Relocating the Soyuz...

[alexpgp]

Moving the Soyuz transport vehicle from the Pirs docking compartment to the Functional Cargo Block has been the focus of intense coordination for much of this past week. The move will make the Pirs available to the crew to use as an airlock for some extravehicular activity later during their flight.

I've worked transport vehicle relocations before (while doing space-to-ground interpretation in February 2001, for example), and it's always stressful because everything on the station has to be shut down and the entire crew must enter the Soyuz for the operation to begin.

The station shutdown is the sort that assumes the crew is leaving for a long time, because if -- for some technical reason -- the Soyuz is not able to dock back to the station, the crew will have to deorbit and the station will remain unmanned until the next crew is sent up. (The possibility of having to deorbit is also the reason the entire crew has to suit up and get into the Soyuz.)

The crew has been up for nearly 7 hours preparing for this operation. They'll be buttoning up the Soyuz (with themselves inside) in about 40 minutes, with undocking to occur about 3 hours later. At that point, the crew will be flying free of the station until they redock 30 minutes later.

The daily report has just been handed to me, so I better go off and translate it.

Cheers...

Comments

[daphnis.livejournal.com]

Must be a bit like running the Explorer-type rover on Mars, eh, only the translators are part of the machinery that makes things happen, so if it doesn't work out quite right, it's not your fault..... unless, perchance, it is!.

You certainly live in Interesting Times.

[eastexpert.livejournal.com]

"Just a blog entry".
That's probably what a God's diary looks like. Moving orbital shite, like, nothing outstanding...

8-( )

[skipperja.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting project. I haven't noticed it in the news.