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No training scheduled on the weekend, although I will certainly take some time to review my notes of the week and to start preparing for next week’s training in the NBL, the big pool where we practice spacewalks. Terry and I will train for a contingency replacement of a pump module. Sounds familiar? That’s because it has already happened on orbit!

I’ve attached some pictures from yesterday at the NBL. I showed up early in the morning for a brief on the peculiarities of the pool’s robotic arm. The software interface and the hand controllers are the same, but the arm itself is of course quite different and the pool has its own special constraints. If you ever hear me say on orbit: “I can’t go any further nadir, we’re getting close to the floor”… something is badly wrong!

Flying the arm in the pool is mainly focused on the GCA moments. That’s an acronym we borrowed front the aviation world and it stands for Ground Controlled Approach. A GCA controller has the approaching aircraft on the radar and gives instructions to the pilot to keep the plane on the glide-path until the pilot has the runway in sight. In the EVA world, a GCA is when the spacewalking crew-member gives instructions to the robotic arm operator in order to move the arm to a particular position. Instructions can be for example “1 meter station zenith” or “15° body pitch up”. Since GCAs usually occur close to structure, good situational awareness on the part of everybody involved is very important and effective communication is vital.

I also got to practice suiting up crew-mate Butch. That’s not an easy task. We usually have very skilled suit technicians who help us, but on orbit we’ll be on our own, so it’s important to be able to help each other getting into the suit.

Today I go 3D! Day will start with a class on the ISS 3D camcoder. I have no experience at all with such equipment, so I’m very much looking forward to it. Then I will have an EVR refresher class. The acronym EVR refers to robotics operations in support of EVA activities: that’s when we ” fly”  spacewalkers around Station on the the Canadarm2. This refresher is important, because tomorrow I will get operate the NBL robotic arm for the first time. Yes, there is actually a robotic arm in the pool! Just to keep my head in the Crew Medical Officer world as well, I’ll have a class later today on dental procedures that could be required onboard ISS. I attach some pictures from our training in the Dome yesterday, where we got to practice our teamwork in monitoring the approach of Cygnus. We’re all very excited about the first Cygnus flying to ISS next month!  

The training day will start in a couple of hours with a short lesson on the still camera that is taken out on spacewalks and with which EVA crew-members have taken stunning photos outside Station. Then I’ll move on to a two-hour refresher on Crew Medical Officer skills. These classes have pretty serious currency requirements, as you can imagine. On the plan, among other things, a review of catheterization procedures, just in case microgravity messes up with somebody’s bladder functions. I know, not a very glamorous part of spaceflight, but a situation we want to be ready for! In the afternoon Terry and I will have a a three-hour free flier rendezvous class in the dome. Free fliers are visiting vehicles like HTV, Dragon or, in the near future, Cygnus, that don’t come all the way to docking, but rather hold position at 10 m from Station and are then grappled by the astronauts with the robotic arm and berthed to a free ISS port. I’ve found a really cool picture of fellow Shenanigan Alex in the dome. It’s a pretty amazing facility in which we practice the rendezvous phase of vehicles from corridor monitoring during the approach phase all the way to grappling with the Canadarm2. Final event for the day, a fit-check for my custom-made earplugs. Those are especially important for the periodic hearing assessment on ISS, in which we monitor the hearing function of astronauts throughout the mission. With all those pumps and fans running all the time, ISS is never very quiet!

I’d say today is a day devoted to overall well-being on ISS. Both Terry and I are being trained as Crew Medical Officers (CMO). We’ve both already taken a number of classes covering basic medical procedures. For example, the retinal imaging class I had yesterday! You can see me in the picture getting a feel for the fundoscope that is used to take images of the retina. As you might have heard, many long duration crew-members have experienced eyesight degradation during their mission and the reasons are not fully understood yet. That’s why we’re now monitoring the eyes so closely throughout the spaceflight. As CMOs, today Terry and I we’ll have a brief on the main psychological disorders that might occur in long duration spaceflight: how to recognize them, what to do about them. If you ask me, good food is one of the main means of psychological well-being. How fitting that today we’ll also have our ESA food tasting! ESA does not provide food for the standard ISS menu, but we do provide a number of dishes that crew-members can choose for their bonus food containers. Another aspect of well-being is overall fitness. Today I will also have a training session on the ARED (Advanced Resistive Exercise Device). The ARED is the weight-lifting machine onboard ISS, except that it doesn’t have weights, but rather big vacuum cylinders that provide resistance as we do squats, chest presses, bicep curls and much more. I’ve also attached a picture from the Quick Disconnects class I talked about yesterday, in case you’re curious to know how QDs look like. We got to practice on pressurized QDs on a special pressure trainer. Having to deal with the pressure in the lines gave me a whole new respect for this task!

