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Russian Space Camp

Jane Ellen Stevens, Discovery.com, 2000

Dispatch 1: Blast Off! to Space Camp

I’m going to space camp! Not the “Disneyland” version offered in the United States. This is the real thing. Cosmonaut training camp in Star City, Russia.

Strapped for cash, the Russian Space Agency has flung open its once top-secret doors to any healthy civilian with $15,000 to spare.

For six intense days, I’ll ride a 30-G centrifuge, practice EVAs (extravehicular activities) in a 1.3 million gallon, neutral buoyancy facility (a 36-foot deep swimming pool) and experience three minutes of weightlessness during parabolic flights (I know it’s called the “Vomit Comet,” but please, please, please, I don’t wanna puke).

I’ll rub shoulders with cosmonauts who are training for duty aboard the International Space Station. I’ll operate the same docking simulator in which Russia’s cosmonauts rehearse before they fly Soyuz into space to link up with that granddaddy of all space stations, the venerable Mir. My blood pressure will be taken on the same table, with the same equipment used by Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space. Through it all, a cosmonaut will be my guide. Our guide. Six other space-walking wannabes and me.

During this one short week, we’ll experience a smidgen of the thousands of hours of training that cosmonauts and some astronauts must complete to live in space. We’ll peer into the inner workings of the world’s other space power, observe the Russian approach to space and perhaps get an idea of how these two very different space cultures will clash or coalesce on the International Space Station.

The Russian Space Agency dipped its toe into space tourism in 1990, when it sold a spot on Mir to a reporter from a Japanese broadcasting company for $10 million. Shortly thereafter, it embraced the commercial space business and began selling civilians one-day experiences in a parabolic flight, or EVA training in the neutral buoyancy facility, and providing access to these training experiences to filmmakers.

Seattle-based Zegrahm Expeditions, a leader in adventure travel, decided to put together a weeklong training program. “Within this next century, the public is going to get their chance to travel into space,” says Scott Fitzsimmons, president of Zegrahm, known for its unusual educational and ecological tours. “In order to do that, they’re going to have to be trained. They need to be trained on spacecraft, and they certainly need to be trained for weightlessness.”

Some of the $15,000 that Discovery is paying for me to participate will go to support cosmonauts, engineers and space scientists. And the Russians take the project “very seriously because they also have the vision that the general public will go to space,” says Fitzsimmons, who participated in the inaugural training camp last year. And since NASA has decided it’s not in the business of giving ordinary people a boost into space, the Russians have the civilian space-training market all to themselves.

It’s a nascent business now, for sure. So far, only 12 total cosmonaut wannabees – from Greece, Sweden, Russia, Scotland and the U.S. – have trekked through Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center. They ranged in age from 26 to 85.

“It was the greatest adventure of my life,” says Martinn Mandels, 59, chairman of ABM Industries, a $2 billion facility-services contractor. A former aviator and graduate of Stanford University’s engineering program, Mandels’ big surprise was how much he liked the Russians, who, for most of his life, had been his sworn enemy.

He was also impressed by the accomplishments of Russian engineers – the first satellite in space, first animal in space, first human in space, first woman in space, first human-made probe on the moon and first space station. “The opportunity to see, feel, touch and smell this incredible hardware, if not to operate it in space, at least to appreciate it on Earth,” was thrilling, he says.

Patricia Nichols, 62, a former photo editor for Magnum, echoes the sentiment. “It’s one of the most exciting things I’ve ever done,” she says. This is a woman who has lived in Brazil and France and who travels to other countries at least four times a year.

Her favorite part? The parabolic flights. “You’re sitting on the floor of the plane and suddenly you’re floating upwards,” she say. “There’s nothing to compare. For some reason, it makes you very thirsty. My instructor opened a bottle of water and said, ‘Watch this!’ We became weightless, the water came out of the bottle in little globs and floated around. He opened his mouth and swallowed a glob. I opened mine and did the same thing.”

All the members of our group wanted to go into space when we were kids, but ended up doing other things. Michael Cooper, 41, a lawyer who’s chief of the trial bureau in the Bronx County (New York) District Attorney’s Office, found law much easier than math or science, but never lost his passion for flying or space. “When this opportunity came up, it was something I couldn’t put aside,” he says. So he saved, scraped and borrowed to pay for the experience.

Wally (Mary Wallace) Funk, 61, a flight instructor for the last 44 years, was a member of the Mercury 13, the group of women who passed the same tests as the Mercury 7 astronauts did but, in the dark ages of feminism, weren’t allowed to go into space. She still dreams of adding time in space to her 16,000 hours of flight time. She’s signed up with Space Adventures, a space tourism company, for a suborbital flight scheduled sometime between 2003 and 2005. She figures that this training camp will prepare her for the trip. More details on her amazing life can be found at http://www.ninety-nines.org/funk.html.

Brian Walker, 44, a toy inventor with 18 toys on the market now, is going to space under his own power. He’s devoting full time to designing and building a rocket in which he plans to launch himself into a 30-mile suborbit next year. You can check out his plans on his Web site, http://www.rocketguy.com.

Me? I’m going because space has always sung its siren song in my ear. Years ago, I applied for NASA’s Journalist-in-Space program, which went by the wayside after the first teacher to go into space was killed along with six other astronauts aboard the shuttle Challenger. But my dream didn’t.

