Have you heard the news?
Today, Roscosmos, the Russian Space Agency, has officially announced that our landing is delayed until early June, which means that… Terry, Anton and I get to stay a few extra weeks in space!
As I’m writing this I just can’t believe that our original landing date was tomorrow and I would now be about to jump in my ISS sleeping bag for the very last time. I suppose I wasn’t mentally ready to leave quite yet, partly due for sure to the fact that this change of plans has been in the air for quite some time.
After the loss of Progress 59P two weeks ago, we all immediately realized that the next Soyuz launch would likely be delayed to buy time for a full investigation, implementation of any corrective actions deemed necessary and possibly the launch of another unmanned vehicle first.
Whether our return would be postponed as well was less clear: on the one hand there are obvious advantages in having a full crew complement onboard, on the other hand we had just lost a cargo resupply ship and consumables might have been an issue (turned out they aren’t).
As we waited for the ISS partner agencies to make a decision, we were scheduled last week for all the activities required to keep us on track for a nominal landing: we performed a leak check of our Sokol pressure suits (leak check passed!); we fit checked our Kentavr compression shorts; we continued to pre-gather cargo for our Soyuz, including our personal 1,5 kg allocation and we packed our few other personal items for return to Earth on Dragon. Anton and I refreshed our manual reentry skills. Since a final decision about delaying our landing had not been made, we had to be ready.
However the Soyuz thrusters’ test, which was scheduled early on Friday morning, was canceled and at that point it was clear that we weren’t going home on May 13th. Ready and happy to stay!
And no worries: I still have underwear, socks and even one of my bonus food containers left. I’m really glad that I saved some of those basic supplies, just in case! I was also able to recover a couple of brand new T-shirts that I had already used to wrap some Dragon return items: they might have some glue residue from the gray tape on them, but they’ll do the trick if I need them!
Talking about Dragon, looks like Terry and I will unexpectedly be around for the full SpaceX-6 mission: we’re diligently packing and loading bags clearing space on ISS, which is always welcome.
We’re also doing more preparatory work to move PMM to the Node 3 forward location and… who knows? The actual move might actually happen soon, instead of next summer. Since we’re not going anywhere for a while, the planners will find ways to make good use of our time onboard.
And I would be thrilled about enjoying, even for a few days, a 360 degrees unrestricted view from the Cupola!
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) Tradducción en español por +Carlos Lallana Borobio
https://laesteladegagarin.blogspot.com.es/search/label/SamLogBook
(Trad DE) Deutsch von https://www.logbuch-iss.de
(Trad Russo)+Dmitry Meshkov https://samlogbook-ru.livejournal.com
13/05/2015