Russian Space Trip Day #3

Day #3 Star City
Today we awoke bright and early and hopped on the bus to Star City. Located outside of Moscow, it is the place where, since the 1960s, the cosmonauts live and train. During the Soviet era, this was a secret facility with restricted access. Now, visitors are welcome. It is here that the cosmonauts live with their families and the town has many things you would expect in a community-a high school, shops, movie theater, post office, sports and recreation facility, and day care. At the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center on the grounds of Star City, there is a centrifuge, planetarium, hydrolab, and simulators of the ISS and the Soyuz spacecraft where the cosmonauts and their astronaut counterparts train for upcoming missions.
For the five of us who are planning to fly on the zero gravity flight, our first appointment was with a doctor in the Star City medical complex. We were ushered upstairs and asked to wait in the hallway until it was our turn for an exam. Imagine my surprise when I turned and saw none other than Alexei Leonev standing three feet away! As the first person to perform a spacewalk, he is well known to all who follow the space program! He also participated in the Apollo-Soyuz historic mission that docked a Soviet and an American spacecraft. This event signaled the beginning of cooperation in space exploration between our two countries. Leonev no longer flies, and although he holds an important position at Star City, I just never dreamed I would see him. It was quite an honor to meet such a hero.
When it was my turn for the medical exam, I was ushered into an exam room and asked a series of questions about whether or not I get dizzy on fast rides, how I was feeling at the time, and whether I had ever done any parachute jumps before. The doctor and nurse were quite welcoming and my exam was quick. When we finished, we hurried to catch up with the rest of our group at the centrifuge. This is an enormous machine, and the only centrifuge in the world that boasts four degrees of motion. It can move up and down, side to side, forward and back, and tip right to left, providing unique training opportunities. As it spins around this room, at several hundred kilometers an hour, it creates pressure on the bodies of the cosmonauts inside. Cosmonauts train on this centrifuge to learn to handle G forces in a variety of directions which helps them in launch and descent. I am standing in the center of the picture to provide some perspective as to the size of this machine.
The next place we visited was the mock up of the Soyuz (pronounced sah-yoos) spacecraft. It is the craft that will carry the Expedition 18 crew to the ISS on October 12, 2008. At the time of our visit, there were two Japanese astronauts training in the Soyuz simulator and we were allowed to climb the steps to peek inside. In the adjoining room were the technicians acting as Mission Control, throwing all sorts of simulated problems at the two men. As we looked inside the spacecraft, we could see the men consulting their training manuals and speaking to Mission Control through their headsets. Anyone hoping to fly in space spends hundreds of hours working in the simulators, which are built as exact replicas of the actual spacecraft the cosmonaut or astronaut will fly.
In the next building, our group got to see a mockup of the former Russian space station, MIR which flew from 1986 to 2001. It was an engineering marvel that stayed functional long past its life expectancy. In fact, American astronauts joined cosmonauts and spent many months on MIR, learning invaluable information about long-duration life in space. During its years in space, MIR survived some spectacular events including a life-threatening fire and a collision with a Progress supply ship. Guiding us through the MIR simulator was current cosmonaut Sergei Zalyotin. He took us aboard and identified the objects on display. There was a table where the cosmonauts sat to eat, a treadmill for exercise, a lower body pressure suit that they don two weeks before return to Earth to begin to prepare their bodies for gravity, and the most important item on board, the toilet. Zalyotin also showed us one of the infamous oxygen cannisters that started the fire aboard MIR. Sergei Zalyotin flew on MIR for three months and for two weeks on the International Space Station. He remains active and is scheduled for his third flight in two years. Our tour group was fortunate to spend so much time
with a Russian cosmonaut. We certainly got an inside look at the space program from an expert.