on the Earth. In pursuit of light and space he will timidly at first probe the limits of the atmosphere and later extend his control throughout the solar system.” Russia also launched into space the first satellite, Sputnik-1, on 4 October 1957 and, more importantly, on 12 April 1961, the first man, Yuri Gagarin, on board the spaceship Vostok.

When the Russians failed in their bid to put a man on the moon before the Americans, they turned their expertise to space stations. On 15 March 1971, the anonymous chief designer of the Communist Soviet space programme announced to the Moscow press: “It seems to me very expedient to build in the near future an orbital space station near the Earth that would operate for a very long time.” A month later, on 19 April, the world’s first space station, Salyut, was launched. The Russians have devoted their efforts to building and maintaining orbital outposts ever since; while, in the US, after the Apollo moon landings, NASA was forced by an unenthusiastic President Nixon to make do with the space shuttle programme.

Now Russia has another “space first” to add to its list of pioneering achievements – the training, launching and bringing back to Earth of the world’s first space tourist. On Saturday 28 April this year, 60-year-old Californian businessman Dennis Tito took off from Kazakhstan with two cosmonauts in the cramped capsule of a Soyuz rocket. He was taken on the two-day journey to the ISS, where he spent eight days before returning to Earth, touching down at 05:35 GMT on Sunday 6 May. He had trouble walking after leaving the spacecraft, and had to be taken to hospital for a medical checkup in a wheelchair, but described the whole experience, for which he paid $20 million, as a “trip to paradise”.

Officials at NASA were highly critical of the venture. Dan Goldin, the agency’s head, was said to have “bullied, bribed, blustered and lied” in his attempt to block Tito’s trip to the ISS. After a standoff with the Russians, he eventually gave Tito the go-ahead on the condition that he remained in the Russian segment of the station. In a speech to the US House of Representatives on Wednesday 2 May, Goldin said: “The current situation has put an incredible stress on the men and women of NASA. Mr. Tito does not realise the efforts of thousands of people, in the United States and Russia, who are working to protect his safety and the safety of everyone else.”

NASA’s attitude towards space tourism is the latest way in which the American approach to space has proved to be different from that of the Russians. For the Russians, the commercialisation of space is the logical next step in achieving Tsiolkovsky’s vision of a future where mankind’s presence is extended “throughout the solar system”. Since glasnost, the former Soviet Union has been financially stricken by political and social change, and the space programme, once funded by a near-blank cheque, now badly needs private money to keep going. For many at NASA, however, commercialisation of the space programme is seen as akin to selling the soul of America’s prestigious agency to the devil.

Yet feuding between the US and Russia no longer drives great achievements in space as it did during the Cold War. Now, it is cooperation, not competition, that fuels developments beyond Earth’s atmosphere. The construction and maintenance of the ISS depends on this spirit of unity and teamwork between the former superpower rivals. Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre at Star City, 40km northeast of Moscow, where cosmonauts have been trained since 1964, and American astronauts alongside them since 1995.

Until about ten years ago, in line with the Communist secrecy that surrounded Soviet achievement, Star City was off limits to non-Russians. But with glasnost came the Mir-Shuttle programme, known as Phase One of the ISS, and the Russian Aviation and Space Agency (Rosaviakosmos) at last opened its doors to non-Russian astronauts and started sharing the wealth of experience it had accumulated on how to survive long durations in space.

Cosmopolitan station

Now, with Phase Two – the actual construction of the ISS – underway, it is compulsory for anyone scheduled for a trip to the ISS to train at both Star City and at NASA’s equivalent, the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Although 14 nations are involved in the ISS project (including Brazil, Japan, Europe, Canada, the US and Russia), it is predominantly America and Russia who are responsible for its success and the training of its residents.

Star City is a quiet, leafy suburb that combines the offices and training buildings of the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre with old tower blocks housing around 6,000 Russians. Disused space capsules lie abandoned in the grounds. Hard times have resulted in an air of dilapidation – the only new houses to be seen are those built by the Russians for the Americans to rent when they come over to train at the Centre.

