HOUSTON -- Astronaut Ed Lu will be the first American to serve as second in command of a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
A full-fledged chief flight engineer, Lu isn't just a passenger. If there's a problem during launch or docking with the International Space Station, he'll have to handle it.
"If you think about it, and heaven forbid this would happen, but if Yuri Malenchenko became ill on orbit, and that prompted an emergency return, Ed has to bring the Soyuz back," NASA astronaut Bill McArthur said.
And Lu readied for the mission in nine weeks, what could take up to a year-and-a-half to complete.
"Ed has got very strong Russian language skills, and so he has consistently required less time than we might call 'the norm' to go through the training just because of his language skills," McArthur said.
"But as a general rule, you would never want to have that as your baseline program," he said.
One of only three Americans to fly on a Russian Soyuz rocket says Lu should have no qualms about flying to the space station in a vehicle that dates to the dawn of the Space Age.
"I felt safer on the Soyuz than on the shuttle because the Soyuz has a good escape system," said former NASA astronaut Norman Thagard, who flew four shuttle missions before rocketing to Russia's Mir space station aboard a Soyuz in March 1995.
"And if I doubted that at all, all I had to do was look over at my flight engineer, Gennady Strekalov." Strekalov and cosmonaut colleague Vladimir Titov had been strapped into an earlier Soyuz spacecraft in September 1983 when a fire erupted at the base of their rocket just 90 seconds before a planned launch.
Two seconds before the rocket exploded, launch controllers issued a command to jettison the spacecraft mounted atop the launch vehicle. A small, solid-fueled tractor rocket lifted the capsule off the burning Soyuz. The spacecraft landed three miles away. The cosmonauts escaped unscathed.
"If it had been the shuttle, you would have been dead," said Thagard, now a professor of electrical engineering at Florida State University. "So I was a lot more relaxed on the day we launched on the Soyuz than I was on any of my shuttle launches."
Changing plans
Lu, 39, Malenchenko, 41 and cosmonaut Aleksander Kaleri originally were scheduled to launch to the station in March and Donald Pettit, and cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin -- was to return to Earth on that shuttle.
Those plans, however, were scrapped after the Feb. 1 Columbia disaster that killed seven.
NASA grounded its shuttle fleet indefinitely, leaving the Russian Soyuz as the only way to transport people and supplies to and from the station.
Lu and Malenchenko, consequently, will hurtle toward the station on a variant of a rocket that has flown more space missions than any other in the world.
The Soyuz first flew in 1966, a derivative of the missile that carried Sputnik -- the world's first satellite -- into orbit on Oct. 4, 1957. The Soyuz rocket has tallied a 98 percent success rate in 820 missions.
The Russians have made little more than incremental upgrades to its systems since.
"You sort of sense their philosophy is that 'better is the enemy of good,' " Thagard said. "It does the job it was designed to do. It's very safe, and they're little inclined to change it."
Inside the Soyuz
Don a bulky partial-pressure spacesuit and climb aboard a Soyuz at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and you'll find yourself in a confined capsule about the size of the modest Gemini spacecraft the U.S. flew during the mid-1960s.
The Soyuz's interior is pale green. It has a bevy of switches and gauges all are labeled in Cyrillic, and has three closely spaced seats, each with liners custom-fitted for the cosmonaut or astronaut who will ride in them.
Roomy it's not.
Think about taking the cramped middle seat in an airliner, rubbing elbows with two large people on either side of you. There's no legroom because the flight is full and your oversized carry-on is beneath the seat in front of you.
Now picture your row covered by a metallic pup tent that seems to get smaller and smaller once the flap -- or in the case of the Soyuz, the side hatch -- is closed for flight.
"It would be tough, I think, if you were claustrophobic," Thagard said.
Lu and Malenchenko have had relatively little time to train for launching aboard the Soyuz, their alternative to the shuttle.
Both previously received emergency training on how to abandon the station and return to Earth aboard a Soyuz. But neither had been certified, for this particular mission, to launch aboard a Soyuz and then perform a delicate docking at the station.
Day and night
McArthur, who served as director of NASA operations in Russia in 2001, said the Russians initially proposed a post-Columbia training schedule that called for Lu to complete 214 hours of training in Soyuz flight simulators.
But "there just simply was not enough time in the day to do the amount of training that they wanted him to do," McArthur said.
Given the circumstances, NASA and its Russian partners ultimately decided that 138 hours of Soyuz simulator time would be sufficient for Lu, thanks mainly to his proficiency in the Russian language and his ability to pick things up quickly.
Published under license from FLORIDA TODAY. Copyright © 2003 FLORIDA TODAY. No portion of this material may be reproduced in any way without the written consent of FLORIDA TODAY.
advertisement
