Recently the operations teams behind the upcoming mission of ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet got together for their pre-launch tag-up. Led by the Columbus Control Centre these meetings are held to discuss the mission and run through all the particularities, key events and changes to protocol. For the first time the meeting was held virtually due to COVID-19 restrictions.
For Thomas Pesquet’s Mission Alpha there was much to talk about. With over 200 investigations planned for the Expedition 60 including 12 new European experiments, Thomas and the crew on the International Space Station will be busy. When Thomas arrives as part of Crew-2 on the SpaceX Dragon together with JAXA’s Aki Hoshide, NASA’s Megan MacArthur and Shane Kimbrough the Space Station will accommodate 11 astronauts for a short time, five more than the six that was the norm for the last few years. These extra people require more planning of course and the operations teams need to consider the life support systems, where the astronauts will sleep, how they will interact with the experiments and their general work schedule too.
Mission Alpha is set to be action packed and will see the first European to fly in a spacecraft other than the Soyuz or Space Shuttle. Spacewalks are planned, new spacecraft arrivals, and not to mention a new Russian module arriving that brings the European Robotic Arm with it. The operations teams had a lot to discuss and the tag-up meeting ran over many days.
The Columbus Flight Directors who led the meeting, Joao Lousada and Julian Doye, commented: “We took a screenshot of the meeting and despite most of us working from home there is still a strong team spirit. It was great to see everybody’s faces and share the moment with the people in our teams dotted all around Europe and even the world.”