In 2011, the 50th anniversary of manned space flight was celebrated. With it came the retirement of Shuttle and the transition of ISS from a construction site to a fully operational science research facility. It is too early to fully analyze what lessons have been learned from this decade as we are not yet a third of the way through it, but based on operations on the station during the previous decade, the difficulties of managing time on the facility remain. Even with a six person crew and full experiment facilities attached, there is still too much time spent in maintenance, repair and cleaning. Locating items and keeping track of the inventory only works, even with the help of a barcoding recording system, if the data is input correctly. This was a lesson learned back in the days of Skylab, but has it
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The end of an era—Space Shuttle Atlantis on the ground at the end of the final Shuttle mission STS-135 July 2011.
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fully translated to today’s space station? Exercise and fitness programs in preparation for the return home also impact on crew time for science and research, and anything new can disrupt even the most trained and prepared crew. Visiting crews can be a welcome relief to the daily routine on station, but they also impede the natural flow of the main crew built up over time and it takes a while for a new crew to get up to speed.
Between the return of the American Skylab 4 astronauts in February 1974 and astronaut Norman Thagard launching to Mir in March 1995, the flow of experience of space station operations was lost by the Americans and the skills had to be learned all over again. Thagard commented, after coming home from a challenging mission in July 1995: “As we move into the era of long duration space flights, we need to consider that the problem of conducting complex experiments with little training is unavoidable.” Thagard went on to explain that if a mission is long in duration, the first sessions of some experiments may not be conducted for some months after last training on them and if these experiments were in early development or preparation, the crews may not have even trained on them at all. This was first recognized by the Skylab astronauts and had long been known by the Soviets. It could be a new challenge as crews move out from Earth and do not conduct the experiments they trained for until some months after their mission began.
As the sixth decade continues, new lessons will be learned, continuing to expand the skills and knowledge of the first fifty years. These lessons can hopefully be applied not only to future ISS and Tiangong expeditions, but also to follow-on programs which take us deeper into space. Despite over 50 years of human exploration of space we have still only taken a few steps in the trail first pioneered by Gagarin. With each new space flight a further step forward is taken, but these missions are destined for future entries in the log book of manned space flight.
The achievement of Gagarin’s historic flight became an annual celebration in the Soviet Union, known as “Cosmonautics Day”. Though this continued in the modern Russia following the collapse of the communist system, it was with perhaps less enthusiasm. However, with the growth of the internet and social media, international events under the banner “Yuri’s Night” are now being celebrated across the world, from small gatherings to larger official functions. For the 50th anniversary of Gagarin’s flight, this took on even more importance, not only for citizens in general, but for those directly associated with carrying his memory into space on each flight.
It has been a tradition of cosmonaut mission commanders, whether under the Soviet or Russian banner, to use a personal radio call sign for communication identification. As part of the celebrations of the previous 50 years of sending humans into space came the decision to use the call sign “Gagarin” for Soyuz TMA-21 (ISS Expedition 28) in April 2011. In recognition of both the American and Russian pioneers of space flight, the names of both the first Soviet Union cosmonaut (Yuri Gagarin) and the first American astronaut (Alan B. Shepard) in space were included in the design of the mission emblem. Radio call signs and mission emblems have become recognized as the flight crews’ personal input into each highly technical and scientific mission into space, humanizing the nuts and bolts of the hardware in which the crew members fly and continuing a long tradition of emblazoning aircraft with nose art or naming oceangoing vessels with a personal identity.
Behind the headlines, the press kits, news releases, and postflight debriefings are personal stories of triumph and achievement and, at times, of tragedy and
disappointment. Of course the science of flying into space, like most technology, is prone to failure and unforgiving disaster, but when things work as designed the results can be both spectacular and awe inspiring. When reading the accounts of each mission into space, the fine line between success and failure each crew faces through every second of the mission should be remembered. Whether these missions last a few minutes or hours, days, or months, the ever present threat of disaster and failure remains. Space is an unforgiving environment. No matter how many times humans venture there, neither the depth of training nor experience can totally eliminate the potential for system failure and risk to the health and safety of the crew. This is a specter constantly riding with every crew on each mission, but the same experience and frequency of exploring space does reduce such risks in that challenging environment. The true legacy of all previous flights into space is that they add to the ever expanding database of knowledge which allows future missions to push farther and deeper in space than ever before and to do so with added safety and with more confidence.
