Last day of training in Star City for this trip and it will be another full day in the Soyuz simulators!
First a manual approach session, in which Anton gets to practice getting the Soyuz manually from a distance of a few km to about 100 meters in front of the docking port. As the flight engineer, I’ll help him out from the orbital module by measuring speed and distance with a laser range finder.
Then it will be my turn at the controls. I’ll have a solo session on manual docking, when I’ll practice docking the Soyuz from within 400 meters – that’s what we call the close-range.
The afternoon will be… hot! At some point during our training session in the Soyuz simulator smoke will start flowing into the descent module from behind the control panels. Not that smoke would necessarily have to flow from that direction in real life, but the simulator does have some known patterns of behavior of course. We’ll turn off all electric equipment but I have a distinct feeling that, like every time, this will not fix the problem in our scenario. So we’ll be left with only one choice: removing all the atmosphere. That will definitely kill the fire!
Once everybody has donned their Sokol pressure suits and the suits have passed the leak check, we will depressurize the capsule and start working procedures to organize the emergency descent. At this point, we’re on a clock: the suits are connected to the oxygen tanks and they can keep us alive for a couple of hours. That’s plenty of time to organize the braking burn that will bring us back into the atmosphere, but there is certainly no margin for not getting it right the first time!
25/07/2013