“Fly away... so you can return”

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			“Fly away... so you can return” Yuri Malenchenko is one of those lucky people who have had the opportunity to greet the dawn and see the sun go down sixteen times in the same twenty-four hour period. Malenchenko has been in earth orbit three times. A little over a year ago, he returned from a six-month expedition on the International Space Station. Previously in 2000, he flew on the American shuttle, Atlantis, and took his first journey into space ten years ago, in 1994, when he spent four months on Space Station Mir. It was on board Mir that we met – but not the legendary orbital complex that ultimately had to be sunk, but on the base module Mir, which is located in the sports complex at the Cosmonaut Training Centre. Has the Earth changed in ten years? The icebergs have got bigger. In 1994, the largest were 30?40km in diameter, but last year they were 150?160km in diameter. In the Antarctic region around South America, there were always a lot of them, but now these colossal bergs have appeared. When you’re up very high, they stick right out. When you’re up that high, you probably see things in a different way… There was one place in Africa, close to the equator that I particularly liked. Here the red rocks come straight out of the surface of the sand. It would be an ideal place to shoot a Martian landscape or a film with an extraterrestrial backdrop. Another thing that strikes you when you’re up there is the number of fires. In 1994 I shot a film of South America from space, and in just a few minutes counted more than a hundred fires. The smoke stretched for many kilometres and then gathered into a single cloud which rose on the air currents. Sometimes the tail of the smoke from the fires in America almost reaches Europe. But worse than that is when rubbish dumps are burning – for example, on one occasion I remember seeing a huge rubbish dump burning near Mexico City. When refuse burns, the smoke has a sort of poisonous colour, whereas the colour of smoke from a forest fire is more or less calm. Like the smoke from a cigar? Well, not quite. Cigar smoke is peaceful and doesn’t do any harm. I’ve never been a smoker – my job won’t allow it and the strain would be too great in training. But you don’t need to be a permanent smoker to smoke a cigar – that’s why I like cigars. When you’re in space, there are lots of things that you’d love to do, but you can’t. When my wife asked me what I’d like most of all when I come back, I told her to get me some Havana Cuban cigars. But several weeks had to go by after my return before I could smoke them – your body needs time to adapt to the conditions on earth. What else would you have loved to have out in orbit? A proper Russian steam bath. With a birch switch. Actually, on the Mir we did have a bath and birch twigs – it was a shower room that could be heated up. We practically never used it as a shower, but almost every week as a sauna. But it was nothing like a real Russian country bath. And the lack of a proper bath was harder to get used to than the weightlessness. During the first few days, when the body is getting used to the weightless condition, cosmonauts sometimes feel a bit rough with headaches and rushes of blood to the head, but after a bit this passes and the condition seems natural. And you stop thinking about things like your blood has completely changed and your heart is working differently. You just carry on as usual. Look at Valerii Polyakov – he spent fifteen months continuously in space, a world record. But he came back without any problems. He must have incredibly good health. We all have to have incredibly good health. Going into space puts a tremendous strain on the body which affects all the organs. You have to be in the absolute peak of physical health to withstand weightlessness and the return to Earth. When the Soyuz starts to descend, the G-force amounts to four to five units. This doesn’t sound much – in military aircraft, it can get much higher. But when the Soyuz is descending, it can last a long time – half a minute or even a whole minute. Apart from which, when you’ve spent six months on the space station, your body has become unaccustomed to the force of gravity and simply being on Earth is hard, so the G-force seems three to four times stronger with the result that those five units feel like fifteen. So you have to continually keep yourself in shape. Two hours of exercise each day: on the running track, the ergometer and the expanders. Every day we run five to seven kilometres. That’s not the winter schedule, but the space schedule. If a cosmonaut fails to train for three or four days, the feeling of weakness is more or less immediate. That’s the lack of fresh air, I suppose. Where can you get it in space? The air is not the same as on Earth, of course. But you’ve got enough oxygen. Naturally, there’s nowhere to get fresh air from in space, so we have to take it with us from Earth. It’s continually purified to eliminate the carbon dioxide and the moisture condenses to form water which, incidentally, we use for drinking and washing. The purified air