As we stand at the beginning of the second half of the initial hundred years of human space exploration, it is appropriate to review what has been achieved and what lessons have been learned. All this experience, both good and bad, can then be applied to current operations and future plans. How those plans turn out in reahty will be the responsibility of future generations, all of whom will follow in the trail of Yuri Gagarin. Even though his total space flight experience was just 108 minutes, he pioneered the journey from Earth to space. Yuri Gagarin will forever remain in the annals of human exploration as the first to leave the Earth, blazing a trail in the conquest for space for others to follow.
Having completed their mission crews prepare for the return to Earth. The method of crew recovery depends upon the design of the vehicle and the location of the landing area. This is usually a barren expanse of land or one of the planet’s vast oceans, both of which give a wide margin for error. The occupants of the spacecraft always hope for a safe and as soft a landing as possible.
For the Soviets, and subsequently the Russian planners, the preferred landing site has always been on soil, usually the immense expanse of Kazakhstan. One of the main reasons for this in the early days was the then secret nature of the whole
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Water impact for Orion mock-ups.
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Land impact tests for Orion revealing the planned dual landing capability.
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Soviet space project; keeping the returning crews and vessels away from the eyes of the outside world. It also avoided diverting naval resources into recovering crews from distant oceans. The early Vostok missions were unable to support a returning cosmonaut landing inside the spacecraft and thus provided an ejection seat for separate parachute descent. However, since 1964 all returning Soviet/ Russian spacecraft with a human crew on board have featured retro-rockets to soften the impact on the arid steppe land.
All Soyuz crews train for water recovery and, though none have been planned, there was one “splashdown”, on a frozen lake in 1976. The recovery proved to be a challenge for both the crew on board and the rescue teams. An earher mission also just missed landing in a lake by just 50 meters in 1971. With the advent of international cooperation, a number of international backup landing sites have been established for Soyuz spacecraft emergency landing situations, foremost of which are sites in Canada.
The ground landing is commonly called a “dust down”. Also termed a “soft landing” method, a landing in a Soyuz is never “soft”, with some dramatic impacts reported over the years, and with spacecraft bouncing upon landing or dragged by parachute. Crews have frequently described the impact as similar to a car crash. The earlier Vostok missions were also planned with ground landings, although cosmonaut training included water recovery techniques as a precaution. But with Vostok, the landing speed of the capsule was higher than any crew would have been able to survive, so the solo cosmonaut used an ejection seat system to vacate the capsule and descend by personal parachute.
One problem that this caused was in officially verifying the early missions. The Soviets had to state officially that each cosmonaut had launched and landed in their spacecraft in order to qualify for the new, internationally recognized aeronautical record. One of the criteria for this was that an occupant had to be inside the vehicle from the moment of leaving the pad to it touching down back on Earth. The Soviets quietly had to ignore this, particularly for Gagarin’s first mission, and maintained this pretense until 1978 when reports emerged that the first cosmonaut had indeed used the ejection system and parachute at the end of his flight. By then, of course, it hardly mattered.
When the Vostok was “upgraded” to fly a larger crew the ejector seat was removed. But this brought back the problem of the higher landing velocity and no suitable escape system. It was for these Voskhod craft that the retro-rocket package was first introduced, located in the recovery parachute system to slow the descent enough for the crew to survive the landing. Fortunately, only two Voskhod were flown, so the risk was minimal before the advent of Soyuz. The Chinese Shenzhou is similar to Soyuz. It is also designed for ground landings and follows a similar profile to the Russian craft.
All American manned space flights under Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo ended with parachute recoveries in the ocean and were retrieved with the assistance of the U. S. Navy. This costly exercise was one of the reasons the Shuttle vehicle was designed with ground landings in mind, reducing NASA’s bill from the U. S. Navy. The possibility of an orbiter ditching on water was still feasible in emergency situations and all crews did train for water egress up to the vehicle’s retirement. Conversely, land recovery techniques were also studied for both Gemini and Apollo although it was never adopted beyond tests and demonstrations. The vehicles currently in development to replace the Shuttle are being designed with both land and water-landing capabihties in mind.
From 1981 through 2011, 133 of the 135 Shuttle missions launched ending with a landing inside the continental United States, on runways in Florida (78 landings), California (54 landings), or New Mexico (1 landing). The Shuttle also had the capacity to land at a number of contingency landing sites around the world, although these were never called upon. Neither were the various transatlantic landing sites that were on standby during each launch in case the mission was terminated early. The Shuttle also had the capacity (in theory) to return to its launch site if necessary in an emergency situation, but again this was never required, much to the relief of each Shuttle crew!
