правильный материал
Flying by the seat of your pants, even now it seems that the original objections that the 60s astronauts had to no human control of space vehicles stand up.
European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Tim Peake, NASA 'naut Tim Kopra and cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko safely boarded the International Space Station yesterday following a tense manual docking of their Soyuz TMA-19M spacecraft with the orbiting outpost. The trio blasted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 11:03 GMT. …
Digital Apollo is a brilliant book. Well worth a read. There's another one called Moon Lander by Thomas Kelly which covers the development of the Lunar Module that is equally brilliant. The two books overlap somewhat but are both well worth a read.
http://amzn.com/1588342735
Has the man learnt nothing from present day zzz-elebrity culture? Doesn't he know that, whenever someone from the press points a camera at you, it's imperative that you adopt a permanent inane, plastic-toothed grin?
And just look at that frumpy space-suit! Would it be too much to ask that he show just a *little bit* of cleavage?
That smile at the camera thing isn't new. A friend has a book about photography - and it talks about the etiquette and expectations of being photographed, and how that changes the results.
One of his examples is a picture of a woman standing on a beach, with a big smile on her face, but at her feet is the body of her husband who's just died of a heart attack. Someone took the picture, and she just automatically smiled for the camera. Presumably if she'd just bumped him off, she'd have done a better job of hiding her emotions...
Or there's the pictures of the troops returning from the evacuation at Dunkirk. Again lots of them smiling and waving to the camera. But the ones they weren't aware of show them looking like shit, as you'd be if you'd just lost a huge battle, retreated for a week and then been stuck on a beach under constant air attack for another one, only to then have to wade out to a small ship and get evacuated - all while still under constant aerial assault.
Also evidence from a lot of the troops was that they felt ashamed of themselves, and many expected to be booed on their return, not cheered. So they weren't really in a smiling mood.
Anyway, if you smile all the time, people will wonder what you're up to.
And I am not entirely joking, so no Joke Alert here.
No need to. Anyone who understands Russian also understands the full meaning of : "Серёжа, давай вручную"
It sounds very mundane and boring when translated: "Sergey, switch to manual". The attitude to life, universe and all the rest is lost in translation.
That was in the bad old days when it would regularly pancake you into a platform.
These days its pretty faultless unless you are stupid enough to come in from the back end of an Orbis station and expect it to guide you through the hab ring spokes.
Personally I use it only for the final landing. Usually blast through the mail slot at full speed to avoid scans, then decelerate to a stop to kick in the DC for the final landing. Nailing the mailslot at 300m/s in a Clipper loaded with naughty stuff is invigorating.
"How is Elite Dangerous getting on now all the bad publicity has died down?"
Don't know. Can't play it. By the time all the mandatory downloads have finished my small window of leisure time is over. Biggest waste of money ever when you include the software, graphics card and power supply for the graphics card (and I bought a Vista PC and an Asus Transformer).
I'm pretty sure that travelling to space involves many opportunities for instant death.
The first 30 seconds of the launch sequence.
Flying your spaceship (which is travelling a 7.2KM per second) near anything else flying at similar speeds.
Opening Airlocks.
Walking around outside.
Just being there.
Coming home.
All of these strike me as the most obvious way to tempt fate, and there's plenty of others.
I'm pretty sure any seasoned vet might maintain a steely face, knowing that he's just increasing his odds even more by making yet another trip up there.
Remember he comes from the region of the guys who ACTUALLY DROVE into Berlin (then had FUN)
Also not a Child of the Magenta.
But it's apparently actually a cultural thing. Russians think westerners are fucking clowns.
I'm married to a Slav - she also thinks smiling and laughing are signs of insincerity and that all British signs of politeness are insincere (such as saying "please" and "thank you" often). She doesn't/can't/won't understand that she comes across a miserable and constantly trying to pick an argument, and wonders why she doesn't get the cooperation from others that she wants/needs. She isn't willing to accept that "when in Rome, do as the Romans do", despite having lived in Britain for 12 years and spent several years in the USA before that. We do live in Scotland now, though, and she does seem more at home - the locals make my native Yorkshire-folk look excitable by comparison.
This post has been deleted by its author
Can't believe none of my fellow commentards have yet raised a pint of festive beer to the lucky trio and all the guys and gals that got them there. Long may they inspire future generations into the worlds of science and technology. In an age when space launches get little publicity except when things go wrong it's good to see the mainstream media having a field day on this one.
Even my 91 y.o. "not quite with it anymore" father in law was intently watching his TV yesterday.....
That's got to be a temperature matching issue with the seals themselves. It's surprising the extent that materials shrink and distort at very low temperatures. Pressurization should be relatively quick once the seals are made.
Makes a mockery of the entertainment industry view where characters pop in and out of air locks at their leisure.
Space is difficult...
It's probably settle-down time, check all the connections, didn't-you-forget-something, what-does-mission-control-say, review of what occurred etc.
My olden skipper said that when on sea, you have to work on shiptime, which is slower than the one used by landlubbers, otherwise shit will hit the fan. spacetime is probably even more redshifted.
Hmmm... I heard Mr Hadfield filling transmission time last night, I didn't really buy it then and I don't buy it now. I also heard Helen Sharman suggest she had waited a similar period for the airlock on her trip.
I know the Soyuz spacecraft is getting on a bit but I would have thought they have progressed to computers, sensors and log files to gather data? And to keep it even after the the system is 'shutdown', isn't this the business most of us are in?
Three cosmonauts in a box with little else to do other than waiting for the door to open, two and half hours, how much data are they going to accrue and voicenet back to base assuming the aforesaid data logging is not in place?
Even if they are scientists and astronauts, my enquiring mind always challenges statements made under pressure (live tv), so sorry, to me the simplest explanation is waiting for materials to stabilise and make a gas tight seal.
No, it's take a pressure reading - wait a while (couple hours) - take another pressure reading and if it hasn't dropped excessively, you can open the hatch because it's not leaking.
If it has dropped, there's a big leak, and opening the hatch would be A Bad Thing
I don't know what they'd do in that case... undock and redock?
Yeah, then again - if the pressure didn't drop measurably in, say, ten minutes pray tell how much do you think it could possibly drop while everyone goes through the hatch?!? You're still welcome to close it after that if you detect a leak / anyway...
I have read that Cosmonauts get (or used to get?) bonus pay for having to do a manual docking, so consequently they would routinely "find" a problem with the automated system and switch to manual.
Google turns up a few claims supporting this, but I don't know if it's really true (or if it once was but no longer is).
To everyone who's saying that Malenchenko is a typical Russian cosmonaut and they never smile, may I present to you Exhibit A:
Major Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, first man in space, and generally an all-round cheerful bloke.