There’s just one hitch. With one week of training, neither the United States nor Russia will send me to space. But Space Adventures might. It’s taking reservations for a suborbital flight that costs only $98,000.

I’ll start lobbying Discovery now.

Dispatch 2: Moscow Landing

Pie Here, Kha-La!

So you go and plan an out-of-this-world experience – such as this cosmonaut training camp – and life can still toss a surprise at you.

Just before the doors closed on the flight from New York to Moscow, a man around 70 years old plopped his bags on the seat beside me. He was rumpled, haggard from weeks of hopping from country to country, as it turned out, and his straight gray hair stuck out in frenetic directions. It was the twinkle in his eye that was so intriguing. He looked as if he was sucking on delicious secrets. Nothing is more tantalizing to a journalist.

He revealed himself to be Prof. Vladimir Syromiatnikov, a man whose reach extends all the way back to Sputnik, which he helped design.

The engineer, who also designed one of the two main docking mechanisms used in space these days, is head of the electromechanical engineering and large deployable structures department for Energia, which has teamed up with U.S. venture capitalist Walt Anderson and some others to form Mir Corp. The company plans to renovate Mir and turn it into a commercial enterprise for use by scientists, advertisers and … tourists.

For a mere $40 million, one man or woman could be the first space tourist on Mir. It’ll cost less to be second: $25 million.

Tomorrow, as part of the now positively pedestrian sum of $15,000 for this week, we’ll meet the president of Mir Corp, Jeffrey Manber. That was another surprise today, offered by our Zegrahm Expeditions guide, Jon Nicholson. And his other surprise: We’ll also have a chance to meet the two cosmonauts who just returned on Friday from the first effort to put a little life back into Mir.

Well, there’s one more surprise. At least Nicholson waited until after dinner to pass us our makeshift pee bottles for the medical exam tomorrow morning. Wide-mouth pickle jars for the women. Long-necked soft-drink bottles for the men. And, we have to fast – no food or drink after midnight. We’ll get breakfast after the checkup, which includes an EKG. I can shrug it off, because this is a work trip for me. But how can people have their urine and heartbeat analyzed during their vacations?

This medical screening is nothing for Wally (Mary Wallace) Funk, a slim, white-haired powerhouse whose business is flying and hobby is “cowboy-cowgirl action shooting” (yep – old Wild-West gunslinger showdown contests). When she went through the testing 40 years ago to qualify as one of the Mercury 13, she had to swallow 3 feet of rubber tubing.

Paul Filmer, 37, a marine geophysicist by training who manages international research funding at the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C., and Jane Skorina, 37, an ear-nose-and-throat surgeon from Minneapolis, are taking this in stride. They see cosmonaut training camp as an opportunity to sample this type of life – they both plan to apply to become U.S. astronauts.

New York attorney Michael Cooper, 41, and Mohammed Masry, 18, the youngest of our group, who have both been space nuts their whole lives, are just ready to get as close to their fantasies as possible. Masry’s father gave this week to him as a present. He’s starting his first year at Boston University in the fall, in business. Sounds as if Mir Corp might be able to recruit him for their front office.

At dinner, toy inventor Brian Walker, 44, a.k.a “Rocketguy,” rattled off the minute details of the design of the rocket he’s using to launch into sub-orbit next year. The windows were based on the design of the spaceship in Planet of the Apes, its fuel is hydrogen peroxide, the spacesuit will help him get through 4.5 Gs, and his new backyard centrifuge will build his tolerance. It’s clear that this week is REAL training for him.

Tomorrow we plunge into cosmonaut training camp. After the medical exam, we’ll be lectured on the tortures that space puts to our earthly bodies, and prepped for Star City’s efforts to replicate those stresses on us this week.

None of us is scared. That’s evidenced by the way we Type A’s didn’t hesitate this afternoon to maneuver through the complex Moscow subway system, all of whose signs are written in Cyrillic script, to find Red Square. Under chilly clouds occasionally scattered by the sun, we wandered from the whimsical St. Basil’s Cathedral – Basil was protected 500 years ago from Ivan the Terrible by his status as the Holy Fool – and stood in front of Lenin’s tomb, where Yuri Gagarin stood to receive the cheers of Russians after his orbit of the Earth in 1961.

It’s 11 p.m., and the sun just set. The Wannabe Seven (plus guide) are ready. As Yuri Gagarin said when mission control asked if he was ready: “Poyekhaly!” PIE HERE, KHA-LA! LET’S GO!

Dispatch 3: Inside Star City

Off a busy highway, surrounded by deep woods of birch and pine nestles Star City, population 6500, including about 60 cosmonauts.

It takes a whole town to raise a cosmonaut. The Russian Space Agency’s physicians, engineers, researchers, trainers and support staff build, run and maintain all the living quarters and training equipment in Star City. The staff’s families live here, too. Their children attend schools at the center. It’s a self-contained world.

Star City used to be a top-secret military installation. You still need an escort to get in past the inner locked gate, but I saw no armed soldiers, as I did at the train station across the street from my hotel. The modern world has intruded into the country’s cosmonaut training facility, too: In a few places, the same type of graffiti you might see in a U.S. city decorates the walls of buildings.