There were significant developments during the second decade of manned space flight operations, which progressed the program forward as the emphasis changed from pioneering missions and lunar exploration to extended duration space flight and international cooperation.
During the final Apollo missions (14-17), the emphasis switched to more extensive surface activities and orbital science operations. The use of the Lunar Roving Vehicle and more mobility in the pressure suits helped the efficiency of the astronauts but one thing that became abundantly clear from the surface activities was that the disturbed lunar material would be a significant factor in planning any future lunar excursions (although at the time no one really thought this would be over 50 years in the future). The lunar dust found its way into everything, covering the suits, the equipment, and cameras. It was carried inside the LM at the end of the moonwalks and, in the one-sixth gravity, lingered in the environment inside the LM. When the next-generation lunar spacecraft or scientific research base appears, it will likely include an airlock-type facility, or at least an airflow barrier, to isolate the outside environment and EVA equipment area from the living quarters. Another important lesson learned from the later Apollo missions was that back-to-back EVA operations were tiring for the crew concerned, something that would have to be factored into planning for extensive EVA operations from the Shuttle.
From Skylab, the Americans experienced a totally new learning curve. Prior to the space station missions, the longest U. S. flight had been the 14-day Gemini 7 mission of 1965, with little mobility available in the close confines of the crew compartment. Even the three final Apollo landing missions with a packed timeline only lasted 11 to 12 days. There had been a gradual buildup of U. S. duration records over the first decade of operations, but Skylab extended the experience significantly over a period of just nine months. The Skylab missions set the achievement bar high for the rest of that decade and beyond.
Skylab has been an often overlooked program, in the shadow of Apollo, but like Gemini before it Skylab established some of the most important and influential experiences and achievements in U. S. space flight history. The program has more in common with today’s space station program than with the historic Apollo lunar missions. In some respects, Apollo could be considered a diversion from the logical progression of early manned space flight activities, from the first attempts through to experience of extended space flight operations in low Earth orbit, prior to the expansion of human exploration away from Earth. It could be argued that, like the Concorde supersonic passenger plane, and perhaps even the Space Shuttle, the Apollo missions were ahead of their time and suffered accordingly. Mastering operations in low Earth orbit and establishing a firm foothold there before moving outwards seems to be the way the global program is being directed for the 2020s. Perhaps without the distraction of the Space Race, we may have already gone farther along this path. But, then again, without that background of competition, we may not have gone very far at all. Once again, future history will reveal just how important these early programs were in establishing permanent human presence in space and far from the Earth.
One of the key lessons learned from the Skylab missions was the importance of scheduling the crew’s time and workload. There was an eventual realization that introducing new activities or objectives for which the crew had little or no prior experience would be less productive than allowing the crew to have the choice to follow a basic flight plan, with a “shopping list” of priorities. Tasks needed to be flexible, so that they could be completed on the day, added to a list of things that would be desirable to complete as soon as possible, or which could be slipped into the schedule as and when time allowed. Trying to micromanage the timeline, as was the case on Apollo, was not the best way to plan longer missions on a space station.
Skylab also highlighted the need for the crews flying the missions to be capable generalists rather than necessarily dedicated specialists. Each of the three missions included a scientist astronaut who had worked on the program for some years, but few of the pilot astronauts had been on the program for that long, many of them having moved over from the Apollo program. Skylab 4 Commander Jerry Carr, a Marine pilot on his first space flight, soon realized that, while learning to operate and monitor the Apollo Telescope Mount and its suite of solar observation experiments, he became a far better solar observer when he stopped trying to become a solar scientist.
It remains a bitter disappointment to many, both inside and outside of the program that, following the glowing success of Skylab A (especially after recovering the station from the brink of failure), the backup OWS could not be launched as Skylab В in the second half of the 1970s. It would have been a golden opportunity to capitalize on the experiences of the first workshop and to correct the mistakes made first time around, as the Soviets were beginning to learn from their Salyut series of stations.
