Tag Archives: Shenanigans

Capsule Resource Management

A pie and a pint. A pint of British ale, to be specific, lukewarm and flat as it's supposed to be, and served in a cosy english pub, sitting close enough to the fireplace to let the flames warm me up a little bit from the chilly outside temperature (after all, it's May in Cheshire, so I can be happy with 8 Celsius). What does it have to do with CRM? Everything. I will explain. But what on earth is CRM, to start with?

Cheshire's Reviving Menu, or CRM

Don't worry, I won't start a theoretical lesson here, and I will mention beer again, just to keep your attention up...

CRM has numerous meanings, from Certified Risk Manager to Centre de Recherches Mathématiques or Cis-Regulatory Module, all the way through Courtesy Reply Mail, depending on your field of expertise.

What we're interested in, though, is Cockpit Resource Management, and its offspring Crew Resource Management. It was created in 1979, after people making statistics realized that human error played a role in almost every major airline accident, and deservedly so: according to James Reason's "Swiss cheese model", an accident in our modern complicated airliners' world happens only when a great many different factors align, and when a risk manages somehow to go through all the layers of safety, the last and arguably most important of which being the pilots' judgements and actions.

As in: "usually the weather was always fine but today a strong dense fog was covering the airfield".
"and this plane is supposed to be equipped for handling low visibility but on this particular day this equipment had failed"
"which wouldn't have been a problem if controllers had been more at ease with the English language or equipped with surface movement radar, but this airfield was never meant to handle international flights, only domestic traffic"
"that's why on this day, when the city's main airfield had closed just hours before, all flights had to divert to here, which made such a small airport unbelievably crowded and planes had to backtrack the runway, which you usually don't do"
"but all this wouldn't have caused the accident if the pilots had second guessed what they thought was a take-off clearance"[1].

There you have it: all the holes aligned: weather + equipment + environment + procedures + pilots’ judgment, what an improbable coincidence, any single one of those safety layers would have saved the situation, but sometimes fate is playing tricks on even the safest means of transportation...

Watch out for when all the holes align...

So yes, human error is always part of the chain of events that leads to accident, only because pilots, military or civilian, are the last layer of safety, the most versatile layer; they are put in a situation in which ultimately, even if everything else fails, they are given a chance, even a so slight one, to recover and save the day: they always are the last barrier.

And don't get me wrong, you're not reading a plea to give pilots the credit they deserve in our modern world where people now think they only push those two big buttons labelled "take-off" and "landing" and computers take care of the rest, but one has to realize that even if sometimes they just couldn't take the action the situation required, in 99% of cases, this last layer effectively blocks those few risks that made it all the way to it, which of course the general public never hears about, specifically because on these days, nothing bad happens in the end.

So how to make this last layer as resilient as possible? Pilots technical skills are already highly trained, but NASA (interestingly enough) realized in 1979 that it was not only about technical skills: communication was a major factor, and so were leadership, teamwork, decision making, situation awareness, fatigue management and resistance to stress.

Universities picked up on this new field of research, and very soon CRM was part of every aircrew training curriculum, first in the US, then worldwide. Tools like structured briefings, to pass information on and always keep track of the situation while sharing a same project of action as a crew, appeared. Failures or unexpected events started to be treated in such a way that every crew member would be given the chance to express his/her opinion, no matter what the gradient of authority and of experience was in the cockpit. Junior officers were now encouraged to speak up, and airlines made sure they wouldn't be blamed for disagreeing with their senior officers. Methods for efficient decision making in time-constrained situations were designed. And so on. And to no one's surprise, the airline business became safer and safer[2].

Kudos to air travel for getting safer and safer

So it's all very well, and I'm sure that, as an occasional passenger, you're very happy with this, but what does it have to do with a pie and a pint... and with human spaceflight?

As CRM was now a well-established part of aircrew members training, it started to spread into other high-risk, complex environment activities. Firemen took up the torch. The nuclear industry became an avid user of CRM's methods and tools. Oil rigs' safety procedures are heavily impregnated with CRM. There is today a trend in medical surgery to use more and more of those techniques. And so on. And flying in space, as the natural extension of flying in the air, couldn't ignore the trend any longer.

Our missions are today longer and longer. The standard is 6 months in the ISS, the future will without a doubt see even longer interplanetary missions. You cannot afford to have poor communications, biased decision making, low situation awareness or bad teamwork etc., for such long missions in such harsh environments. Whatever "bad" behaviours you can get away with for a one hour-long flight, don't even dream about extending them to a space mission.

CRM and "soft skills" will get you to space!

