SPACE COULD BE YOURS
You sit in the Sokol pressure suit in the bucket seat of the Soyuz space capsule. You have the flight controls. Your task: docking the Soyuz Spacecraft at the International Space Station ISS. This you have to do manually. Situation: automatic docking system failed. On a small screen you have all needed data in front of you. Adjust speed. Power up speed. Control the distance.
The computer will display your attitude. Your approach will guide you further and further for 500 meters. 400 meters. You fire the braking thrusters to keep your speed - which amounts to a little matter of about 28,000 kilometers per hour - slow down to 3 meters per second approach velocity. A not an easy task to keep the course now, out there in the vastness of the universe!
The Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center (GCTC) in Star City near Moscow is now for more as 50 years the center for the Russian space training. Here, Yuri Gagarin starts his training for his first spaceflight and since decades for now international crews are here on training for to fly to space. They have to participate months and months, sometimes years on training before they will go on their missions to space.
Originally built in 1960 as a "military area 26 266" it was named after Yuri Gagarin's death to honour the first human in space. Now it is the “Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center”, or shorter ‘GCTC’. Until 2009 the center was under supervision in a relationship between the Russian Defence Ministry with the Russian Space Agency Roskosmos. Now its under the main responsibility of the space agency. The current head of the center is the Russian cosmonaut Sergey Krikaljov.
The main tasks of the GCTC are mainly in the field of training of cosmonauts for various space missions, including simulation of spaceflights. G-Force trainings, mission specific trainings for EVA’s (Extravehicular Activity – working in outer space directly outside a space station or a space ship). Medical investigations and test of cosmonaut candidates and monitoring of the training, survival trainings for out of control landings of Soyuz and taking care of the cosmonauts before and after the flight. Also, the center is conducting trainings for cosmonauts in the fields of celestial navigations.
The GCTC also offers services for commercial purposes, as for private individual space trainings, as complete mission training simulations as such as EVA training for open space adventures or trainings with other mission profiles.
You can experience real cosmonaut training with the professional Russian aerospace professionals!
You will be trained in exercise sessions and you will learn what it means to a special mission with a flight to the stars.
On the rotating chair as an example you will experience how astronauts need to really capable of suffering their vestibular system: Put two and a half minutes on the rotating chair, and try not to lose control of your perceptions. Despite the helpful advice of your instructor is that hard enough. Cosmonauts must persevere in this chair 8 minutes at a time and operate switches and thereby solve other tasks that require complete concentration.
In the Hydrolab, the huge pool of water, are mainly due to the astronauts prepared to work outside the space station, known as EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity).
By balancing the buoyant forces the trainee will feel inside his heavy Orlan space suit weightlessness and you are nearby the conditions close to work in outside space.
Here you pass under the guidance of experienced instructors, your daily workout.
You learn to work in the Orlan spacesuit with tools and undertake excursions into a world without gravity, and the "lift-off to the helicopter training" you will practice rescue operations after an emergency landing of the Soyuz capsule somewhere in the ocean.
For all exercises different modules of spaceships and space stations are available in various models in the GCTC in their original sizes. You will make extensively acquainted with the functions and operations of instruments before you run it as a cosmonaut. Cosmonaut. You will learn in real surrounding fields on a specific mission plan, how to dock the Soyuz spacecraft eventually under your manual control to the International Space Station ISS. WE can tell you: this isn’t an easy task!
At the end of your training program is a proper farewell ceremony: You will receive out of the hand of a GCTC official certificates for completion of your training and then you will celebrate your success at a large dinner in Russian style.
The training facilities at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center are so varied, so that they can hardly enumerate here. We are in a position that we open to you various options if you want to use the center for your needs. For your own training or other purposes as a major international television production as actions shows or documentaries.