Bob Cabana recently was made NASA’s Director of Human Space Flight Programs in Russia. He says: “Star City has a family-type atmosphere. It doesn’t have the hustle and bustle of Moscow. It’s a country environment with a very tight community. The training day starts at nine o’clock in the morning, when classes begin, and continues until six in the evening, with a break in the middle of the day for lunch. Over the years, we’ve become very well adapted to the environment and well associated with our Russian counterparts. The goal is for astronauts to spend a year and a half training for an ISS mission, half here in Star City and half in the States.”

Since they joined forces in 1995 for the Shuttle-Mir programme, the Americans and Russians have been merging their training programmes towards a common ground. “We’ve taken the best of both,” says Cabana. “Initially, our approaches were a little different. The Russians had specific classroom instruction – a lot of notetaking, followed by oral and written examinations. They’ve now moved to more computer-aided training and, in the States, we’ve increased the number of exams and moved towards a more formal classroom environment.”

Igor Rudyaev, deputy head of the Foreign Economic Department at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre, says: “In Russia, we have more individual training and our tutors spend more time with crew members, teaching them all the things they will do during the space flight. In America, it’s a more private thing. The astronauts know the mission programme and study by themselves. If they have specific questions, they ask their tutors.”

Hard to lose weight

One aspect of training that is largely the same in both countries is spacewalk practice. “In both places, when it comes to EVA [extravehicular activity] training, it’s done in a pool,” says Cabana. “We have no simulator on Earth that can replicate a weightless environment. The best we can do is place somebody in a spacesuit and put them in a pool of water, and then, through a series of weights, we make the suit neutrally buoyant so it does not sink to the bottom of the pool or float to the surface. For the astronaut in the suit performing tasks in the water, that’s as close as we can get to him actually being weightless.”

For long durations in space, which today involve missions to the ISS but in the future could include a two-year round trip to Mars, psychological training is paramount. The Russian tutors are expert at assessing how someone reacts to situations and how they will fare in a stressful, confined, isolated space for long periods of time; and at how they work as a team member. Interestingly, they’ve found multinational teams to be the most effective, sometimes completing tasks two and a half times more quickly than crews from a single country. “It’s like mingling the bloods in a marriage. The greater the mixture, the better the child,” says Ivan Sivak, a former cosmonaut tutor, now a senior manager of international relations.

Rudyaev says: “When we took the first steps in international preparation for manned spaceflights, it was not easy to overcome the barrier of different national identities and languages. But now we have a very well-worked-out programme for the training, including very good language training – English for the Russian cosmonauts and Russian for the American astronauts.”

Having spent the last six years nurturing this spirit of cooperation, the ugly row over Tito’s flight was an unwelcome rift in relations. However, it has spurred NASA and the Russian agency to overcome the difference of opinion towards space tourists as a matter of urgency. Dennis Tito was by no means a oneoff when he decided he wanted to spend tens of millions on going into space. Already, another multimillionaire wannabe tourist has started training at Star City for a flight to the ISS. Mark Shuttleworth, a 28-year-old South African internet tycoon, enrolled through Space Adventures, the American company that brokered the deal between Tito and the Russian agency: “He’s learning Russian and has already passed his medical exam,” says Tereza Predescu, spokesperson for the company. “He’s looking forward to a possible flight in April 2002.”

To avoid another damaging confrontation between the Americans and Russians over Shuttleworth and future tourists, an agreement has been drawn up regarding space tourism. At the time of going to press, it is due to be signed within weeks by all ISS partners.

Obeying the space rules

“We’re just in the process of finalising the language of the agreement,” says Debbie Rahn, public relations officer at NASA. “It basically states that space participants must meet various categories of crew criteria, such as language ability, and personal and general suitability to fly. They must also agree to certain standards of behaviour. The Russians have formally requested to fly Mark Shuttleworth next year and the partners are assessing that request based on the crew criteria that is being finalised. So a process is in place that the Russians are following, which is very good news.”