So today, we select the crew according to their psychological predispositions to teamwork, we test their decision-making, leadership and communications, and we train them. In the simulator, in the classroom, underwater, in isolation in Antarctica, in the wild, in the Russian snow, or in Sardinian caves. They will, we will, have to face the unexpected. We will have to react as a team. It doesn't matter who is the smartest or the quickest: the output of the entire team cannot be greater than its slowest member's. As it grew wider in range and acceptation, CRM went from Cockpit Resource Management to Crew Resource Management then to Company Resource Management... it is now becoming Capsule Resource Management!

CAVES 2011: also check CAVES 2012 and NEEMO on Youtube

And that’s exactly why I was in Cheshire, of all places: being already qualified as a Type-Rating Instructor in the aviation world, I was being trained there as a CRM instructor, together with pilots from all over the world, military or civilian, fixed wings or rotary, to further increase my exposure to these concepts, and to help spread the word into the space business. After all, CRM originated in civilian air transportation, so it’s only fitting that an ex-commercial pilot should do his part. And during my stay in this lovely corner of England, as Andy was preparing for going underground for CAVES, as Samantha was gearing up for NOLS, Tim was underwater 10 miles off the coast of Florida for NEEMO. It just shows how much emphasis is now put on CRM and HBP (Human Behaviour and Performance) for space crews training nowadays. And as Tim had been in this hot and damp environment for quite a while with his crewmates, with only canned food and warm coke in their underwater habitat, I took the picture shown at the beginning of the article, and sent him. For sure communication is part of CRM, and rightly so, but one could argue that a little motivation doesn’t do any harm…[3]

[1] Any resemblance to an actual air disaster is not purely coincidental: see the Tenerife disaster. No equipment failure was involved in the real accident, it is added here in the discussion only to illustrate James Reason’ Swiss cheese model.

[2] Of course, technology also greatly contributed to air transportation’s safety

[3] Right after receiving this picture while living under the sea, Tim got back at me (and at Andy) in great fashion: see how.

#Shenanigans09

In The Matrix, one of my favourite movies, Neo is walking up a set of stairs when he spots a black cat in a corridor. The cat disappears around a corner only to reappear in the corridor a few seconds later. Neo casually dismisses it as a case of déjà vu. However, Morpheus and Trinity immediately recognize it as a glitch in the Matrix and as a sign of the danger that is about to befall them.

The same sort of situational awareness and attention to detail is necessary when you are a member of the Shenanigans 2009 class of ESA astronauts. Is your coffee cup still on the same side of your computer as when you left your office? Is your desk chair the same height as when you last sat in it? These are all clues as to whether or not you are about to become the victim of another shenanigan. Unfortunately, long periods of calm can give a false sense of security and dull the senses. As a result, it is a skill that has to be relearned occasionally.

I recently had this lesson taught to me again, when I noticed that the name tag on my flight suit was missing. We all have extra sets of Velcro name tags and national flags for our training flight suits, so I dismissed it as a case of careless misplacement. I should have known better…

As readers of this blog know, Tim recently took part in NASA’s NEEMO 16 mission. The team of four aquanauts spent 12 days living underwater, testing the operational and technical concepts needed for an asteroid sampling mission. Read more about the mission and check out the awesome pictures at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/NEEMO/index.html. Tim brought back not only a wealth of experiences, but also the video below, which illustrates magnificently why our astronaut class of 2009 is called the Shenanigans.

Thomas’ and my name tags are now four miles of the Florida coast and 20 meters below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, waiting to greet the next visitors to the gazebo of the Aquarius habitat. The only way to retrieve the name tags is for one of us to participate in the next NEEMO mission. Here’s to hoping!

PS. I will be participating in ESA's CAVES training in September. The training is similar to NEEMO, except that we will be living underground in a cave in Sardinia for six days. Check out the video from last year's CAVES team, which included Thomas and Tim at http://www.esa.int/esaHS/SEMBNGFURTG_index_0.html. Suggestions by tweet welcome for how to get back at Tim.

Leonardo and the guardian angels

If you ever have a chance to visit NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL) – and it’s well worth a visit - you will notice a brightly coloured painting on the wall of the main control room. On the left side is an unusual depiction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, which seamlessly fades into a human being in the same pose, but dressed in a white spacewalker’s EMU. That’s the Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or simply “the suit”.

Part of the NBL. The control room is on the right sight and you can see the painting on the wall. (Photo courtesy of NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman)

I love how this painting strikes a connection between human spaceflight and Leonardo, a figure who explored the potential of the human genius in engineering, art and the observation of nature. I wish I could somehow tell Leonardo that today not only we have flying machines – albeit quite different from the ones he envisioned – but human beings can even “walk” in space. And I wish he could fly on the Space Station and use his talent to tell and depict the story of those human beings up there.