We seven wannabes began our 36 hours of training this week with a two-hour medical exam. This was on top of the thorough blood analysis and urinalysis that we completed before we left the United States. So, we tramped from room to room along the narrow yellow hallways of the medical training facility, one of several worn buildings spread across a wooded campus.

After swiftly jabbing (yeeeouch!) the tip of my left ring finger, a technician squeezed blood into three thin tubes and onto a slide. The results were back in a couple of hours. An ENT (ear-nose-throat surgeon) peered into those orifices and offered medical advice to some of us. Down the hall, each of us stripped from the waist up for an EKG, and put our clothes back on before we strapped on a blood pressure cuff. The last stop was with the ophthalmologist.

We were a little indignant, a little worried. We wanted to get on with the adventure, and were afraid that the physicians would find something that would keep us out of the centrifuge or parabolic flight. And we began to appreciate what the cosmonauts – and astronauts – go through.

But our exposure is but a skinny minute, relatively speaking. We’re only doing 36 hours out of 2500 to 3000 of intense training that a cosmonaut finishes in two to three years. “They’re always reading a book, preparing for an exam,” says our translator, Maxim.

As we scrambled from our medical exams to don our flight suits so that we could run to the auditorium for a warm greeting by the center’s director of training, I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like if the tables were turned. Would the staff at NASA’s astronaut training center in Houston be so gracious if wealthy Russian tourists tramped through their halls?

The Russians seem to be taking our presence – and the presence of other tourists – very seriously. Immediately after a press conference featuring Sergei Zalyotin and Alexander Kaleri – the two cosmonauts who returned from reviving Mir three days ago – a new age of Russian space flight dawned in front of reporters. Zalyotin and Kaleri’s Mir mission had been the first financed by a private company, MirCorp, which plans to use Mir for commercial enterprises. Its president Jeffrey Manber walked up to the microphone to introduce Dennis Tito, the first “citizen explorer.”

Sure, it’s a fancy word for a rich tourist. Tito, a 59-year-old aerospace engineer turned investor, is rumored to be paying between $10 million and $20 million for a few days aboard Mir. But he’s pursuing the dream of thousands, and treating it with respect. He’s been at the training center for the last couple of weeks, and supposedly has impressed the Russians with his dedication and physical fitness. He might blast off to Mir in the spring, if the next step of reviving the space station as a commercial site and tourist destination occurs as planned in November.

We left the press conference to delve into the stresses that zero gravity, isolation, confinement to a small station, and long-duration flight put on the body and the mind. The Russians, like the Americans, are trying to figure out ways to ameliorate those severe stresses that lead to weakened bones and teeth, and scarred psyches. They’re also searching for ways to meld their long-term, team, ground-guided approach to space with NASA’s short-term, individual, astronaut-guided approach for the International Space Station.

We finished our day getting prepped for our parabolic flight in a training room at the hydrolab. On the walls around us, and in the days before us, cosmonauts – and a couple of astronauts – had scrawled their signatures and dates of space duty.

Dispatch 4: Thirty G’s

Too little sleep. Too much caffeine. Too much excitement. The combo made my heart skip a beat and – SHAZAM! – the centrifuge stopped at 2 G’s. Two G’s! I’ve done 6 before!

Wally Funk, who was ready to push 7 or 8, was also yanked when her heart skipped a beat. But the pilot, who’d done a centrifuge in the United States as a Mercury 13 candidate, made it to 5 G’s. “Piece of cake,” she said as she climbed out of the seat into which she was strapped. “I feel great!”

There’s nothing wrong with our hearts, but the Star City doctors take no chances. Any tiny blip, and everything stops. They weren’t too enthusiastic about Paul Filmer going in the centrifuge. He has diabetes. He keeps his blood sugar well under control, and took another urine test upon arrival this morning at Star City to prove it.

Until we suggested to the physician in charge that he at least let Filmer go to 1 G for the experience, they’d “lost his records” – our hosts just don’t like to criticize or give bad news. So, they put him in for 1 G, and when his vital signs were as steady and healthy as a clam, they set the long arm spinning to 2 G’s, then to 3, then to 4, and all the way to 6.

This is an adventure, but it’s a sobering adventure. There’s nothing like learning firsthand what the cosmonauts go through to get into space, the testing systems devised to get them there and how difficult it is to work and live in space.

Take the centrifuge. It was clear that this wasn’t a ride. We didn’t just jump into the very comfortable centrifuge seat (that looked more like a horizontal electric chair) for technicians to wheel us across the loading dock and push us into the windowless compartment. Before we were allowed to step into the seat, we had to duck off into a room and strip to the waist so that sensors could be attached to our chests and backs. Another sensor was slipped over a finger as we were strapped into the seat, as was a blood-pressure cuff.

Inside the centrifuge, a camera focused on our faces, which the physician in charge watched closely from the control room. The door was shut and locked tight behind us, and the compartment tilted up. After several checks, including a blood-pressure reading when the cuff around my arm inflated, the centrifuge arm began a slow acceleration. I felt practically no sensation of movement, but just an invisible hand beginning to push me into the seat. My heart rate blinked on a panel in front of the physician in the control room, and he continuously asked how I was doing. The blood pressure cuff inflated again. Two technicians behind him watched the EKG and shouted out the abnormal blip, and the physician ordered the centrifuge to decelerate.

