This was one of those weeks in astronaut training when I feel like a kid at summer camp. I got to spend three full days at Ellington Air Field, where NASA’s T-38 fleet is based, training basic maintenance skills with the amazing mechanics who fix those jets and make sure they’re safe to fly on. Great opportunity to refresh some skills and to learn many new tricks. Incidentally, I had a blast!
There’s something fun and rewarding in mechanical work: I guess it’s that combination of manual skill, knowledge about tools and materials and that basic human pleasure deriving from building something or repairing it.
Anyway, of course I wasn’t there for my entertainment. We do a lot of maintenance work on the Space Station. It’s an extremely complex vehicle and the equipment does require periodic preventive maintenance and, occasionally, corrective maintenance to recover from a failure. The ISS training flow includes a number of maintenance classes, in which we get familiar with the tools we have onboard, the way maintenance procedures are written, what the ground controllers expect in terms of reporting and interactions and some typical maintenance activities.
This Field Maintenance Training is a fairly recent addition and is meant as an immersive experience, in which you get a lot of hands-on practice and.. well, you learn from the best. It’s actually a two-week course, but unfortunately there is no way we could find two weeks in my schedule right now, four months from launch. But since I was really keen on doing is, the course is very flexible and I have stellar schedulers, I was able to participate for three intense days.
The first day I was in the avionics workshops, practicing soldering skills, multimeter use and working on electrical connectors, for example removing or installing pins. The rest of the time I shared between the battery and sheet metal workshops, practicing things like drilling, tapping, riveting, metal bending, removal of bolts with a stripped head… This latter one, I really hope it doesn’t happen on ISS: trying to drill through a steel bolt is not fun even on the ground, must be very challenging in weightlessness!
Last time I did something like this, I was 19-year-old and I was doing a 6-week metal work internship in a mechanical apprenticeship workshop in Munich, a requirement to start my engineering studies… I would have never thought that, 18 years later, I would be practicing cutting threads with manual tap-and-die sets as an astronaut, to possibly do it on the Space Station. Isn’t it cool?
Picture: trying to take picture of a poorly accessible and poorly illuminated detail. Ground controllers are the second pair of eyes for our ISS maintenance tasks… but since we can not bring them up there, it’s really important to be able to photo-document our work.
You can find more pictures here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/astrosamantha/sets/72157645855530706/
Futura mission website (Italian): Avamposto42
avamposto42.esa.int
(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/
25/07/2014