What I think is missing in Leonardo’s original drawing, however, is the connection between people, the idea of a collective endeavour. The NBL painting, on the contrary, is a tribute to the team, and in particular to some very special people: the NBL divers.

The painting on the NBL control room

Divers are our guardian angels in the water. First and foremost, they are in charge of our safety and are rigorously trained to respond to any suit emergency in an expeditious and effective manner to protect the life and health of the guys or girls entrusted to them.

Life savers in an emergency situation, in a nominal EVA training run divers are instrumental in providing astronaut with smooth and effective training. Briefly, it is on their shoulders to make the gap between pool training and real weightlessness as small as possible.

So, how do they do that? First of all, by means of a good weighout, the process of adding or removing weights and foam blocs from different locations of the suit to stabilize it in the water. When I’m in the suit, I really enjoy these moments, because I can relax as the divers spin me in different orientations to pinpoint residual tendencies of the suit to rotate.

Divers performing initial weighout at the beginning of the run (Photo: NASA)

Another trick to fool gravity in the pool is to use low-fidelity, neutrally-buoyant substitutes for tools and replacement parts, as long as it is compatible with training objectives. For example, you might have noticed that spacewalking crewmembers carry a Power Grip Tool (PGT) tucked away on their right side. In the pool we carry a lighter, fake PGT during translations. When we need to use it, we retrieve the light PGT from the swing arm and hand it to a diver, who will promptly swap it for a higher-fidelity PGT that can actually drive fasteners. Yes, that’s what the diver is doing in the paining!

Throughout the run, divers will continuously help to offset the weight of high-fidelity tools and replacement units or stabilize the suits in orientations that happen to be unstable in the water in that particular moment. They operate the underwater cameras that record the action and feed live images to the control room. And they are a great source of invaluable feedback and suggestions, since many of them have supported countless EVA training runs over the course of many years at the NBL.

Divers take charge of us in the moment we are lowered in the water. For a six-hour run, they work on three two-hour shifts, with the first-shift divers typically coming back in for the third shift.

Also, remember that suits in the pool are supplied with Nitrox and cooling water from the surface via umbilicals. Divers manoeuvre the umbilicals out of our way and sometimes they will ask us to let go of structure and they will fly around a module or a truss segment to reroute them. I like these occasional brief breaks from the hard work. Not only I welcome the opportunity to rest for a minute or two, but immensely enjoy the bird’s eye view of the Space Station under water offered by the quick “flyarounds”. It’s an immense privilege to be able to train in the NBL. If it wasn’t for the suit, I would probably pinch myself once in a while.

We expect the best, but prepare for the worse

Fellow ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst bringing “unconscious” crewmate Reid Wiseman back to the airlock during a practice rescue scenario in the NBL (Photo courtesy Alexander Gerst)

Most astronauts dream of having the opportunity to perform a spacewalk at least once in their career and I am no exception to that rule. There’s something appealing about the idea of leaving behind the relative safety of the Space Station wearing your own little spaceship, about the thought of driving bolts while oceans and continents majestically pass by, about the challenge presented by the most physically and mentally demanding activity ISS crewmembers are confronted with.

There are also specific risks inherent to a spacewalk and one of the most dreaded scenarios involves a spacewalker going unconscious due to a medical issue or a malfunction of the pressurized suit. Over 150 spacewalks have been performed to assemble the Space Station and such a dramatic scenario has never occurred. However, you will not be surprised to hear that it does materialize quite often during training in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL).

During the EVA training flow future crewmembers are required to demonstrate the ability to rescue an unconscious fellow spacewalker by bringing him or her safely back into the airlock within 30 minutes. I had a chance to try the rescue for the first time last Thursday during a six-hour run in the NBL with veteran spacewalker Steven Swanson (Swanny).

Ready to be lowered into the water for an NBL training run. Notice lying on the floor the reel of an 85-foot safety tether. The big hook attached in front is connected to structure after airlock egress, while the reel follows along.

This being my first attempt at the rescue, the scenario was extremely simple. I knew in advance that Swanny was going to simulate unconsciousness and I was right next to him on the truss. Also, neither of us was carrying anything at that point, and we were both attached to structure only with our respective safety tethers and one extra tether. We call this latter the local tether, since we attach it locally at a worksit to be able to work with both hands.

Safety tethers, on the other hand, are thin steel cables that are coiled in a reel. We attach one end to structure as soon as we exit the airlock, and since we carry the reel with us, the cable uncoils as we move away and recoils when we come back. If we need to go far out on the truss, we might even have to carry a second safety tether to attach when the first one runs out, and having to make the swap on the way back with an unconscious crewmate would require extra precious time.