You could journey to a theme park and hit 4 G’s on some roller-coaster rides, and not go through all the rigmarole. But, as I realized, the point is not really how many G’s we did. It has something to do with noticing the young cosmonaut waiting his turn as we walked out of the centrifuge loading dock to our next event.

While half the group went off to learn about the spacesuits the cosmonauts – and the astronauts – use for spacewalks, the other half headed off for a lecture on the life-support systems of the Soyuz spacecraft. This is the cramped module that ferries cosmonauts, and a few astronauts, back and forth to the space station. Cosmonauts spend 48 hours learning the intricacies of the air, water, food and toilet systems that keep them alive. We had one hour.

True to the fascination of the non-flying public with how to go to the bathroom in space, we were particularly intrigued with the space toilet. Countless hours of research and science have probably gone into figuring out how to rid air in a space capsule of the deadly chemicals emanated by our bodies. But picking up the contraption, pointing out the differences between those for women and those for men (the funnel shape for urination), and simulating its use was the highlight of the hour.

This is how it works: You ride it like a horse. Urine is sucked into a tube. Fecal matter goes through a slit in a plastic-covered compartment, which is lined with three layers of bags. The cosmonauts tie off the tops of the bags and dispose of them in the garbage, which is sent back on the Progress supply module to burn up on re-entry.

We forgot about the space toilet quickly when another training instructor selected Jane Skorina to put on the Sokol survival suit. The Russians tragically lost three cosmonauts several years ago when their Soyuz spacecraft accidentally depressurized on re-entry. Now all cosmonauts wear the suit during launch, docking and re-entry.

“It’s like sitting on my living room couch,” said Skorina after she donned the suit and was cinched into a Soyuz seat. That was before the instructor attached a hose to the pressure suit and pumped it up. Then she felt as if she’d been shoved inside the body of the Pillsbury Doughboy. She could barely bend her arm to touch her helmet, and it was an effort to write, but the suit would have kept her alive for 125 hours if the Soyuz space capsule she had been riding in depressurized.

By far the most intriguing part of the day arrived when we ventured into the mockup of the Russians’ contributions to the International Space Station – the Zarya, Unity and Zvezda. The modules stretch across an expanse of space in one of Star City’s handful of buildings. They look like caged birds, silent and white and dreaming of flying high above Earth.

Down to the English and Russian labels on each switch and cabinet, and the mirror in the sleeping closet, the Zvezda service module at Star City is a double of the one that’s scheduled for launch next month. It’s more of an engineering project than a simulator for the cosmonauts and astronauts. The Russians built it to make sure that all its various parts actually work and fit with all the others. It’s practically a copy of Mir’s core module, and will provide the first ISS crew with kitchen facilities, sleeping closets, exercise areas, communications and yes, the all-important toilet.

Dispatch 5: Weightlessness!

Space camper Michael Cooper paces at the entrance to Tchkalovsky Airfield. We’re waiting for the bus that will take us to the giant Ilyushin-76 “flying laboratory,” and our five minutes of weightlessness.

“Freedom,” says Cooper. “That’s what I’ve always imagined it to be. Freedom.”

I really couldn’t imagine it. Being neutrally buoyant in really clear water comes close, but it’s confining. So does skydiving, but you’re always riding a cushion of air, and worrying about yanking your ripcord after 60 seconds.

The closest you can get to weightlessness on Earth is to take a parabolic flight. We’ve been waiting for this all week. The Ilyushin-76 pilot is to fly to 33,000 feet, bring the nose up, accelerate, climb and power back. The jet and its contents – us – will fly in an arc and go into free fall for about 30 seconds, putting everyone inside into giddy weightlessness.

All cosmonauts and astronauts do parabolic flights before they go into space. So do the people who study the effects of weightlessness, and, of course, the crews of planes. The actors and movie crew of “Apollo 13” did around 500 parabolic flights in NASA’s KC-135, all within 13 days. We are scheduled to do 10 – if no member of our group gets so sick that the physician on board stops the flight.

The bus pulls up to the Ilyushin-76. The crew files out to do a preflight check on the engines and in the cockpit. The plane has a modified fuel system and instruments, and the inside walls and floor have been padded with thick mats.

We expect another medical exam, but all of us are so healthy that the training center’s doctors say that we don’t have to have another round of blood pressure checks. That means we have an extra 30 minutes on our hands. Thirty minutes to think about the flight. We pace. Duck into the bushes at the edge of the tarmac. Watch the preparation without really seeing.

How many people would go on a vacation if they were almost guaranteed of throwing up? Six, apparently.

The crew lines up at attention in front of the plane. Bounding out of a car to inspect the airmen comes our chief pilot. Good news: Vladimir Platonov is reputed to be one of Russia’s best parabolic pilots ever. I turn on the video camera, and our translator, Maxim Alekseyev, himself a lieutenant colonel, asks me to stop. He explains that the airmen are superstitious, and don’t want anything unusual in their routine. Fine by me. I don’t want to do anything to jinx this flight.

