Space cadet: Citadel grad astronaut Randy Bresnik preps to lift off from Russia – Charleston Post Courier

Randy Bresnik will get a closer look at the August eclipse than anyone back on Earth from 250 miles above the Lowcountry.

Bresnik, a graduate of The Citadel, is scheduled to launch July 28 for the International Space Station, where he'll take over on Sept. 1 as commander of an American-Russian crew. The spacecraft will be positioned just north of Charleston when a relatively rare total solar eclipse occurs Aug. 21.

The crew's job is to continue a few hundred experiments already underway, such as research studying the effects of the craft's micro-gravity on heart stem cells.

But on that August afternoon, Bresnik will be doing the same thing as a lot of people in the world beneath him: shooting photos and video.

"We'll get a different perspective than what you will see, and a different perspective than what the satellites see (from farther out in space)," he said Friday during a brief phone interview from the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia.

The closely monitored and timed interview, conducted with NASA officials breaking in to announce the remaining minutes and then to end it, is a glimpse into Bresnik's daily mission-training life. The interview was one in a series scheduled back-to-back before Bresnik travels Sunday to the takeoff launch site, the Cosmodrome in Baikonur, Kazakhstan.

Star City is a secure location, like a military fort, in the forest near the Chkalovsky Airport on the outskirts of Moscow. Built as its own city, most there have no need to come or go. It looks like a lot of woodsy Southern U.S. military base towns, where the tree-lined homes are modest and the roads turn from asphalt to dirt.

The family of Gagarin, the Russian cosmonaut who was the first human in space, still live there, according to the Daily Mail of London.

Baikonur, about 400 miles to the south, is a village in arid, flat scrubland along the Podstepka River with touristy downtown spots amid rows of Soviet-era low-rise structures. The terrain looks like West Texas. The Cosmodrome sits just to its north, another secure facility in the barren flats.

Bresnik, a 1989 graduate of the Citadel, was a Marine Corps aviator when he became one of 11 members of NASA's Astronaut Class 9 in 2004, a class selected from about 4,000 applicants. He space-walked in 2009 aboard the shuttle Atlantis.

For more than a year, he and other crew members have been in rigorous training for the space station mission in both the United States and Russia, as well as locations in Europe. The training has included Russian language tutoring.

Other training has been done in mock-ups of the station and its array of modules, some underwater to simulate the free float of work outside the spacecraft. A lot of the rest is studying reams of manuals and making responses routine for the crew to the necessary communication needs and other duties.

The current political tension between the U.S. and Russia hasn't spilled into the mission or the camaraderie, Bresnik said. The space station has been a joint mission between the two countries since it was launched in 1998. The technicians and astronauts remain dedicated to the mission.

"Nobody lets any of that (political) stuff get in the way of what we're doing," Bresnik said.

Besnik flew to Russia shortly after a break spending Christmas in Texas with his wife, Rebecca, and two children.

After his 2009 space-walking journey aboard the shuttle Atlantis, he talked about the awe and hard-to-grasp scale of circling the Earth with the sun rising every 90 minutes. The astronauts think of the two-week shuttle missions as a sprint, with so much to be accomplished very quickly.

A space station mission, on the other hand, is a marathon: 180 days aloft, along with "getting uphill and getting back down" in the Soyuz spacecraft.

Besnik said he is looking forward to one perk of life in the station a windowed cupola that juts from the craft and offers views of the universe and the world below. He anticipates spending some quality down time there, watching as he circles the planet.

Reach Bo Petersen Reporter at Facebook, @bopete on Twitter or 1-843-937-5744.

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Space cadet: Citadel grad astronaut Randy Bresnik preps to lift off from Russia - Charleston Post Courier