Space City

Last Friday we had another big excursion, this time to space city - the place where the Russian cosmonauts are trained. We got on this green bus at 12:30 with the SRAS students who are attending MGU and Lisa Horner, our coordinator in Moscow. Anyway, we set off and drove through some somewhat run-down neighborhoods/villages outside of Moscow until we got to a heavily wooded area, where we found the training place.

Lena got out to try and find out tour guide to see if we could start the excursion early because traffic wasn't quite as bad as anticipated and so we got to the site about 20 minutes early. She found him and he agreed to start early, so we drove through a gate and up to a mini-city area. We got out and met our tour guide, who was a retired engineer and cosmonaut (I presume). We set off towards a large circular building, in which he explained to us is the largest centrifuge in the world.

We went in and climbed to the third floor, entered a room and saw this humongous, green machine that is intended to simulate conditions that the cosmonauts would experience as they journey space, namely the feeling on 6x their own weight.

Looks like fun, right?

Our guide led us to a TV sitting in the middle of the room, which showed a video describing the condition and facts about the centrifuge. It was vaguely interesting (apparently it takes 27 megawatts to power the thing, which seems like a lot. I mean, "mega," right? Come on), but it wasn't a particularly well-made video. We moved on to another building, where there is a giant pool (12 meters deep) which is supposed to help the cosmonauts get used to that weightless feeling. The model station that can be lowered into the pool is called Звезда (star), apparently so that the cosmonauts can say "Hell no, I didn't train in some crappy normal station, I actually lived in a f***ing star, man!".

I lived in a f***ing star, man!!!

After that the tour started to wind down a little bit, with us moving to one last building, where there was a statue of Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space.

I like to think that Yuri was a big fan of high fives, the love of which is captured forever here.

Anyway, we got to the last area of the tour, where we saw all kinds of neat little gadgets and tools used by the cosmonauts in their training and in their actual missions. For example, they went equipped with a gun that looked like a plastic toy gun that carried three bullets, just in case something nasty came upon them after they landed.

The gold outer layer is designed to protect their eyes from the sun.

Santa. In Space. With Russians. That'd be an awesome movie.

"World"

Overall, it was yet another really cool excursion that let us learn a little more about Russian tradition and history (one tradition - cosmonauts always watch the movie "White Sun of the Desert" before a flight. Our guide said that one time an officer left the viewing to smoke, and the commander shortened his mission from the original 8 months to 3. No one leaves the viewings anymore).