It’s time to board. We bound up the stairs and walk into a giant padded cylinder. At the front of the cabin stretch two banks of instrument panels where the controllers and physician sit. Alexander Skvortsev, a cosmonaut training for the International Space Station, will be in the back to help us. He’s done this 10 times before.

We put on parachutes and take our places along the starboard side of the aircraft and listen to an officer brief us on the procedure. “It’s best to stay as relaxed as possible,” he says. “Don’t tense up during the two Gs. Just stay relaxed.”

Right.

“And if you get sick,” he continues, “just use the bag. Don’t worry about getting sick. Thirty cosmonauts have also thrown up on these flights. … Make sure when you hear the last warning that you get to the floor. The crew will be watching you to help you. But you must be careful. You can break your neck at 2 Gs.”

Great.

The doors shut, the engines whine into a dull roar and, after a short taxi, we’re rolling and airborne. A short 20 minutes later, bright warning lights flash. While the rest of the group sits on the mats and holds on to a railing above their heads with both hands, I tuck one foot under a rope attached to the edge of one of the mats so that I can use the video camera. The plane accelerates and pulls up hard, pressing us into the floor. Bright lights flash and bells sound, and, like magic, we float off the floor of the aircraft.

The blood rushes to my head. I feel as if a high pressure hose just pumped me full of helium. I float at the end of a tether – my leg. Jon Nicholson, Mohammed Masry, Paul Filmer and Cooper look puzzled as their legs levitate in front of them. We all start whooping. Their feet flip to the ceiling. They’re upside down, legs plastered against the sides of the plane.

Their legs float back down. We all bob like corks. Suddenly, the 5-second warning sounds. BAM! We’re plastered to the mats. My body gains an extra 125 pounds, at least. It feels like 3 Gs, not 2.

Arc Two: All of us hold on one more time, on the advice of the Russians, to get used to the feeling. My legs, which have so faithfully operated in the world of 1G, suddenly develop a mind of their own. It’s as if my feet, suddenly set free, begin to explore this new world without consulting the other end of my body. I feel as if I am an embodiment of a split personality.

Arc Three: When the jet levels out in its three-to-four minute preparation for the next arc, we scramble to the aft and link arms for a group photo. Skvortsev and another crew member stand behind us to pluck us from the ceiling if we’re still floating when the warning bells sound. Up we go, a mass of flailing arms and legs. I hold the group down because I can’t seem to let go of the railing.

Arc Four: One more group photo. This time I don’t hold onto the railing. As the plane begins pulling up, half the line suddenly falls backwards, surprises on all their faces and stay stuck to the floor until we arc. Up we go again, less coordinated than before. We fall in a heap. We’re doing the space camp version of ring-around-the-rosy.

Arc Five: One of the crew members spins Nicholson like a pinwheel while Wally Funk does barrel rolls, and Brian Walker tours the ceiling. At the end, Nicholson’s face breaks out in a sweat, he’s pale and his eyes aren’t focusing. Uh-oh.

Arc Six: The guys begin falling like flies. Cooper’s holding a vomit bag and looking ill. I can’t tell whether he’s used it yet. Nicholson’s sitting this one out, so I hand him my camera. I run down to the end to join Skvortsev. He signals me to crawl up a rope that’s strung across the ceiling and down the walls of the plane. As we float again, I go hand over hand to the ceiling and turn to face the others. My legs flip up behind me and I push off toward the floor. YIPPEEE!!! Oops, time’s up. Skvortsev pulls me down and we ride out another 2-G dip.

Arc Seven: Filmer and Walker had promised to video each other puking, if it came to that. It’s come to that. I signal to Skvortsev that I want to be shot down the center of the plane. He nods and yells, “Stay completely relaxed. Don’t move!” OK. The plane arcs and I float horizontally. He grabs my legs and shoves. I soar above the vomiting fray like Superwoman.

Arc Eight: Walker’s been sick, but jumps back into the action. Masry, the youngest of the group – and probably the one with the most sensitive vestibular system, says Skorina, who’s an ear-nose-and-throat surgeon – is curled up on his side. Nicholson can’t hold the camera anymore. The physician, who’s been checking out Masry, grabs it and goes to the control station and does video. A crew member spins me. Funk tries to fly and do a dance with Walker.

Arc Nine: I grab my camera and glance over at Nicholson. He’s thrown up his yogurt breakfast into a clear plastic bag. It seems that blueberry yogurt turns pink once it’s partially digested. I look away. The only three standing – floating – are Funk, Skorina and me. Funk spends the last arc bouncing, and Skvortsev sends Skorina soaring gracefully down the center of the cabin.

The Russians call a halt. It’s over, too soon. Funk, who’s got 16,000 hours of flying time, heads to the cockpit to check out the crew. Skorina and I sit down. I hate to brag, but I do want everyone to note that all the men in our group threw up, and none of the women did. Of course, if we’d done 15 arcs, I would have been right there next to them, vomiting in my little clear plastic bag.

I feel exhausted, a little queasy. I lay back on the mats and go to sleep.

Dispatch 6: A Scuba Walk

Jane Skorina, Wally Funk and I lay snug in the seats of the cramped Soyuz. Victor Suvorov, a 31-year veteran of the space program, leans through the hatch.

“Enter your position over the Earth here,” he says, clicking a globe on the instrument panel, “and your landing is here.” Oops. The Pacific Ocean.