But it was not the case for me on my first try. I merely had to detach Swanny’s local tether and use it secure him to myself, and then stow his safety tether, since we would be both secured by mine. Sounds quick and easy, right? Well, I guess it could have been. In reality, when I was ready to move, I realized that I had created a tether tangle and I would have to take the time to fix it if I was going to go anywhere. Good lesson learned!

Christer Fuglesang stands on end of Canadarm2 (Credit: NASA)

ESA astronaut colleague Christer Fuglesang stands on a platform at the end of the Station's robotic arm, Canadarm2, during operations to relocate a CETA cart on the ISS (Credit: NASA)

Nothing in the suit is easy, but the rescue seems to be in a category of its own. It’s quite a challenge to manage the bulky suit of the unconscious crewmate by pushing or pulling it on a tether, while at the same time making sure that it doesn’t bump into structure, especially not with the relatively fragile visor. And it’s quite a challenge to manoeuvre him or her into the airlock in an expedient manner, and to enter as second without the colleague helping, or at least getting out of the way. I was sure thankful to Swanny for showing me some veteran’s tricks to do that!

For a scheduling coincidence, I had my first rescue scenario as a robotic operator the very next day. When EVA crewmembers are attached to the Space Station Robotic Manipulator System, or Canadarm 2, they must count on the robotic operator to bring them quickly and safely back to structure in case of an emergency. One more skill I’ll be trying to acquire in the next few weeks, but the details are for another day...

Outdoor staircases and brain gymnastics

Love the outdoor staircases in Montreal!

I’ve been in Montreal for a week now, staying in the charming neighborhood of Plateau Mount Royal and spending full days of robotics training at the Canadian Space Agency.

I haven’t ventured far beyond the commute route so far, except for the brief stroll to nearby cafés for breakfast, a little daily ritual that has progressively shifted later in the mornings as I have slowly digested the six-hour time shift from Europe. I have taken great pleasure in exploring the little quaint streets flanked by trees and row houses, each with a unique façade and with an outdoor staircase leading to an independent entrance on the second floor. Straight or curved, simple or elaborate, rigorously in metal with open steps, these external staircases conjure up a dynamism that matches the colorful livelihood of the neighborhood.

With Canadian colleague David Saint-Jacques and a real-size Canadarm2 mockup. Every boom is 7 meters long, but it's an amazingly light piece of hardware (Credit: CSA)

It’s a delightful way to start the day before making my way to the facilities of the Canadian Space Agency for training on the Space Station Robotic Manipulator System. Short: the SSRMS. For friends: the Canadarm2. In case you ever wondered how a 400-ton structure was put together on orbit, the short answer is: piece by piece, with the help of the SSRMS.

You can imagine the Canadarm2 as a robotic replica of your own arm in a bigger size. It has a shoulder, an elbow and a wrist. Like your arm, it has two straight booms between the joints. And like your arm it can bend the elbow and it can rotate shoulder and wrist in pretty much any orientation. In engineering terms it means that it has seven degrees of freedom, although we can lock one of degree of freedom to force the arm to move in a more controlled way. Station is precious; bumping into it is not an option.

Working at the Robotic Work Station. The two monitors relate to the simulator and are not present on orbit. Instructos using to run the simulation (Credit: CSA)

To train future ISS crewmembers in SSRMS operations the Canadian Space Agency has Robotic Work Stations that are identical to the ones on orbit. There are hand controllers for translation and rotation, a computer and a control panel to configure the system and to input commands, and three monitors for camera images. There is no real arm, of course, but simulation software runs in the background and the camera views will show you exactly what you would see if you were flying the arm on orbit.

A typical simulator session might well start with what might look like playing with a toy. On a small-scale model of the robotic arm we reproduce the initial configuration based on the given deflections of each joint. I like to see it as a warm-up exercise for the brain.

Placing the Canadarm2 on the ISS model in proper position and configuration. The prop David is holding is useful to visualize coordinate frames (Credit: CSA)

If you’re a model-builder you’ll love what comes next: to be able to visualize the arm movement with respect to the Space Station, we have a tremendously detailed rapid-prototyping model of the ISS right next to the simulator workstation. I find it an object of intrinsic beauty, I’ll confess. But it’s of course intended as a tool of visualization and as an aid in the extensive brain gymnastics to come: mentally flipping camera images, predicting how the arm movement will look from different points of views, identifying the best camera combination to monitor clearances from structure, determining hand controller inputs in different coordinate frames, visualizing joint movements – these are some of the tasks that are sure to keep your brain on its toes as you fly the arm.

David and I trying to understand how one of the HTV coordinate frames is oriented (Credit: CSA)

After one week of training I am starting to be familiar with nominal basic SSRMS operations. I’m now looking forward to learning next week about off-nominal situations like singularities and self-collisions, as well as practicing free-flyer captures, which consist in maneuvering the arm to grapple a vehicle that is not attached to the Space Station.