Just had a tag-up with my NASA ITI (Increment Training Integrator) Alicia on the upcoming four weeks of training. Terry and I will be busy! Now I still have half an hour to take care of some admin stuff at my desk. It’s a gorgeous view from the window, as you can see. The building far on the right, by the way, is Mission Control Center – Houston. For friends MCC-H. More formally: the Gene Kranz Mission Control Center. Remember “failure is not an option”? Soon I’ll be heading to a class on Fluid Quick Disconnects (QDs) operations. QDs connect different segments of the fluid lines outside Station, in particular the highly toxic ammonia lines. I’ve worked  with QDs in the pool before during EVA training, but the pool mockups are low-fidelity. Today we’ll spend some time working with the high-fidelity QDs. In the afternoon I’ll have a class called retinal imaging, in which I will be taught some skills necessary to perform examination of another crew-member’s eyes. Better learn this well!

I’m on my way to Johnson Space Center for four weeks of US training. Short train ride from Cologne to the Frankfurt airport early this morning and now an 11-hour flight to Houston. There’s an A380 waiting at the gate, boarding is about to start. As you can see in the picture, boarding for this “beast” is done via three jetways on multiple levels! I’m not looking forward to the 7-hour difference in time zone. Actually 9 hours compared to Star City, where I was just two days ago. Jet lag might be the single greatest hurdle in astronaut training for me: it always takes me a week to ten days to get back to normal sleeping patterns after a intercontinental flight. Maybe because I’m accustomed to be a sound sleeper and typically fall asleep within seconds of hitting the pillow, dealing with sleep disruptions is not my cup of tea. Anyway, I see it as part of the training. Sleep shifting occurs pretty often on the International Space Station, in particular when the crew needs to support the arrival of new crewmates or of resupply vehicles like Progress, ATV, HTV, Dragon or, in the new future, Cygnus. As you can well imagine, docking times are determined by orbital mechanics, launch windows and orbital day/night requirements, not by the sleep schedule of the crew. I’m experimenting with a more deliberate approach to sleep-shifting. I’m wearing sunglasses this morning to reduce light exposure while it’s night in Houston. And I’ve purposely slept only a couple of hours last night, in the hope that this will help me be asleep most of the flight to the US. In a couple of weeks I’ll have a briefing at Johnson Space Center on sleep shifting techniques: looking forward to learning some helpful tricks!

Enjoying a day off at home! Lots of little things to take care of before I depart for Houston early tomorrow, but all in all a relaxing day. I thought I’d share some pictures from the 8G centrifuge run earlier this week. Some of you asked to see some “after” pictures, so here you go: before, during and after! I’ll tell you more tomorrow about how it felt.

D-Day has arrived. Departure Day, that is. Definitely not my favorite part of training life: when you have to pack your bags and move to the next location. In Star City I have an accommodation that is assigned to me, meaning that I always stay in Room 32 when I come for training. But while I’m gone, other ESA personnel on business travel can stay there, so when I leave I need to pack all my stuff and put in storage whatever I don’t want to take with me. It feels a bit like putting one life on freeze as I go somewhere else to live another life for a while. Because traffic around Moscow is typically inclement, we usually leave Star City 4 to 5 hours before plane departure. That can be even earlier on snowy days, a bit later if we leave at low-traffic times, like today. Our skillful driver, Nikolay, knocked at my door at 5 am this morning. Now I’m in Frankfurt waiting for my train to Cologne. I have some office work to take care of at the European Astronaut Center this afternoon. Sitting here in the busy terminal, it’s strange to think that I was riding my bike in peaceful Star City just last night. Or, for that matter, around this time yesterday I was settling in my chair in my “other” office. I attached a picture. Lots of lessons learned from our fire sim yesterday, especially in terms of distributing tasks between Anton and myself during a fire case. When the situation is critical, Crew Resource Management is especially important!

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!

Today I go ballistic! The Cosmonaut Training Center here in Star City is the home of the world’s biggest centrifuge with its 18-meters arm. It’s a pretty impressive beast. I had a first ride in it last week and I’ve written about it here: https://blogs.esa.int/astronauts/2013/07/22/a-ride-in-the-worlds-biggest-centrifuge/ But while last week I only went to 4.3 G, this time I will experience up to 8G. The purpose of this is not to inflict unnecessary pain on poor crewmembers, but rather to prepare us for the case of a ballistic reentry, when G loads can easily go up to 8G and more! So, what’s a ballistic re-entry? That’s a mode in which nobody, neither the crew nor the computer, is trying to control the re-entry trajectory of the vehicle. It pretty much comes down like an inert body with a trajectory dictated purely by its geometric characteristics and mass distribution. With one trick: the capsule is put into a continuous rotation around it’s longitudinal axis of about 13°/sec. So, why would we choose to go ballistic? Not that the nominal re-entry is a smooth ride, but this one is definitely rougher. Well, it could happen because of a number of failures during the nominal reentry. That’s why whenever a crew is returning from orbit there are always two rescue teams waiting: one at the nominal landing site and the other at the ballistic site. But it could also happen that you have to leave the orbit quickly because of an emergency, for example a fire or a depressurization. In that case the control teams at Mission Control Moscow don’t have the time to calculate and upload into the onboad computer the data for a controlled re-entry. So ballistic it is! And no, there won’t be a rescue team waiting in this case. Picture credit: GCTC