He chuckles and shakes his head. “Not a good place for Russian space capsule to land.”

Soyuz spacecraft have carried cosmonauts to and from orbit since the 1960s. When it’s launched, Soyuz has three parts: the habitation module, where the cosmonauts can have a little room to eat, read, move around and, oh yes, use the space toilet; the descending module, where they sit for launch and descent; and the unpressurized engine compartment that extends solar panels.

Only the descending module returns to Earth. The other parts are undocked and burn up in the atmosphere. The descending module lands only on solid ground, after deploying a series of parachutes. After several cosmonauts were seriously injured in hard impacts, engineers installed rockets that the cosmonauts fire when they’re 18 feet off the ground to slow their descent.

Yesterday, we watched two cosmonauts, wrapped in deflated Sokol space suits, crawl into the hatch. They were training for just such a descent. And now, we’re sitting in the same training capsule. It’s still a bit unfathomable to me how a place that was so top secret that we would have been shot if we’d scaled the fences can now be so open.

Some of it has to do with money. I don’t know how much of our $15,000 fees help support the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center (it’s been difficult to get a straight answer yet), but U.S. dollars go a long way in this country where the average salary is $1800 a year. Money aside, there’s something else going on: These engineers and trainers love to explain the Russian technology to interested outsiders, fascinated outsiders, yes, even outsiders who are space fanatics. Sure, we’re getting a few disgruntled looks, but only a few.

“I respect the people who are enjoying this type of experience,” says Victor Suvorov through our interpreter, Maxim Alexeyev. “I like the people who are curious, not in the stuff in their own kitchens, but who are interested in our equipment, in our space craft.”

The Soyuz is so small – it and the habitation module have only 10 cubic meters of empty space for three cosmonauts to move around in, less room than a walk-in closet – that it feels as if we’re wearing it. How three Russian guys spent 18 days in the craft (in 1970) without killing each other is beyond me.

The Orlan-M suit used for EVAs (extravehicular activities) is yet smaller, and even though you wear it, you don’t “put it on” said Nigel Bachmanovsky, who instructs the cosmonauts in its operation. “You enter it.”

To be specific, you open the back, as if you’re opening the control panel of a giant robot, grip the shoulders, and slide in. Both astronauts and cosmonauts will use the Orlan-M (Orlan means “large eagle” in Russian), because its arms, legs and torso are adjustable, and it comes with three different sized gloves.

We had two hours to learn about the Orlan-M. Cosmonauts have 14 hours of lectures and 8 hours of practice outside the suit. Then there are four practical training sessions in the suits at the training center, and two in a vacuum chamber at the plant where the suits are made, about a 90-minute drive from the training center. In the vacuum chamber, the cosmonauts have to demonstrate their skills in operating the Orlan-M and deal with simulated emergencies before receiving EVA certification.

Wally Funk and I put on white long johns, leather caps with built-in earphones and microphones, and enter the suits. They are surprisingly comfortable, turning us into Michelin tire-women. Moving around and doing intricate repairs on the outside of a spacecraft must be cumbersome and exhausting.

Our next stop is the 36-foot-deep hydrolab, where cosmonauts enter EVA suits and practice installations and repairs on mock-ups of space modules sitting in 176,580 cubic feet of water in a tank 65 feet in diameter. It’s a huge tank equipped with overhead cranes to move parts of different modules into and out of the water. Since we don’t have even the few hours of basic training to work safely in the suits, four of us who are certified don scuba gear and slip beneath the surface.

It isn’t space. But it isn’t Earth, either. Pieces of the International Space Station’s Unity and Zarya modules sit on a platform raised to a depth of 18 feet – the very careful crew of the hydrolab want to reduce our risk and theirs to an absolute minimum. We swim around it to get a feel for the mass of what were just parts of modules, and then take turns scooting into one of the modules to put on and take off a hatch.

Just bracing myself to crank a handle is a challenge, never mind trying to lift and move a hatch nearly as big as my body. I can see why cosmonauts need hours of training in the Orlan-M to feel the least bit competent. And we don’t have to worry about holding onto the modules the way the cosmonauts need to cling to them for their lives.

I hover in the water and watch the others moving like helper bees around a white queen. It’s a short step to imagining that I stop for a moment after emerging from Unity to take in the magnificent contraption soaring around Earth. I can see Earth. And think that this is a pretty interesting life.

Dispatch 7: Mission Control

After our stunning flight into weightlessness, we’re back on Earth – in the town of Korolev, home of Russia’s space mission control center. The whole town used to be off-limits to outsiders. Now NASA has offices there.

A skeleton crew in Mir mission control watches the aging space station skim the planet’s surface. No one’s living on Mir now. The next crew is scheduled to visit toward the end of the year, to prepare for the world’s first “citizen explorer” – U.S. financier Dennis Tito. He’s reportedly paying at least $10 million for the privilege. We file out of the darkened hall past a wall of photos of cosmonauts. We have to shine our lights on the photos to read about their accomplishments.

In the bright International Space Station mission control, the floor buzzes as a new set of technicians learn how to serve the world’s next mission in human exploration of space. NASA and the Russian Space Agency haven’t resolved how Korolev and the Johnson Space Center in Houston will share monitoring of the space station. It’s a political problem, not a technical one. The Cold War echoes in a tug of war.