You can expect free-flyer captures to become more and more frequent on ISS in the coming years. Not only astronauts will continue to capture and berth the Japanese resupply ship HTV, but they will soon start doing the same for the new US commercial resupply vehicles Dragon and Cygnus. First Dragon capture is coming up soon, and I think it will be a historic moment. Make sure to watch!

No molecule shall stand still!

As part of my training on the systems of the International Space Station (ISS) I have passed my ECLSS exam a couple of weeks ago at Johnson Space Center in Houston. ECLSS is the Environmental Control and Life Support System and is one of the ISS systems that the crew interacts most with. What nature does for us when we are on the planet, we have to engineer for ourselves when we are in space. Things like water or waste management are very much on our minds on Earth as well, as we realize that we might be pushing the limits of nature’s ability to support our needs. But how about something so simple as air circulation?

André Kuipers performs inspection and cleaning of Columbus ventilation systems (Credit: NASA)

If you live in a part of the world that gets warm sometimes, you might have used fans in your home to circulate air and make the heat more bearable. If your part of the world gets very warm quite often, you might even have an air conditioning system in your home for comfort. But have you ever thought of a situation in which your health, your safety and even your life may depend on a constantly functioning ventilation system?

That is the case on the International Space Station. One of the consequences of gravity that we take for granted on our planet is natural convection : we all know that warmer air rises and cooler air descends, right? That’s one of the main drivers of our weather phenomena, and it’s also the reason why the heat from radiators is well distributed in our homes.

This buoyancy-driven effect does not exist in microgravity, therefore on the ISS we resort to forced convection. A carefully laid out system of ducting, fans and grids creates a known airflow pattern that satisfies the needs of astronaut health and comfort, as well as the requirements of a number of subsystems.

For one thing, we need forced air circulation to have proper mixing of atmosphere components. Imagine what would happen if that was not the case: as crewmembers breath, they exhale CO₂-enriched air, and without ventilation the concentration of CO₂in the air around their head would increase to dangerous levels. A little bit like breathing in a bag! Also, we constantly introduce oxygen into the ISS atmosphere to compensate for crew consumption. The Oxygen Generation System (OGS) has one outlet into the cabin and we rely on inter-module ventilation to distribute oxygen it throughout the Station. Without ventilation system not only newly produced oxygen would not reach all the modules, but the pocket of concentrated oxygen formed at the OGS outlet would cause a fire hazard.

André Kuipers uses a vacuum cleaner on the Columbus ventilation systems (Credit: NASA)

Besides maintaining a homogenous atmospheric composition, the ventilation system also makes sure that all the air is circulated through a number of subsystems. Remember, for example, that we don’t grow plants on ISS, so we need dedicated components, called Carbon Dioxide Removal Assemblies, to scrub CO₂ from the Station atmosphere. And of course we want the air to flow through our air conditioning system, which not only provides cooling, but also removes the humidity produced by crewmembers’ breathing and perspiration. By the way, the condensate recovered from the atmosphere is not lost, we have a way to process it into potable water. But that’s worth a story of its own…

I’d also like to mention a safety-related aspect which might not be so obvious. The automatic fire detection capability on ISS is dependent on running ventilation: for it to work, we need to circulate air through the smoke detectors, which are typically placed in air ducts and in front of inlet grids. Should the ventilation on ISS stop, you might notice on NASA TV that crewmembers will periodically check each module for burning odour. As we are taught during training, without ventilation the crew is prime for fire detection!

Last but not least ventilation contributes to the cooling of some components. This is especially true in the Russian segment, so much so that there are strict limitations on the opening of wall panels, since this inevitably causes some disruption of air circulation patterns.

Robonaut measures airflow for the first time on the ISS (credit: NASA/ESA)

By now I’m sure you’ll agree that maintaining a nominal air flow on Station is of paramount importance. That is why crew are responsible for making sure that inlets and outlets are kept free of obstructions at all time. Moreover, cleaning of the grids and the filters is part of the regular weekend housekeeping activities.

Crewmembers are also periodically asked to perform a measurement of the velocity field in front of outlet grids, so that experts on the ground can infer information about the health of the ventilation system. I’ll admit, it’s a bit of a tedious task, but also one that requires precision and a steady hand. That’s probably why it was the very first actual task that Robonaut 2 had a chance to try on-board a few weeks back. Who knows, by the time I get to ISS myself, R2 might have taken over this duty completely. Way to go, R2!

