I will spend six hours in the Soyuz simulator today! Actually in two different ones.
The first one you can see in the picture. That day our crewmate Terry was with us as well, now he’s in the US. It’s in this type of sim that we practice all phases of flight. The hatch right behind us, btw, does not exist in the real spaceship: on the launchpad you have to lower yourself down from the top section, the orbital module. But for the daily work it would be a bit cumbersome.
We also have another sim type that is used only to train manual rendezvous, manual docking, undocking-and-redocking to another port (this latter is always manual). I’ll have a practice session in the afternoon.
In the morning I’ll be with Anton in the sim to practice ascent and post-ascent orbital operations. We’ll start out, as we would nominally, with the quick rendezvous procedures that I’ve talked about a couple of days ago. But in the process of doing the burns to get to Station, something will happen that will make it impossible to keep the tight schedule.
Fortunately, the “old” two-day rendezvous profile always applies! In agreement with the ground, we’ll transition to the longer profile and give ourselves some more time to fix the issues. We’ll just have to wait a bit longer for that warm meal!
23/07/2013