First of all, happy Cosmonautics Day! I can’t imagine a more suitable place to be in today than here in Star City, where it all started. Well, I guess next year will be even better, as I will be on ISS!
But there’s still a lot of training to be completed before that and the coming weeks promise to be an exciting time. This is for me the “back-up trip” to Russia: Reid, Alex and Maksim will launch on May 28th and Terry, Anton and I will be their shadows until then. Just like them we’ll take the qualification exams, we’ll participate in all the pre-launch ceremonies and traditions and we’ll fly to Baikonour for a two-week quarantine time. And then we’ll watch them blast off to space!
So this past week I’ve resumed my Soyuz “routine”. I had several manual flying sims (rendez-vous & docking as well as descent), while yesterday Anton and I were back together in the Soyuz simulator.
First we practiced the transition from the nominal quick profile (launch-to-docking in six hours) to the two-day profile. If you have followed the last Soyuz launch, you know that this is a very real possibility: Soyuz 38S had a minor issue with one of the burns and they had to interrupt the nominal profile to eventually dock two days later.
In our sim, however, after the transition we also got a leak in the pressurization lines of the propellant tanks: basically we were loosing pressure in the helium tanks that pressurize our fuel and our oxidizer, so that they flow to the combustion chamber when the appropriate valves are opened. No pressure, no engine firing! So we had to immediately initiate an emergency descent, before the pressure became too low.
A nice refresher sim, as we wait for Terry to join us next time. I attach a picture of Anton and myself that Terry took a while back… with some artistic liberty.
(Trad IT) Traduzione in italiano a cura di +AstronautiNEWS qui:
https://www.astronautinews.it/tag/logbook/
(Trad ES) Tradducción en español aquí:
https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/
(Trad FR) Traduction en français par +Anne Cpamoa ici:
https://spacetux.org/cpamoa/category/traductions/logbook-samantha/
12/04/2014