
Training
Flow
Practicing
with the Hardware |  | Expedition
3 Flight Engineer Mikhail Tyurin, left, and Commander
Frank Culbertson practice using biomedical equipment at
the Bioengineering and Test Support Facility at the Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas. |
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During your
very first training class in Houston, you will learn how to do the
things you'll do every day aboard the space station. You'll learn
how to look at your daily schedule and read procedures written by
people on the ground, which you must complete correctly. You will
learn how to use the station's laptop computers and all of their
software. You'll also learn how to enter information into the station's
Inventory Management System, which is used to keep track of the
station's equipment and supplies (how much stuff there is and where
it's all stored). There will also be simulations where you will
work in a mock-up of the real space station and practice what you
have learned so far. Simulations are where you will learn how to
live and work in space and where you will practice for emergencies.
You will do dozens of simulations during your 18 months of training,
both in Russia and the United States.
At the
beginning of each new training session, the station training lead
and the training team will give you a Crew Training Notebook. This
binder contains all the handouts and study aids you will need during
that training session.
After your
first training session, you and the rest of your crew will go to
Russia for about a month. There you will learn about the Russian
portions of the space station. You will learn about the system that
provides clean air and comfortable temperatures aboard the station
-- the Russian Environmental Control and Life Support System. You
will also learn how to send commands to the Russian systems using
the Command and Data Handling System computers.
After your
month in Russia, you will return to Houston for more training on
the U.S. portions of the space station. In this part of your training,
you will learn about the Caution and Warning system, U.S. Command
and Data Handling, Electrical Power System, and Mobile Transporter,
which can be used to move the Canadarm2. When you are finished,
you will take part in another simulation to make sure you have learned
everything.
When you're
not in the classroom or the simulator, you may find yourself in
a 6-million gallon pool learning how to work outside the space station.
You will learn how to do spacewalks, or extravehicular activities
(EVAs), at the bottom of the pool in a fullscale model of the real
space station. There you will learn how to wear and maintain a spacesuit,
how to move when there's no gravity and how to use all the tools
you might need in order to fix something outside the space station.
If the space shuttle will be delivering new parts to the station
while you're there, you may learn how to install those parts while
working in the pool.
 | Expedition
2 Flight Engineer Susan Helms spent two days with her
crewmates learning how to survive in an extremely cold
environment. If her crew had returned to Earth aboard
a Soyuz spacecraft, and if that spacecraft had gone off-course
and landed in Siberia, this training could have saved
her life.
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As the months
go by, you will learn about every system on the space station. For
some of them, you will become your crew's expert on that system,
a specialist. You will also learn how to handle any emergency that
may occur and how to fix anything that might break. You will learn
how to do experiments for scientists on Earth. You will learn how
to take pictures of our planet and do educational demonstrations
for schoolchildren.
As you get
closer to your flight, you will do simulations with the space shuttle
crew that will be taking you to the space station, or in the Russian
Soyuz spacecraft, if that is how you will be arriving at the station.
Your 18 months
of training will include approximately 300 hours learning about the
space station's systems, 300 hours learning to do spacewalks, 60 hours
of medical training, 150 hours of science experiment training, 150
hours of language training, and 150 hours of robot arm training. Altogether,
you will spend almost 1300 hours training for your mission.
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