Yesterday Anton and I both had a perfect score on our manual docking exam, which was the first of a series of 6 exams we’ll have to pass to be qualified for our flight to space on Nov 23rd. The remaining ones are manual descent, manual rendezvous, knowledge of the flight program, Russian segment operations and, finally, the full day complex Soyuz simulation, which will complete the series on October 31st and bring to a close over three years of training.
As you know, it’s the second time Terry, Anton and I go through the final exams: the first time was back in May, when we served as backup crew for Reid, Alex and Max, who are now in space. I told you everything about the manual docking exam back then: you can find that story here!
It’s certainly nice to have the first exam behind me, but there’s also a touch of sadness. Chances of actually flying the Soyuz manually in space are very slim: as you know, the Commander sits in the center seat and is prime for manual flying; and manual docking is anyway only necessary in case of a failure of the computer or the automatic docking system. That means that yesterday might have been my last time manually flying the Soyuz, albeit in the sim, for a long time, or maybe forever…
Anyway, I have a lot to look forward to… certainly not the time to get melancholic! I’m flying to space in 36 days!
Pic: a cheerful start of the exam with Anton, we cracked some jokes with the commission as we picked our envelopes with the exam scenarios (Credit: ESA/S.Corvaja).
More pictures here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/astrosamantha/sets/72157633096769012/
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 FR) Traduction en français par +Anne Cpamoa ici:
https://spacetux.org/cpamoa/category/traductions/logbook-samantha/
(Trad ES – Currently not updated) Tradducción en español aquí:
https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/
18/10/2014