Nineteen years after he went into space, Dr. Reinhold Ewald still can’t eat broccoli.
“It was the most mineral-rich vegetable available in space, and I had to eat tons of it,” the German astronaut recalled with laughter as he gave a lecture at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) on Tuesday in honour of Cosmonautics Day, celebrated in Russia on April 12 to mark the anniversary of Soviet cosmonaut Yury Gagarin becoming the first man in space on that day in 1961.
German astronaut Reinhold Ewald, left, with Professor Rupert Gerzer at Skoltech on Tuesday. Photo: Skoltech
Ewald, who was on the Mir space station for a dramatic three-week period in 1997 that saw a fire break out on board the station, was in Moscow to attend a Kremlin gala marking Cosmonautics Day. So far, the ESA astronaut recounted, his trip has been marked by coincidences.
“The funny thing is, yesterday I visited Star City – the training centre outside Moscow – and we witnessed a crew training, and they were exposed to a scenario where they had a fire,” he said, joking that he had been the main advisor. But the coincidences didn’t end there.
“Believe it or not, it was exactly the same instructor that I had 26 years ago who was sitting at the consoles, still doing his job at the age of 70,” he said.
The fire on board the Mir in February 1997, caused by an exploding oxygen canister, could easily have ended in tragedy, but the six-man crew kept their heads and worked together to deal with its consequences and avert disaster.
“Suddenly there’s a hierarchy, a given authority,” Ewald said, recalling the incident. “In this case, it was [Russian cosmonaut] Valery Korzun, who was the most experienced, with four months already on board. He took the lead and everyone lined up and did exactly what was needed, not being a hero – these kind of movie things don’t help,” he said, adding that no one had panicked.
Nor did the incident put him off: Ewald, who studied astronomy at Cologne University in the ’80s before becoming an astronaut, has continued to work with astronauts from the ground, including at the Columbus Control Centre in Germany. During his talk at Skoltech – held as part of Professor Rupert Gerzer’s course on Human Spaceflight – he encouraged the students to follow in his footsteps, describing being an astronaut as “a very interesting job” and an opportunity to contribute to science.
Ewald pictured on board the Mir space station in 1997. Photo: NASA.
“Space is the easy part”
One of the most difficult things about Ewald’s space mission was, he said, going from zero gravity to 5.5G when reentering the Earth’s atmosphere. The training on Earth, in which astronauts experience 6.5G, was bad enough: “There’s a nightmare on your chest. The next day, I had terrible muscle ache from instinctively operating against it – you shouldn’t do that,” but the difference in going from 1 to 6.5 and 0 to 5.5 was, he says, huge.
“Most of the exhaustion you see in astronauts coming out of the Soyuz spacecraft is from the exertion, from being squashed by these forces,” he said.
Despite the drama of the fire, excessive amounts of broccoli and chest-crushing landing, Ewald says the 21 days he spent in space are nothing compared to the 21 years he has spent working in astronautics on the ground. “That is the easy part,” he laughs.
“When you work in space you get your daily agenda, you work on the tasks for which you’ve been trained, it’s an easy life, but once on the ground you have to find your way yourself,” he said, explaining that flight plans are prepared more than a year in advance.
“It’s a quiet life up in space, it’s more troublesome on the ground,” he said.
Now, from the ground, Ewald formulates messages for the crew from the control centre and helps them solve problems they encounter – even if they are not as dramatic as a fire.
“The most frequently asked question on board the space station is ‘Where is …’” he said. “Because things get lost, they are constantly looking for things.”
One of the aspects mission control monitors from the ground is the relationship among crew members.
“It starts two-and-a-half years before the flight, when the crew starts the training cycle,” Ewald says. “You don’t necessarily become friends and go to each other’s weddings and children’s birthday parties, but it’s a kind of reliability that develops inside crew. If it doesn’t function, then that’s a bad flight. We see that on the ground.”
If the ground controllers see that the crew is unhappy – “if they’re complaining about the food or experiments not working” – they take steps to introduce positive aspects, such as family conference calls, he said.
New space age
Ewald’s lecture focused on the making and developing of the International Space Station (ISS), the successor of Mir. He described how life in space has changed for astronauts in recent decades, from their journey to and from space to their daily life, as the ISS has gradually seen more and more sections added to it.
Observing today’s space missions, Ewald says that astronauts are now “better off – their muscular status is much improved,” he says.
The ISS “living room” node contains a treadmill and exercise devices that residents use regularly. On April 21, as thousands of runners compete in the London Marathon, British astronaut Tim Peake will run the full distance on the ISS treadmill.
“My colleague [ESA astronaut] Alexander Gerst [who spent six months on the ISS in 2014] landed in Kazakhstan in the morning, and in the evening he was waving and smiling and walking into the rehabilitation centre – it’s amazing, I couldn’t have done that, I couldn’t have made such a fast recovery even after three weeks in space,” said Ewald.
The Mir space station seen orbiting above the Earth. Photo: NASA.
“Exercise in space now is so effective that all the former effects of weakening bones or muscle atrophy have been combatted almost completely,” he added.
The views enjoyed by modern astronauts – both of the Earth and of the station itself – are also an upgrade of those available from Mir.
“On Mir we had these little portholes we could peek out of, and there was a bigger window with a view of the Earth, but not the 360-degree view they have from the Cupola,” said Ewald, referring to a European-made section of the ISS that offers panoramic views.
“The images you see now on Twitter of Earth and parts of the station – they’re taken from the Cupola,” he said, adding that most astronauts find that Earth only looks inhabited at night, “when coastlines are lined with lights, for example.”
While conditions on space stations may have changed and current trends may focus on using unmanned craft for space exploration, Ewald does not believe humans can be replaced by robots in space any time soon.
“I don’t think we can rely on the robotic exploration of the solar system,” he says. It may be more expensive and dangerous, he concedes, but: “it’s enormously more effective to send humans.”