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D. J. Shayler and M. D. Shayler, Manned Spaceflight LogII—2006—2012, Springer Praxis Books 158, DOl 10.1007/978-1-4614-4577-7_3, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
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SOYUZ TMA-9 (UPDATED)
2006-040A September 18, 2006
Pad 1, Site 5, Baikonur Cosmodrome, Republic of
Kazakhstan
April 21, 2007
Northeast of the town of Jezkazgan, Republic of Kazakhstan
Soyuz-FG (R7 serial number Ц15000-23),
TMA-9 (serial number 219)
215 da 08 h 22 min 48 s (Lopez-Alegria, Tyurin)
10 da 21 h 05 min (Ansari)
Vostok (“East”)
ISS resident crew transport (13S), ISS-14 research program, visiting crew 11 research program
Flight crew
LOPEZ-ALEGRIA, Michael Eladio, 48, USN, NASA ISS-14 commander,
Soyuz TMA flight engineer, fourth mission
Previous missions: STS-73 (1995), STS-92 (2000), STS-113 (2002)
TYURIN, Mikhail Vladislavovich, 46, civilian, RSA ISS-14 flight engineer 1, Soyuz TMA commander, second mission Previous mission: ISS-3 (2001)
ANSARI, Anousheh, 40, civilian, U. S. space flight participant, visiting crew 11 (returned with ISS-13 crew on TMA-8)
Shuttle delivered ISS-14 crew members—STS-121 up (STS-116 down)
REITER, Thomas Arthur, 48, ESA (German) ISS-14 flight engineer 2, second mission
Previous missions: Soyuz TM-22 (1995)
STS-116 up (STS-117 down)
WILLIAMS, Sunita Lyn, 41, US Navy, NASA ISS-14 flight engineer 2
Flight log
The 14th resident crew boarded the International Space Station (ISS) two days after they had been launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. On board with Lopez-Alegria and Tyurin was U. S. space flight participant Anousheh Ansari, who would spend just over a week aboard the station conducting a small research program. The day after docking, the crew were able to witness the reentry of
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Returning the ISS resident crew to three: Expedition 14 crew members Mikhail Tyurin (left), Thomas Reiter (center), and Michael Lopez-Alegria share a meal at the galley in the Zvezda Service Module.
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Atlantis at the end of the STS-115 mission, four days after the Shuttle had undocked from the station.
The original intention was for Japanese businessmen Daisuke Emomato to fly to the ISS on TMA-9 with Ansari serving as his backup, but he failed his preflight medical on August 21. The following day, Ansari replaced him on the prime crew. Ansari is the Iranian-born naturalized U. S. citizen who cofounded Telecom Technologies Inc. in 1993, supplying softswitch technology to the telecommunications industry. With her brother-in-law, she made a multimillion dollar contribution to the X-Prize suborbital space flight record attempt foundation, which was officially named the Ansari X-Prize in recognition of the contributions by her family. (The X-prize was won by SpaceShipOne in 2005.)
With the formal handover to the ISS-14 crew completed on September 27, Ansari returned to Earth on September 29 aboard TMA-8 with the ISS-13 crew members NASA astronaut Jeffery WilUams and Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov.
While Ansari’s fellow Soyuz TMA-9 crew mates were undergoing their induction in ISS systems prior to assuming formal residency from the outgoing ISS-13 team, the latest space tourist completed her own program. During her nine days on board the station, she conducted three TV broadcasts, amateur radio broadcasts, and a series of photographic and video surveys in the Russian segment of the station for educational purposes. She also participated in biomedical experiments, including researching the mechanisms behind anemia, muscle changes that influence back pain, and the consequences of radiation on crew members.
With the departure of the ISS-13 crew, Lopez-Alegria and Tyurin began to work with ESA astronaut Thomas Reiter, who had arrived on July 6 aboard Discovery during the STS-121 mission. The German astronaut was working on the ESA Astrolab program and would leave the station on December 20 aboard Discovery (STS-116) after handing over his ISS-14 FE2 role to NASA astronaut Sunita Williams who arrived on the station on December 11. Williams would continue on board the station with the ISS-15 crew after the departure of Lopez – Alegria and Tyurin. During their first days on the station, the new resident crew was occupied with troubleshooting the Russian Elektron oxygen system, which had been switched off due to overheating just before they arrived on the station. This was followed by the shutdown of Control Moment Gyroscope #3 (this would be replaced during STS-118) and the repair of the American Carbon Dioxide Removal Assembly (CDRA) system. Maintenance work takes up as much time as experimental work on most expeditions. Thomas Reiter’s arrival saw the resumption of delivering a third permanent crew member via Shuttle, an important step towards resuming normal operations after the loss of Columbia in February 2003. Other “normal” operations included the relocation of Soyuz TMA-9 from the aft port of Zvezda to the nadir port on Zarya on October 10. The crew relocated the Soyuz a second time on March 31, moving the spacecraft from Zarya back over to Zvezda to clear the hatches for other operations. During their expedition, the crew would also receive the Progress M-58 and M-59 resupply vessels and host the STS-116 crew.