We drive back roads to Star City for our challenge of the day: docking simulation. It’s our chance to crash … uh, link … Soyuz with the International Space Station. Igor Sukhorukov walks us through the controls. They’re tricky. It’s not like flying a plane, where you’re landing on a fixed point. The space station’s zipping along, and you’re trying to catch up with it by moving faster than it’s moving, and then slow down to dock on target with a gentle bump.

Even after hours of practice on the ground, some cosmonauts have failed to dock with Mir. They ran out of fuel, and had to make the two-day return to Earth while planning their new careers as street sweepers, no doubt.

So, Sukhorukov says, the left hand controls a joystick and switch that make the craft move up, down, forward, back, left and right. Got it?? The right hand controls a joystick that moves the craft on its axis to roll, pitch or yaw. Easy, he says, and looks at our pinched faces with doubt and amused patience.

It’s not like the fast pace of a video game. Thrusters respond slowly, and push the spacecraft slowly, at first. But too much thrust and not enough back thrust to stop, and you’re soaring past the station and crashing into the solar panels, just as the cargo craft Progress thunked into Mir on June 25, 1997. (For a breathtaking read on that unlucky episode in Mir’s life, read Dragonfly, by Brian Burrough.)

We’re tense. We play with the two small models to grok the maneuver. For the next hour, “Brake! Brake! Brake!” are the most common words out of Sukhorukov’s mouth, as he lies in the hatch and tries to guide each of our clumsy efforts.

In the Soyuz capsule, nestled nearly horizontal in the half-egg of the pilot’s seat, I grab the two joysticks on either side of my knees and focus on a green monitor. Just twitching the right stick sends the craft yawing wildly. I gingerly flick the left switch to move the craft forward. The station seems so far away. Whoa! How did it get so big! Brake! Brake! Brake! Whew. It worked. Now gingerly move to the right and head for that really small target at the bottom of the module. Easy now. Right on!!!

I join the wannabes who begin lobbying to pilot the next shuttle to Mir: Mohammed Masry, Michael Cooper, and Jane Skorina. Oh, and did I mention that my docking was the most accurate????

The crashing cosmonaut trainees and their excuses:

Paul Filmer: “It’s not like a video game. It’s like flying at 10 mph.” Brian Walker, who’s going into suborbit on his own rocket next year: “Well, I don’t have to worry about docking. I’ve got a huge desert to land on.” Wally Funk (after three tries): “I coulda done it, but his hands were in the way.” Jon Nicholson: “The ISS is no longer. We do have a diplomatic crisis.”

We have one last lunch in the Star City Café. It’s the same as always: bright yellows and reds of vegetables, plates of cold meat, neat stacks of brown and white bread, followed by a hot course of meat, potatoes and a few kernels of corn. American pop and rock music from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s blares from a radio. A few years ago, that would have been Soviet military music. Dessert’s always put on the table along with the salad fixings, and Wally Funk digs in immediately. She’s one of those people who follow the motto: “Life’s short; eat dessert first.”

We devote our last afternoon in Star City to learning about how cosmonauts – and some astronauts – learn about celestial navigation. “We can teach anyone,” brags Sergei Prokorovitch, the team leader of celestial navigation training. And so he can. After a classroom lecture (we do one hour – the cosmonauts do 100), we lean back in the comfortable chairs in the small planetarium. Prokorovitch helps us pick out constellations as he beams outlines of Orion, the scorpion, and the bears, major and minor, on the dome.

But the most amazing part of this planetarium – and what makes it unique in the world – is that it drops the horizon to what cosmonauts see from Mir or the International Space Station. It puts us in a night sky that surrounds us, instead of half a cup that shelters us.

We all cram into a small enclosure in the middle of the dome, and Prokorovitch shuts the door. Inside are three different control panels and matching windows: Soyuz, Mir and Buran, the Soviet space shuttle that flew only once – without people – and was grounded for lack of funding. (Several were built – one is secreted away at Star City, and we saw one at the edge of Gorky Park’s amusement ride area.) Cosmonauts practice sitting at these controls, looking out these windows and doing calculations on complex instruments.

“We’re redoing one of these for the International Space Station,” says Prokorovitch.

He sets the stars to spinning slowly, and suddenly we’re tumbling through the universe. Natasha Netkach, our Russian guide, bolts out the door. We should have brought the vomit bags on this flight, too.

On our way out, we file past the giant globe of the Earth that used to sit in Yuri Gagarin’s office. “Yuri Gagarin’s globe, from his office. Wow!” exclaims Paul Filmer, as he kneels in not-too-mock adoration. In front of his face is the United States. He peers along the mid-Atlantic seaboard. “Hmm. There’s no big X over Washington.”

We make one last stop in Star City, at the statue of Yuri Gagarin. Stems of flowers dropped by admirers lie at its base. After Gagarin’s orbit of Earth, he became a national hero like no one before or since. If not for the Cold War, he would have been the world’s hero.

Dispatch 8: One Week Down

At 10:30 a.m., half of the space campers say goodbye, pile into the van and ride off to the airport. The rest of us are leaving later. We can’t believe it’s over. The Earth’s mass must have increased, because we drag heavy Jupiter hearts through the day.

