On the day he learned his lifelong dream would come true, cosmonaut Aleksandr Kaleri felt no joy. He knew that the reason he was being assigned as a commander of a Soyuz spacecraft was that seven people had died. And the specter of Columbia has continued: Even as he and his crewmates train to go up to the space station in October, Kaleri still does not know how he will get home: shuttle or Soyuz.
THE NEXT MISSION to the space station is set for Oct. 26, when Kaleri and his crewmates will launch aboard a Soyuz capsule. The three men spoke last week with reporters at the Johnson Space Center in Houston; Kaleri later spoke one-on-one with NBC News reporters, describing how his flight plans for 2003 had been scrambled by the Columbia disaster on February 1.
Originally, Kaleri was part of the planned three-man Expedition Seven crew for the International Space Station. Together with the commander, Yuri Malenchenko, and the science officer, Ed Lu, he was to have ridden a U.S. space shuttle into orbit in March, to relieve the previous crew.
With the grounding of the shuttle fleet, everything changed. The twice-yearly Russian missions of short-term “taxi” crews (including paying guests) to periodically replace the Soyuz bail-out capsules on the station became the only way to get the long-term Expedition Crews into space.
Furthermore, because of constraints on space station supplies — primarily water — the long-term crew size was reduced from three to two.
As a result, Kaleri’s two crewmates were assigned to fly the first Soyuz, in April, to relieve the former crew, whose mission had been stretched several weeks.
Furthermore, two men from their original backup crew — cosmonaut Valeriy Tokarev and astronaut Bill McArthur — were immediately assigned to train for a later Soyuz mission.
This left Kaleri, along with British-born astronaut Michael Foale, the leftover member of the backup crew, to form a third two-man crew. And because they were both very experienced space veterans, their assignment was the toughest: learn entirely new Soyuz crew duties as the backup crew for Malenchenko and Lu. And they had to do this immediately.
“It was a heavy task,” Kaleri told MSNBC.com, “There was only two months to train.” They had to be ready to step in on short notice and fly the April mission, if anything happened to the prime crew. It didn’t, and they were then assigned as prime crew themselves, for the next launch, in October.
LAST MAN ABOARD MIR Kaleri was a civilian physicist who worked in Russia’s space industry before being selected as a cosmonaut. He flew three missions aboard the Mir space station, and has the dubious distinction of being the last man aboard that vehicle before it was dropped out of orbit in 2001. “Of course, we didn’t realize it when we left that there would be nobody else,” he sighed.
In the eighty-odd manned Soyuz missions since 1967, all but two have been commanded by Russian jet pilots, not civilian engineers. Those took place in 1979-1980, and only one actually made a successful space linkup. And as Phil Chien of “Earth News” pointed out at the press conference on Thursday, on both those occasions together with the Soyuz landing last April when another civilian was in command, there had been serious landing problems. It’s an inauspicious set of precedents, even without the Columbia.
Kaleri brushed off any suggestion of a jinx. And he defended his space piloting skills, even though his vitae only lists 22 hours of flight time, in a L-39 jet trainer. Cosmonauts who have been pilots have at least 500 to 1000 hours of time in jets.
“I have had the same [Soyuz] training as the military pilots,” he pointed out, in slow but clear English. And he has received full certification from the training center outside Moscow.
“In my opinion the skills for controlling spacecraft like the Soyuz, more ballistic than an airplane, are not so close to the skills for piloting planes,” he explained. “I think I can do these tasks at the same level of performance as military pilots. I will do my job no worse than them.”
It was always his goal, Kaleri said, to eventually command a Soyuz crew. But there was “no joy this time, because of the circumstances.”
POLITICS OF SEATING Kaleri faces one additional unprecedented difficulty. The training for the second seat of the Soyuz, the flight engineer who sits to the left of the center-seated commander, was complicated by politics. Although Kaleri’s companion aboard the space station will be five-time space veteran Michael Foale, Foale will NOT be the second member of the Soyuz crew. That distinction falls to European Space Agency astronaut Pedro Duque, who will launch with Kaleri and Foale, spend a week aboard the space station, and then return to Earth with the current crew, Malenchenko and Lu, in their older Soyuz craft.
The third seat of a typical Soyuz mission is for the “passenger,” who actually does very little work during the launch and docking. Training is minimal, and even commercial space tourists with no flight experience can pick it up in a few months. Yet it is in this seat that Foale will be sitting on this launch. True, he insisted, he will test some new hand-held rendezvous sensors during the docking, but otherwise he will have no role in controlling the Soyuz.
Duque explained that he is flying as part of a European strategy to get short-term experience aboard the station, and to train a cadre of European astronauts as certified flight engineers so they can assume even more responsible crew positions later. Several Europeans have already taken part in such missions — they pay about $12 million for the seat — and more are scheduled next year. A Dutch physician named Kuipers will be the flight engineer on the Soyuz to be launched in April 2004, and he will return to Earth with Kaleri and Foale in the Soyuz, if the shuttle isn’t ready by then.
Of course, since the shuttle may fly as early as April, this crew also has to train to land in it, as well as in a Soyuz. “We joke that we may have a one-way ticket [on the Soyuz]”, Foale said. As to which spacecraft he will land on next spring, he added: “I honestly wouldn’t want to guess.”
In addition, in case the long-term crew later has to use the Soyuz for an emergency evacuation, Foale DOES have to know how to fly back as its flight engineer. What this means is that Kaleri has to train as the commander with three different possible flight engineers — with Duque for launch (and possible abort landing), with Foale for an emergency evacuation landing, and with Kuipers for a nominal landing next April. But Kaleri, referring to his training with Duque and Foale, assured reporters that “Both these guys have gotten to be very good flight engineers in a very short time.”
And although Ed Lu, now in orbit with Russian commander Yuriy Malenchenko, was the flight engineer for their Soyuz launch last April (it was, after all, only a two-man crew), he is NOT slated to be flight engineer for the landing this coming October. Before they were launched, Duque had already made several training runs with Malenchenko. “I have more training time for landing with Yuriy than Ed does,” he pointed out.
Added to these training permutations complex enough to make one’s head spin like an orbit, there’s the added load — metaphorical and physical — of Duque’s presence aboard the Soyuz. The extra seat on the two-man Soyuz launch last April was filled with a canister containing extra supplies and science materials, such as specimens for processing. And even though it is strictly the so-called “upmass/downmass” limitation that is the dominant constraint on how much science can be conducted aboard the station, the opportunity to enhance station science by using this room in the October Soyuz for supplies has been sacrificed in order to fly the ESA astronaut.
The reason is simple, Foale explained: “They’re paying for the launch!” Without the ESA cash, the underfunded Russian space program wouldn’t have been able to buy the spacecraft and its launch vehicle from the manufacturers. Added training complexity and reduced science capability are just two more repercussions of Moscow’s budget crunch in space.
For the three crewmen of Soyuz TMA-3, as the craft will be called, these complexities are irrelevant to their dedication to flying their mission successfully. And although they have had to endure probably the most complicated and reorganized training schedule in the history of human space flight, they expressed confidence in the mission and each other. “I have no doubt that Sasha [Kaleri] can outperform all the other cosmonauts,” Foale testified, and each of them endorsed the skills of the others. In a few months, they will have the opportunity to prove it.