Throughout their expedition, the resident crew continued to work on the expanding experiment program in both the Russian and American segments. These were now being supplemented by the ESA program conducted by Reiter. There were 114 hours of crew time planned for American science operations and 266 sessions on 41 experiments in the Russian segment. The crew also conducted extensive robotics work with the Canadarm2 unit on the exterior of the station.
A total of 33 hours 42 minutes of EVA time was accumulated by the ISS-14 crew. Lopez-Alegria conducted all five space walks, accompanied on the first and fifth by Tyurin from Pirs using Russian Orlan suits and by Sunita Williams for the other three, operating in U. S. EMUs from the Quest airlock.
The first EVA (November 23, 2006, 5h 38 min) involved the repositioning, deployment, and relocation of equipment on the exterior of Zvezda, as well as the commercially sponsored Canadian “golf experiment” in which a golf ball was placed in orbit using a gold-plated club. The next three EVAs (January 31, 2007, 7h 55 min; February 4, 7h 11 min; and February 8, 6h 40 min), from the U. S. segment, focused upon rerouting electrical and fluid quick disconnect lines from the soon-to-be-disconnected Early External Active Thermal Control System to a permanent cooling system in the Destiny Laboratory. The two astronauts also began work for the Station-to-Shuttle Power Transfer System (SSPTS), which would enable the Shuttle to draw electrical power from the station for extended visits to the facility. On their third EVA, the two astronauts jettisoned two large shrouds from solar array truss P3 Bays 18 and 20 and installed an attachment for cargo carriers. The final EVA of this expedition (February 22, 6h 18 min) was back on the Russian segment, where the two astronauts retracted a stuck antenna on Progress M-58 and performed a series of equipment photography and similar lesser tasks. In a total of 10 EVAs, Lopez-Alegria had accumulated an American astronaut record of 67 hours 40 minutes by the end of his residency.
On March 31 (March 30, gmt), the Soyuz TMA-9 spacecraft was relocated from the Zarya port to the rear Zvezda port. Although this operation took only 24 minutes, the operation to shut down the ISS and then restart it again took several hours each side of the relocation flight, during which the station remained unmanned.
A combination of the delay to the launch of STS-117 (due to hail damage on the External Tank on February 26) and the rescheduling of TMA-10 from March to April ensured that Lopez-Alegria and Sunita Williams would both set new American astronaut endurance records for stays in space. The replacement resident crew arrived at the ISS aboard Soyuz TMA-10 on April 9, 2007. Traveling to the ISS with the ISS-15 cosmonauts was American businessman Charles Simonyi. Following the customary welcoming ceremonies, Simonyi exchanged his Soyuz seat liner with Williams, who officially joined the ISS-15 crew. The formal handover between ISS-14 and ISS-15 crews took place on April 17. After a joint program of 10 days, the ISS-14 crew loaded the Soyuz TMA-9 with items for their return, together with Simonyi, on April 21.
Milestones
250th manned space flight 102nd Russian manned space flight 95th manned Soyuz flight 9th manned Soyuz TMA mission 13 th ISS Soyuz mission 11th ISS Soyuz visiting mission (VC11)
Longest flight by a Soyuz spacecraft (215 days)
Set new endurance record for ISS Expedition (215 days)
Lopez-Alegria set career EVA record for an American at 67 h 40 min (10 EVAs) He also set record for longest U. S. space flight (215 da 8h 22 min 48 s)
Ansari was the 4th (1st female) space tourist and the 1st Iranian in space
Flight crew
POLANSKY, Mark Lewis, 50, civilian, NASA commander, second mission Previous mission: STS-98 (2001)
OEFELEIN, William Anthony, 41, USN, NASA pilot
PATRICK, Nicholas James MacDonald, 42, civilian, NASA mission specialist 1 CURBEAM Jr. Robert Lee, 44, USN, NASA mission specialist 2, third mission Previous missions: STS-85 (1997), STS-98 (2001)
FUGLESANG, Arne Christer, 49, ESA (Swedish) mission specialist 3 HIGGINBOTHAM, Joan Elizabeth, 42, civilian, NASA mission specialist 4
ISS-14 crew member up only
WILLIAMS, Sunita Lyn, 41, USN, NASA mission specialist 5, ISS-14 flight engineer 2
ISS-14 crew member down only
REITER, Thomas, 48, German Air Force, ESA (German) mission specialist 5, ISS-14 flight engineer 2, second mission Previous mission: Soyuz TM22/Mir 20 (1995)