Patches, Watches, and Sunglasses, episode I: the patch

Patches, like watches and sunglasses, are a pilot’s thing. Worn on flight suits, leather jackets, or T-shirts, pinned on corridor walls or printed out on coffee mugs for the briefing room or the squadron mess, they are part of the decorum at every group of flyer’s hideout. They usually convey messages for the happy few who know how to read them, and if sometimes the message is encoded with an esoteric subtlety, sometimes… well, not that much (like that patch of a squadron whose name or country of origin I won’t mention, proudly sporting the motto “pulling G’s” above a stylized bulldog actively pulling on…a poor lady's G-string clenched between his teeth. Speak about military finesse…).

Luca on our first day at EAC

Tom Cruise on his first day at Top Gun

Find the seven differences...

Yes, the hair (or lack of) is one of them, but the main one is: Luca is not (yet) wearing his class patch...

The astronaut corps is, for good or bad, no different than any other group of fliers anywhere else in the world. Therefore, we quickly realized, one month into Basic Training, that we had to have our class patch, to establish us as a team. And like every patch in the world, following an immemorial and yet never uttered tradition, it was designed… around a beer, in a bar (well, a bar/restaurant, to be honest). The brainstorming was intense, as you can imagine, and (one of) its result(s) was the general design: a helmet in the center, symbolizing the astronauts’ job that was now ours, framed by our individual flags and ESA’s to unite them, the helmet’s golden visor reflecting a “09” referring to a launch countdown as well as evoking the year of our recruitment. We celebrated this great achievement, one of the first steps towards defining the identity of this special group of people.

Charta of the European astronaut corps

Later on, we added in the design 6 white stars representing the six individuals, and we included an extra layer around the design, to encapsulate the motto of the European Astronaut Corps: Sapientia, Populus, Audacia, Cultura, Exploratio. Thereby, we were linking our class to the groups of preceding European astronauts in an affiliation that we are all very proud of.

As the result was now quite solemn, we added our class name, the Shenanigans, as a center element. I won’t elaborate here on how astronauts classes pick (or deserve) their names, same for individuals’ call signs, but let me tell you it is somehow related to the sense of humor and practical jokes that we, still now, enjoy together.

With the design approved, we started the next step: production… to quickly realize that no one of us could boast of artistic talent, or even drawing, as a skill on his/her resume. So after a couple of ugly short-lived draft attempts, we decided to turn to talented individuals, and luckily there were some in our entourage. The guys from spacepatches.nl, having dealt with patches for a long time, kindly offered their help and came up with the layout of the flags, that reminds of the ISS cupola. And my good buddy V. Gibaud was finally responsible for integrating all those ideas in an artistic way, for drawing the central helmet part, and for producing the patch. Let me tell you it was no easy task, given the expectations of high-maintenance hard-to-please over-achievers like the astronauts sometimes are. There is no word to describe his talent, and the final result was a total score in every possible way.

ESA astronaut class of 2009 patch

We now proudly sport it on our training flight-suits and jackets, we pin it on corridor walls, and we even printed it out on our coffee mugs… without mentioning iPhone wallpapers! We sometimes distribute it as a token of appreciation from our group after training or at public events. It has flown in planes, sky-dived, bungee-jumped from 233m high, gone underwater for spacesuit training and on top of the Mont Blanc so far, and I have no doubt it will fly to space and back quite a number of times in the years to come. Godspeed, Shenanigans' patch!

Training in the Soyuz

Strapped in my cramped seat in the small cockpit next to my commander, I scan the instruments looking for trouble. There’s nothing obvious, but there’s no doubt in my mind that we’ll have a failure, probably more than one. We only undocked a few minutes ago, and already we had to use a reserve procedure because the automatic undocking sequence never started. So, as we wait for the spacecraft to reorient itself in space, I check every parameter and mentally compare it with the numbers I have memorized, knowing that I’ll find something, hopefully before it’s too late. I hear the commander talking to Ground Control, because one of the infrared systems that provide the vertical indication to the main computer has failed. “Here we go”, I think, as I quickly reconfigure the system to use the spare one: but as soon as it goes in the loop it also fails. The commander will have to take manual control of the orientation.
In the meantime, I figure out what is wrong with the spacecraft: our pressure is constant, but the oxygen partial pressure is slowly increasing. It means two things: we have an oxygen leak somewhere, and we’re going to depressurize the spacecraft to avoid a potential fire. It also means that we need to stop the normal reentry, and we’re going to perform instead an emergency, “quick” descent.
That’s when I silently pray, probably like hundreds of astronauts since Alan Shepard’s first flight, “Luca, just don’t mess this up…”

The good thing is, we’re still safely on the ground, and we’re running a simulation. Just one of the many emergency sims that we go through while training for Expedition 36, planned for next year.

