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Questions and Answers:
Paul Filmer, PhD '92 Why did you decide to take an MIT Alumni Travel Program trip to Star City in Russia? It was really a last minute decision--the Alumni Travel Program sent out a call to fill the last few slots, and I jumped at the opportunity, knowing that this was a much more serious experience than the bowdlerized children's space camp offered by NASA in Huntsville. I have followed the space program since I was a young child, and knew that this was as close as I was going to get to the real thing since diabetes precludes my qualification under either the U.S. or the Russian programs. What cosmonaut activities did you get to experience? To attempt to compress several years of training into a week is obviously impossible, but the staff at the Gagarin Training Center did a good job of collecting the highlights of the extensive training cosmonauts receive, combining technical lectures and physical activities. The first segment was dedicated to medical activities-learning about the consequences of extended zero-g stays and the various strategies employed on the Salyut and Mir series to counteract them, as well as an extended battery of tests to confirm the results of our preliminary application screenings. Blood draws, electrocardiograms, retinal scans, and a lot of uncomfortable poking and prodding tested our mettle. Our only consolation was to be accompanied through all these test by cosmonauts Sergei Zalyotin and Alexander Kaleri, who had landed on the previous Friday, back from what was to turn out to be the very last mission to Mir. After training in life support systems, we were fitted for the Sokol and Orlan EVA space suits used on missions to the International Space Station. Once medically cleared, we were subjected to six g's in the 18-meter centrifuge. Later, donning scuba equipment in the neutral buoyancy tank, we prepared for a small part of the assembly sequence from the upcoming STS-106 mission, completing the mating of Zvezda to the ISS. We trained briefly on the procedures for manual docking of the Soyuz spacecraft to the space station (but I have to confess to crashing). The climax of the training was a flight of ten parabolic arcs aboard the enormous Ilyushin 76 training aircraft, which gave us a brief taste of zero-g much to the delight of our inner ears. What did you learn that might be useful to your work in international collaboration at the National Science Foundation? Patience and silence in difficult situations. But I did learn how to swear a blue streak at ground control in Russian, although this has not yielded results at any budget meetings.
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Institute of Technology