Last Friday, on the day after our arrival in Baikonour, we left early in the morning for the cosmodrome, where the Soyuz TMA-13M is being prepared for launch on May 28th. In fact, this so-called “first fit check” drives the entire schedule of the crews in the weeks before: they have to be in Baikonour in time for this event.
Anton and I already had a chance to sit in the spaceship of Max, Reid and Alex back in Moscow a few months ago, when we did the acceptance verification.
But this time it was a very different feeling: this assembly of metal and electronics will bring our friends to space in less than two weeks, their lives will depend on it functioning properly. With that in mind, even more than if it were our own spacecraft, the one thing we kept telling ourselves was: “Don’t break anything!”
We went inside one first time in our blue flight suits for a general familiarization and to go over a checklist to verify the overall configuration. Then we went inside a second time in our Sokol suits, and this time we really focused on moving carefully and deliberately to avoid any incident. It’s a very cramped space and entering from above from the orbital module is obviously a lot more cumbersome than using the “fake” side hatch we have in the Star City simulators.
Both we and the prime crew went through a verification procedure of the communication system. In addition, the prime crew fully strapped in, since their seat liners were in place, and had a chance to experience the extension of the seats. When they’ll come back to Earth in six months, their seats will extend before landing to arm the shock absorbers, which would damped the impact force in case of a failure of the retrorockets.
Picture credit: Victor Zelentsov
More pics here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/astrosamantha/sets/72157644330297400/
(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/
20/05/2014