Having finished all the theory training on the Soyuz spacecraft systems, I’m now mostly working on four separate simulations.
The first kind, and the one that requires the most preparation, is the Soyuz “complex” training. Together with my commander, we go through all the different phases of the flight, from launch to docking and then from undocking to landing. Our instructors set up all kinds of possible emergencies, and the responsibility of the crew is to perform the correct actions in accordance with the board documentation. Sometimes however we have to rely solely on our knowledge of the systems, especially when we don’t have radio contact with the ground. Most of the actions are time critical, and require a strict coordination between the different members of the crew. I know at least 100 ways to mess things up, because I’ve done them all, and I’m counting on discovering at least another 1000 in the next year or so of simulations.

The second kind is the “rendezvous” training. In these simulations I sit in the top part of the Soyuz, and use a laser range finder to calculate our distance and closure to the ISS. The commander manually flies the spacecraft using the data that I feed him. The instructors can position us at various distances, and with different speeds. Sometime the velocity vector is really high, and if we don’t react fast there’s a risk of an unintentional contact with the Station, with disastrous consequences. This kind of simulation also requires a lot of discipline and coordination between the flight engineer and the commander. The instructors can add a laser range finder failure to the simulations, to make things more interesting: then I can help my commander by guesstimating the range using tables that I built in my checklist. My commander is very experienced, so I know that if I hear “спасибо (spasiba)” it means that my estimation was pretty accurate. If I don’t hear anything, well, probably not so accurate.

The third kind of simulation is the one I find the most challenging (meaning: thousands of ways to mess things up), and the most fun at the same time: “manual docking”. I perform these on my own, in the commander seat, and it’s as close as it gets to flying a spacecraft while staying on Earth. The concept is similar to the rendezvous, except that now my job is to take the Soyuz all the way to the assigned docking port, with very, very strict parameters. The interesting thing is that the target is moving, rotating on its three axes, and the flier has to manually match all the motions in order to dock. The other interesting thing is that we would only fly this approach in case of failure of the main computer, so we don’t have any data for range and speed: we have to calculate them ourselves, using the charts on our checklists, and do it real time while flying the Soyuz. Now see what I mean by challenging?
The instructors can also give us other failures, for example they can freeze the camera that we use for monitoring. The worst thing that can happen is an uncontrolled contact with the ISS. The instructors will calmly tell you: “No, you don’t want to do that”. But don’t ask me how I know this.

The last kind of simulation that I’m training with right now is the “manual landing”. I find these simulations also challenging (the aforementioned definition remains) and fun, and each one only lasts a few minutes, so they’re extremely dynamic.
In case of a major failure during the reentry phase, the crew still has the possibility to control the descent capsule, after separation, during the early atmospheric part of the descent. This training is also performed individually, from the commander’s seat. Using the Manual Control System interface, we can rotate the capsule, thus changing the lift factor of the descent module. However, the capsule flies like a brick, so it takes a little practice to understand how the spacecraft reacts to the manual inputs. The parameters to maintain are the G load and the landing location, but the variables are so many that no two reentries are the same. Initially, I kept either exceeding the G load or landing in an altogether different country, much to the instructor’s chagrin and/or amusement. But it’s getting better all the time.

In the next few weeks I will be working almost exclusively on these simulations, training with my crew. Then I will be going back to Houston and JSC for a whole different kind of training. But that’s another story, to be told next time.

A long awaited reunion

The first entry of a blog, although not impressive or exceptional in itself, is still a first. It somehow sets the tone, and even if we’ve all always been told not to judge on a first impression, I know I can’t shake off a bad initial feeling, and respectively, that a good first impression has always something beneficial. Then, after a variable adjustment period, this first impression will slowly be replaced by who you really are.

So here I am, jabbering on about first impressions, whereas I (we) have so much to say. But one thing at a time: first of all let me thank you, whoever you might be, for coming here, going through the hassle of reading my (way too long) sentences and showing some interest for what we are doing or trying to do.

I don’t really know yet who I am writing for/to right now, but let me make an assumption to start with: the space enthusiasts that would initially, even by chance, wander into this blog, already know a great deal on the technical aspects of being an astronaut and training for a spaceflight. I’ve met so many that knew more than me on aerospace engineering or cosmology, or that could tell hundreds of space anecdotes that I had never heard about, that I’ve stopped trying to teach them anything: in the times of the internet, they already know. What they might not know, however, and what they might be looking for, is the inside day-to-day reality of being an astronaut: the constant traveling, the people you meet, the incredible experiences you live, what is already exceptional way before launch day, what is also difficult and sometimes painful but is still part of the job, the small stories, the jokes, the camaraderie, the up and downs, etc. Therefore -but it’s only my assumption and since our collective ambition is to all contribute to this blog, it might very well not be the case for everyone taking the pen- I’ll try to avoid too much technicality and focus on what’s usually not told in press conferences or PowerPoint presentations (but hey, don’t expect big secrets… those ones we keep for ourselves). It might also just be my character, I don’t know. What I know is that in a group like ours, you find as many different (strong) personalities and point of views than you have individuals, so expect the unexpected…

This being said, it still falls to me to set the scene right for the next one to follow, so as in every would-be good piece of literature, I still have to describe the set, and introduce the characters.

