Abingdonian 2017

32 The Abingdonian Cosmonaut Training When it was advertised to us last academic year that there was the opportunity to travel to Russia to train like cosmonauts for a week with an accomplished British-American astronaut, it sounded unreal and far too good to be true. However, when we reached Moscow airport, it started to feel like it wasn’t all a dream. A man down already, we soldiered on to our hotel, getting our first snatch of the cold of Russian February. At this point we knew who our fellow trainees were going to be: 11 Abingdon boys, 16 girls from St Helen and St Katharine, as well as five others (who I was glad to find out weren’t in fact following us for some malicious reason in Heathrow). The next morning, under the watchful gaze of a bronze statue of a soldier stepping forth, we boarded the metro to central Moscow for our whistle-stop tour. Seeing Red Square and St Basil’s, I was struck by the lack of the scale conveyed in photos. Memorable, certainly, was our visit to Lenin’s mausoleum. Having been told not to stop, and with soldiers at every turn, it was truly an extraordinary experience. We proceeded on to the Kremlin, snow falling, where we were guided past government buildings, a Soviet meeting building made into a music venue, and past the world’s biggest bell (with what seemed like the world’s biggest crack) and the world’s biggest cannon. Past these we went on to be surrounded by the seven churches of the Kremlin, their gold cupolas bright against the literal whitewash. Following lunch and a brief shopping excursion, we hopped on a bus bound for Star City (previously “Closed military townlet number 1”), now the home of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre. Here it was that one of the greatest attractions to the trip was realised, as we gathered around a rather tired Mike Foale. And despite his fatigue, as he gave his introductory presentation about himself and his career, the confidence and presence that we all expect of an astronaut were unmistakeable. The next day saw the true beginning of the programme. With a tour of the training centre, we were shown the Russia segment of the International Space Station before being introduced to the Mir, a strong focus of the trip and the first modular space station. Furthermore, we were introduced to the wilderness survival training by the lead trainer and spoken to about Dr Foale’s career and experience of the US and Russian space agencies, something I found particularly interesting having read little on the more recent eras of space history (being myself interested in early explorations). We ended the day by visiting Yuri Gagarin museum, including a recreation of Gagarin’s office complete with notebook with sentiments written by every astronaut before their missions. The day was finished by a visit to the famous Gagarin statue. The following day we had a detailed tour of the Mir in the mock up used to train crews for missions aboard Mir during the station’s 14 years of operation. This was followed by a two hour first aid course by a very enthusiastic conductor. However, the thing that everyone had waited for was the chance to try the Soyuz docking simulator, which, quite entertainingly, NASA still can’t get its hands on. The realistic simulator was a fantastic opportunity to try something new that required a lot of coordination. I am proud to say that I, unlike some of my peers, did not crash. The surprise of the day came when we went to look at the Sokol (IVA) suit. Not only did we get hushed as not to disrupt Cosmonaut training in the Soyuz trainers, but we were shown the suits by Yuri Gagarin’s flight trainer, still working at the