Steve Swanson
A NASA astronaut, Swanson’s three missions to the International Space Station delivered and installed two of the station’s Truss Segments
How many ISS missions have you been sent on?
I was on three different missions. The first two were on the Space Shuttle and the third was the Soyuz. On the first I was a flight engineer, on the flight deck with two minor pilots of the shuttle. I had to go through the checklist for launch and landing and all the phases of flight. For that mission I did a spacewalk and used the space station’s robotic arm. On the second mission I was a spacewalker, and did the engineering jobs too. We all have other little jobs alongside the main ones. There were over 300 experiments going on while I was up there, and I probably worked on 120 of them myself. We then spent about 40 per cent of our time maintaining the space station.
What is a journey to the space station like?
It’s an exciting ride. Probably the most dangerous part of the mission is the launch. Certainly for NASA, that’s where we’ve had major catastrophes, so that gets you a little more nervous. But it’s also a really fun trip, and well worth it. On the shuttle, the launch was often aborted. I think 50 per cent of the time it didn’t launch the day it was planned to. You’d get all suited up, get out to the
launch pad, get in the vehicle and it wouldn’t launch. I treated all launches as practice runs that weren’t going to launch that day – that way I was never disappointed. When it actually did get close and it looked like we were going, I could change my mindset and say, ‘Okay, we’re launching today. Let’s get it all figured out’.
Does experience make the process easier?
The process gets easier because you understand it more and you understand what’s happening, but the odds of survival are still the same no matter what. That always gets to you a little bit as you go, no matter how many times you do it.
What’s it like travelling inside a space capsule?
The Soyuz was much smaller. You don’t have a lot of room to stretch out and move in a capsule. The Space Shuttle was much better for that. You just have to deal with that time frame, and you’re usually pretty busy making sure all systems are working well. It’s mainly just a process of keeping the vehicle going to explore the destination correctly and keeping the vehicle safe.
How much control do you have over the spacecraft?
A lot of it is pre-programmed manoeuvres, which we can set up or even load into the memory. We then execute them and watch them play out. Usually the computer controls almost everything, and the ground will send up a lot of the data needed to do the manoeuvres. Our job was to initiate the burns through keystrokes, just to make sure that everything was set up correctly and ready to go. You’re still doing the work to get everything done, but you’re not having to do the math to figure out what manoeuvre you need to do and when. That’s already been done by Mission Control on the ground.
They need to figure out exactly where you are and how to get you to your final destination. We didn’t have that knowledge on board.