So, what does this week mean? What’s the significance of a group of outsiders – Americans and one Saudi Arabian – spending several days within the walls of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center? It’s more than a joy ride. More than a once-in-a-lifetime adventure. And more than easy cash for the Russians. We were offered a glimpse into history, and, free of Cold War rhetoric, could appreciate firsthand the Russians’ feats in space exploration. The Russians also opened their doors for us to witness their painful determination to preserve their space program and Mir, their 15-year-old space station.

“Life’s a survival game,” says Maxim Alekseyev, our translator at Star City. Like other lieutenant colonels in the military, he makes $100 a month. That’s less than the average Russian income of $1800 per year, and he and his wife can’t make ends meet, much less save for their daughter’s education. He’ll receive some extra money for translating these last few days, but he, like the others at the training center, are trying to find their niche in Russia’s new economic pecking order.

Alekseyev grew up with the Cold War; many of the instructors we met grew old with it. Most were genuinely interested in teaching their former enemies about their technology and training methods. They’ve had to make the leap into the new relationship between the United States and Russia out of necessity.

“We have no problem with this change,” Alekseyev says. “We need to figure out a way to provide for our families. We still love Mother Russia. We’re still patriotic. But things have changed, and we’re all looking to find our place in society.”

The changes have set the Russian space program tumbling like Mir on its bad days. The space station’s been the butt of jokes on late-night TV talk shows. The Russian space program is so short of funds that it’s offering civilians rides into space and trying to make Mir a commercial enterprise. Star City’s buildings are crumbling. The Russian people, many of whom are experiencing poverty and uncertainty that they’ve never known, are no longer enamored of their cosmonauts as they used to be.

But Mir’s been flying three times longer than its design life. The Russians have the world’s most reliable rocket in the Proton. And they have more experience in long-term space travel than anyone else. That knowledge is valuable to the International Space Station. But, says Valery Korzun, a Mir commander who put out a fire on the space station on Feb. 23, 1997, NASA isn’t taking advantage of that.

None of the astronauts who spent time on Mir – Shannon Lucid, John Blaha, Jerry Linenger, Michael Foale – Korzun ticked them off on his fingers – are involved in space station training. And they’re the ones who have the most experience.

The issue is critical because doing a space shuttle mission and a Mir mission are very different, says Korzun. Shuttle flights are short. Astronauts can push to the limit, get by on three or four hours sleep a night for 10 days without much problem. But no one can do that for six months or a year without suffering the consequences. When Blaha came aboard Mir, says Korzun, he was doing a 100-yard dash. When cosmonauts and astronauts go aboard Mir – and the International Space Station – they spend months in space. They must harbor their energy and set a slower pace. Otherwise, as Blaha did aboard Mir, they suffer exhaustion and depression, and hurt themselves and the mission.

Korzun made the point at dinner with us at the Star City Café one night during space camp. When Jane Skorina asked him if he’d read Dragonfly, by Bryan Burrough, a book that describes the fire and collision aboard Mir in 1997, he laughed and said he’d read the part of the book about his flight. He said that the astronauts and cosmonauts who read the book all thought it was inaccurate, but what he found interesting was that Burrough described the same events through astronauts’ and cosmonauts’ eyes, and the descriptions were often different.

“This is not because one side is right and the other side is wrong,” says Korzun. “It’s because everyone understands things in their own way. And that’s where a problem arises that we may come across on the International Space Station. Therefore I consider it very important to understand our partners. Because the book described a problem between the Russians and Americans, then in the future the situation will be even more complicated, because there will be not only Russians and Americans, but many other countries [on the space station].”

When attorney Michael Cooper first heard about cosmonaut training camp, he thought it was a gimmick. The brochure photo of the Ilyusin-76 and his dream of experiencing weightlessness, however, spurred him to call Zegrahm Expeditions president Scott Fitzsimmons. “Is this for real?” asked Cooper. “Who’s gone on this trip? I want to talk with somebody.”

For all of us, the trip went far beyond our wildest expectations. (And Cooper thinks that every bit of it was worth it, even vomiting during the parabolic flight.)

When I asked one of the previous space campers, Martinn Mandels, chairman of ABM Industries, what he liked best about the week, he said, “The people.” That surprised me, but now I understand.

We witnessed people acting with grace under the worst kind of pressure. In the last 10 years, they’ve seen their government turn upside down and their economic system turn inside out. They’ve struggled under leaders who don’t lead, and weathered a violent minicoup in their capital city. They’re hanging on, with pride. They don’t always do things the way Americans are used to doing things, and they aren’t always as open as we’re used to being. But these cultural differences are sure to be hurdles that not only space travelers have to overcome as the human species unites to explore beyond our planet.

At the end of camp, before giving us our certificates, Igor Rudyaev, deputy chief of the training center’s foreign economic department, said: “The end of training is always most difficult. We give you a piece of our heart and a piece of our soul.”

So they did. And we each left a piece of ours with them.

Jane Ellen Stevens, a science and technology multimedia journalist based in California, has reported for many publications as well as for TV. Her previous work for Discovery.com includes “The Chilling Fields,” and “Sea Otters: From Cradle to the Wave.”

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