is carried to all modules of the station through ventilation ducts, and then returns by itself to the purification unit. It moves fairly quickly – at several metres a second – so that there are no stagnant zones. Does that mean that there’s a permanent wind blowing on the space station? Yes. If you drop something or leave it, it’s immediately blown away. So you have to be very careful. The space station is huge – several hundred cubic metres – and if you lose something, it can be extremely difficult to find it. Sometimes you can go three or four months without being able to find something, and then you discover that it’s been caught in the ventilator net. Experienced cosmonauts know in which module lost things end up, and go there immediately, but the less experienced have to wait a week or two until whatever they’re looking for gets caught on something. Those cosmonauts who’ve been there for a long time tend to lose fewer things, but the newcomers are always getting their things blown away. So how do you manage to conduct scientific research in such conditions? We try to be careful. On the Mir station we had several scientific programmes running: a national Russian programme and scientific programmes from Kazakhstan and the European Space Agency. Each programme has several sections – medicine, biology, technology and terrestrial observation – and in each section there are ten to fifteen experiments going on. We’ve even done experiments with melting and fusing. Special ovens were installed, which could produce temperatures of several thousands of degrees and create unusual alloys. They were produced without the force of gravity, so the molecules in the materials were distributed freely – not like on Earth. Yes, apart from being a cosmonaut, you’ve also got a broad scientific background in such things as biology and molecular physics… Do you really know your way round all these sciences? Only in general terms. The scientists on Earth set us specific tasks, which we try to carry out to the best of our ability. But they are the people who examine our materials, and study the results of the experiments, and draw the appropriate conclusions. If the crew of the International Space Station is preparing for a long (in excess of four months) expedition, this preparation may take as much as a year and a half. And it’s not enough just to make a thorough study of the systems on board the actual station (and studying the systems in the Russian section is done here, at the Cosmonaut Training Centre, while the systems in the American section are studied at NASA in Houston), it’s also necessary to make a study of each scientific programme, and that means dozens of experiments. Furthermore, each experiment requires its own equipment, which the cosmonauts also have to know how to handle. This makes it essential to work with the experiment designers and directors so that you know what it is they actually want to obtain and understand the documentation. Dozens of hours of training can be spent on each experiment. Then, before the cosmonauts can be allowed to actually make the trip, there are more than a hundred examinations to pass. And they don’t take them in the same way as they did in the institute, where there is a list of questions to prepare for, but only a few that need to be answered. Here they have to answer every question, so an examination for one person can sometimes last three or four hours. And the examination process is the reverse of that at the institute; here you have one candidate and a whole group of examiners. But then instead of a run-of-the-mill diploma, you get the right to fly in space and leave your name in history. And you’ll also be remembered for the fact that you were one of the crew on the International Space Station. In the year 2000, I flew on the Atlantis shuttle to take part in integrating the Zvezda service module (it was the biggest module in the Russian section) with the other modules. Part of the work included going out into open space with the astronaut, Ed Lou, laying the external cables which ensured that the systems of the different modules worked together, and installing various transmitters. Inside, we installed the basic systems that were essential to the functioning of the whole station – the electrical system and the life-support system and, incidentally, the running track and the ergometer. That trip lasted fourteen days, five of which the shuttle was docked to the station. The whole time there were seven people working in the module and getting the station ready for future crews. Getting everything to go smoothly required years of preparation… There were problems, of course, but they were mainly technical or matters that required negotiations and agreements. To give you an idea, all our technology and even our measurement system were different from those used by the Americans, so the designers had to spend a long time agreeing these matters. Our job was to organize the interaction of crew members and the joint management of the station, because the American sector worked according to its own cycle and we worked according to ours, and we each had our own individual areas of