Shuttleworth is expected to pay around the same amount as Tito did for his space trip and, because he will train primarily in Russia, fly on a Russian vehicle and stay predominantly in the Russian segment of the station, the money will mostly end up in Russian space coffers. With many Rosaviakosmos staff rumoured to be going without pay for months at a time due to the appalling state of the Russian economy, this newfound private funding promises to provide welcome financial relief for the Russian agency. Commercialisation is the only hope for the proud space nation, which has seen Mir deorbited and national space treasures sold in order to keep its involvement in the ISS afloat.

“The civilian era in space has begun and it’s impossible to stop it,” says Rudyaev. “Many people will come to space in the next few years.” Even NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) who, at present, do not want to cooperate directly with companies such as Space Adventures, recognise that the future of manned space exploration lies with tourism. “All the partners are interested in how we are going to utilise the space station from a commercial point of view,” says Cabana.

Against all the odds, the Russians are continuing to set landmark precedents for mankind in space. Anyone fortunate enough to train and travel to the ISS with them will experience more than the wonders of weightlessness and extraordinary views of Earth. They will be accompanying people who pride themselves on their ability to survive dire circumstances through resilience, resourcefulness and improvisation – and, in short, by their very nature, remain the masters of space.

Feeling the force

The centrifuge is used to study the trainee cosmonauts’ reactions to the sort of acceleration stresses they will experience under launch. The large centrifuge weighs 300 tons, has a radius of 18 m and can produce a force of 30G (although nowadays it is only pushed to 20G, because it is more than 40 years old). When rotating, it consumes 24 megawatts of electricity – the equivalent of a town of 100,000 people. Trainees are tested at various levels up to a maximum of 6G (during a real launch, the upper limit is 4.8G) for a period of 30 seconds at each level. As they rotate, the chamber’s pressure, temperature, humidity and air composition is varied. The chief doctor monitors the trainee’s physical reactions using medical sensors to ascertain how long the test should last.

Rehearsing zero-g

The hydrolaboratory at Star City is basically a massive circular swimming pool, 12 m deep and 23 m in diameter, which can contain 5000 cubic metres of water (when it is drained, local lakes rise noticeably). It is here that cosmonauts can practise spacewalks and test equipment in conditions that come as close as possible to matching the weightlessness experienced in the zero gravity of space. Neutral buoyancy is achieved in the water by using a series of weights in the spacesuit, which are adjusted by divers once the cosmonauts have been lowered into the pool. Under their suits, the cosmonauts have sensors attached to their bodies so that doctors can closely monitor the physical stresses they will undergo. Working underwater in a full spacesuit is particularly arduous – merely clenching one’s fist requires 25 kg of pressure. The suit weighs between 170 and 200 kg, and the pressure inside it is 0.4 kg. After two or three hours’ work underwater, even the fittest cosmonaut loses about 4 kg in body weight.

Eyewitness accounts: cosmonaut views from space

Sergei Krikalyov, ISS Expedition One crew member:

“The further you travel, the more you feel part of a big group of people. Traveling outside of Earth, I get this feeling of being part of mankind. So we do not represent only our countries in space; it’s an international adventure. It’s similar to what sailors feel when they are out at sea – if they meet another ship, they probably feel some kind of brotherhood; it doesn’t matter which flag is on the ship. The sea is a hostile environment, so people help each other to fight with nature.”

Mikhail Tyurin, ISS Expedition Three crew member:

“For me, the ISS is important because it’s a good way to share our culture, to learn to work together, to learn how we can understand each other. After several years have passed – 15, 20, maybe 25 – the station will stop its life; but our experience working together, how we were friends, will help future generations work together. These are the social results of this programme and, in my opinion, they are even more important than the science and technology.”

Linked from RuSpace news