Russia Gives Space Station Crew the Keys to Its Ship

TIME Science space Russia Gives Space Station Crew the Keys to Its Ship Philip Scott Andrews for TIME Members of the press and officials from NASA and Roscosmos talk with Russian Cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Gennady Padalka, alongside NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly, after a training session at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, March 23, 2015. The official handover of a brand new Soyuz is a milestone for any space flight from Baikonur

No one kept a secret like the old Soviet space program kept a secret. Back in the early days of the space race, Sergei Korolev, the Soviets chief designer, was known only as, well, the Chief Designer, the better to prevent any assassination attempts that officials from Roscosmosthe Russian NASAconvinced themselves the Americans were cooking up. Baikonur, the Russian Cape Canaveral, hidden away in the Kazakh steppes, stole its name from a mining town 200 miles north, the better to confuse enemies who might come looking for it.

But the secrecy of Baikonur was partly just geography. If you want to get to space you need launch pads that aim away from populated areas and that are located as close to the equator as possible, giving your rockets a boost in speed thanks to the physics of Earths rotation. In the U.S. that meant Florida, with millions of people to the west and north but no one at all in the ocean to the east. In Russia, that meant Baikonur.

The Baikonur launch facilitywhere cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Gennady Padalka and astronaut Scott Kelly will lift off for the International Space Station on March 28, with Kelly and Kornienko slated to stay a full yearis a half hour drive into the desert outside of Baikonur proper, which is itself is at least three hours away from pretty much anything at all. The old spaceport, when you finally arrive, looks exactly like you would have expected it to look if you grew up during the cold war when everything Soviet was synonymous with scary.

MORE Meet the Twins Unlocking the Secrets of Space

There are the cement blockhouses and the skeletal gantries and the security fences everywhere, all growing out of the surrounding scrub without so much as a single sapling or tuft of grass to add a little green. You could photograph the place in color, but why bother?

But inside Baikonur, none of that matters. Here, the sense of placeor placelessness, reallyfalls away, replaced by the same kind of closed-world, finely focused, center-of-the-universe bustle that accompanies any launch facility anywhere on the planet.

On Monday, at T-minus five days, the three members of the prime crew and the three members of the backup crew were scheduled to run their final ingress drills, climbing into their Soyuz spacecraft, for the first timeor at least the first official time. That, according to more than half a century of custom, required an equally official handoff, in which the people who built the spacecraft would, in effect, turn the keys over to the people who would drive it.

The ceremony took place in a large meeting room divided by a glass partition. Representatives from NASA, Roscosmos and the media crowded on one side of the glass and waited until officials from both Roscosmos and Energiya, the state-owned contractor that built the rocket and the spacecraft, entered and sat at a conference table facing the partition. The cosmonauts and astronauts, now in preflight medical quarantine, entered through a door on the other side, and sat at a matching conference table facing the officials.

The spacecraft is now ready for you, one of the government men said to the crew in Russian. It is ready or flight.

Read the original here:
Russia Gives Space Station Crew the Keys to Its Ship