responsibility. It took several years to get us working together properly. Does the new station differ from the old Mir station? Outwardly, the Russian section of the International Space Station resembles the base unit of Mir. There have been a number of changes made to the central control panel, which sends out orders to all the station’s systems, and laptop computers have been installed for control purposes in addition to the fixed consoles. Then the systems which control movement, the day-to-day work of the crew, and some other things have been seriously modernized, but the bodywork of the Mir and the International Space Station service module are identical. And the interiors are very similar. The orbit is different, but the height – 400km – is the same. The speed is 8km per second, so one orbit takes an hour and a half, and in twenty four hours we see sixteen sunsets and sixteen sunrises. The Mir Space Station functioned according to Russian law. What about the International Space Station? There are certain legal documents that affect the whole station. But there are nuances, since the station consists of different zones: part belonging to Russia; part to the US. So the appropriate side takes decisions for its own section. There is a difference between the two sections, but for us crew members… you must understand, it’s all the same. For us its just one area that we all share. And there’s a lot that brings us all together. Work goes on from morning till night, and if something happens, it concerns all of us. Space is a very beautiful place, but it’s a very aggressive environment. So we have no choice but to be a single, friendly family. When you watch a launching from Baikonur on TV, there always seem to be dozens of people crowding round the rocket – almost to the very moment of take-off. But when you watch an American rocket launching at Cape Canaveral, there seems to be no one there. What actually does happen? In fact, everything is the other way round. In the United States, there are far more people coming to watch a launching, because it’s a whole show. It’s just organized in such a way that those watching are in special pavilions placed at some distance from the site. And when the crew are getting ready for the launch, they never come near the public. With us, the procedure is different. There are far fewer people, and none of them are spectators – they’re all specialists. What they sometimes show on the newsreels, takes place after the crew have reported to the State Commission and before the launch, when there’s a bit of time to talk to people and receive wishes for a good journey. That’s the bit they usually show on TV. At that moment, do you feel your responsibility to mankind? To mankind?.. Yes, I suppose so. When you come here, you see how many people are connected with this industry, and how much strength, thoughts and ideas have been put into it… Even if we are speaking only about piloted space exploration, then there are thousands of people who work just so that one person can go into space. And then we see that the work of hundreds of thousands of people depends on our efforts. So you do feel a responsibility and try not to make mistakes. The first cosmonauts were all pilots. What about now? Now things have changed a bit. There are ship’s commanders and there are flight engineers. The commanders are always military men, preferably fighter pilots; but the flight engineers are technical specialists. The Energiya Space Corporation, which builds space equipment, has its own cosmonaut unit with its own specialists that know the technology. There is also another unit of cosmonaut medics from the Institute of Medical and Biological Problems, because medicine is a very important branch of space exploration and lots of experiments are carried out on the station. During training, each cosmonaut has to fly a certain number of hours, for which we have a squadron of L-39 training aircraft. But that’s not quite the same… I was a fighter pilot and served in Moldova, flying MiG-21s and MiG-23s. There we lived by a strict military routine with training, guard duty, flights and study. I felt quite at home in a plane, free and comfortable. But now the main thing is training for a flight into space. It’s a completely different profession. It’s very important that we continue flying. When we first came into rocketry, being a pilot was the initial qualification for further study. This is essential, because a pilot has to be able to understand and process information rapidly, and he must be able to react immediately to what is going on in the cabin and outside. The situation changes rapidly, and you are continually being given instructions: one objective comes up, then another, and you have to make instant decisions. Space flight is very similar, because new situations are continually arising and things change so fast that you have to be able to react immediately to these changes. I liked my job as a pilot, and when in 1987 I got the offer of being transferred to space exploration, I wasn’t keen to leave the air force. They gave me twenty minutes to think it over, and I agreed. And don’t regret it. by ОLGA ZAKUTNYAYA