Star City in winter, seen from ESA astronauts' rooms

The scenery is very well known by many of the human spaceflight connoisseurs: it’s called Star City, near Moscow, and has been the training centre and residential place of Russian cosmonauts for 50 years now. As I am writing this from my room in the Prophylactorium (which serves as a rehabilitation centre after long duration spaceflights, and as a hotel with also some office space for NASA, ESA and JAXA personnel), I have a wonderful view of some of the Russian training buildings and residential blocks, and of the NASA cottages who accommodate US astronauts when they train here and seem to have been copied-pasted straight from the US. If I stretch my neck from the balcony and look left, I get a postcard view of the brand new wooden Orthodox church of Star City, and to the right, I can see the frozen lake and wooden terrain around. The weather is gorgeous today, in spite of the minus fifteen Celsius, and everything is covered in a pure white snow, knee high everywhere it was not cleared, that reflects the sunlight and damps all the sounds. I might be waxing lyrical here even so slightly, but that’s really what it looks like; it hasn’t always been like this as they wen though difficult times in the 90s here, and I was also a little bit less romantic last week during the forest survival training, when I didn’t have the central heating of my room to give the scenery some added poetry from behind the window -but that’s probably worth another entry by itself. Anyway, Star City is a real small Russian town -school, police and all- with a cosmonaut centre within called GCTC (Gagarin Cosmonauts Training Centre), and we spend our time here between GCTC’s training premises, the ESA office, the gym and the pool, our NASA colleagues' cottages and our rooms.

The rooms are at the same floor, it’s very much like being back in boarding school with some extra space and freedom, and when we arrived from Cologne with Andreas on Sunday night a week ago, we were met by Luca, our favorite Italian test pilot, freshly arrived from the US, whom we hadn’t seen in ages. Andy and myself are living in Cologne, Germany, where the European Astronaut Centre is located, but Luca has been assigned to a 2013 long duration flight on the ISS, so he is now traveling back and forth between Houston, where he now lives and trains on the US space assets, and GCTC where he has a lot of classes as well on the ISS, the Russian Soyuz that will be our ride into space, etc.

The ESA floor in the Prophylactorium

We hadn’t seen each other in a while, because even though our class is the most united group of people you could find, we are usually all over the world due to training or other activities, so we very seldom have the opportunity to meet together like in the (already) good old times. We were still catching up in our floor kitchen, where we will have meals and debates and laughs during the next weeks of training, when Samantha came in from the airport and joined the reunion. As a reserve astronaut, being trained to step in shall anything happen to a crew member before he launches, she also gets to travel a lot and has a schedule of her own, but this time she’s in Star City at the same time as us. The discussion continued well into the night, even after finishing up the welcome chocolates that Yuri and Anna, our ESA staff here, kindly left on the table for our group as a Christmas/new year present. We were joined after some days by Tim, whom I’m training with on the Orlan spacesuit now, and our group is now complete but for Alex, who is training in Houston for a spaceflight in 2014, and whose sense of humor we are missing a lot. So just by good fortune, our coincident training schedules reunited us here in Star City, and that seemed a good enough (or unlikely enough) reason to start our own blog.

5 out of 6 "Shenanigans" from the class of 2009, in GCTC

I’ve already written too much to start describing in details the group life we are living here, at our base in Cologne or elsewhere, the dynamics, the personalities, but we’ve already been through so much during Basic training and since we’ve been recruited, good and bad, that the bonds couldn’t be stronger and are here to stay. I can’t wait to play the guitar with Luca, have scientific debates with Andy over breakfast, drink espresso and speak French with Samantha at the Cosmonaut's canteen, go run laps with Tim in the cold around the lake…and that we start again playing practical jokes on each other (I am working on a top 10 of those, and trust me there are many to chose from, including some self-inflicted ones, but that’s probably part of the secrets we will keep…). Time is missing to tell all about what an incredible experience going through basic training, the first phase of astronaut education, with those exceptional people was, and time flies so fast that everyday brings new stories that push back the old ones. Anyway, we now have a blog, and in the future we’ll try to capture those moments and bring them to you, hopefully in a shorter and more condensed format than what my literary French background requires… we may also sometimes shift the focus more to training, and sometimes just to whatever we feel like saying... I leave it to the next contributors, but isn’t diversity also what makes the whole astronaut experience so exceptional after all?

To finish with, if you have questions (or even if you simply made it alive to here ), feel free to leave a comment!