L-292: Launch to docking sim

Today we had long sim with Terry and Anton practicing all operations from the moment we take our seats on the launch pad to docking… well, actually we didn’t quite make it to docking, we ran out of time a few km from Station. But it was anyway an intense training day with lots of learning points!

This is, by the way, how our first exam day will look in a couple of months, when we will be do our official qualification sims as the backup crew of the Exp40 folks. On this type of sims, since the exam does foresee that we get to ISS somehow, we would never get catastrophic malfunctions like a fire, a depressurization or a leak in the propellant lines: those scenarios would force us to an immediate emergency reentry.

Instead we will get a number of smaller malfunctions, which today included for example a lack of ventilation in Terry’s suit, a leak in one of the oxygen lines, a failure of the main radio receiver, a broken gas analyzer forcing us to manually keep internal pressure within acceptable limits by opening and closing the oxygen supply valve, a series of Kurs failures of both the prime and the backup unit, which would have eventually forced us to a manual rendezvous and docking, if we had gotten that far.

We don’t always wear our Sokol during Soyuz training, but these so called “suited” sims are very useful to get us used to properly strapping in and organizing our actions. As you might have noticed, we don’t exactly have a lot of space to move around in the descent module, so it’s a really good thing to practice dealing with the suit in the cramped space.

I’ve attached a couple of pictures in which you can see knee straps. Because at reentry the impact with the ground is pretty violent, it’s important that legs are tied down to the seat: if they were free to move, legs might violently impact the control panel just above and cause pretty serious harm. Not having leg straps properly in place has been a serious debrief item in one of our previous sims, so now we are in the habit of checking each other carefully.