We also facilitate the transport of equipment hardware. As you are aware, Russian vehicles – the Progress and the Soyuz can carry on order. The Progress can carry 400-500 kg of US cargo each time. So, we also facilitate the integration of that NASA cargo into the Russian spacecraft.
So, we’re NASA’s technical eyes and ears on the ground in Moscow.

RT: Fantastic. Does this mean that the space programs for Russia and the United States are very closely integrated?

MB: Absolutely. Especially as regards to the International Space Station, we are very much a team, and not only NASA and Roscosmos [Russian Aerospace Agency] and its contractors, but also our international partners – the European Space Agency, the Canadian Space Agency and the Japan Exploration Space Agency – are all very closely interrelated and intertwined.

We have, as I said, dozens of teleconferences taking place between all of these different agencies each week. A lot of planning goes into the manifest – as you know, there are changes in schedule. So, we have to change the mix of the cargo that we carry on each of these vehicles, to make sure that we provide all of the necessary supplies of equipment for the crew members, especially now with six people in orbit.

RT: As to NASA and Roscosmos, have you always managed to co-operate well?

MB: Well, I would say not always. You’re probably aware that our first venture together was the Apollo-Soyuz effort in 1975, and we had kind of a low, where we did not do much of a manned space flight until the Shuttle-Mir mission started in 1993.

But since 1993 we’ve been working together and learning to work together very closely and have become more and more interrelated, more and more integrated. And since 1998-1999-2000, when we started to fly the International Space Station, it has been a non-stop 24-hours-a-day integrated team.

RT: So, is it enemy No. 1 or partner No. 1? I mean, do politics reach as high up as the ISS?

MB: We are not completely immune from politics, but we try to insulate – especially the crewmembers onboard – from the political infighting. And I would have to say that as regards to the team that we have on the International Space Station, we are partner number one, and in fact, as numerous people say, if our respective governments can take a lesson from the way we work together, the world would be a much better and much friendlier and safer place.

RT: There is a difference in approach in Russia and the United States – there was a New York Times article that said that Russia sometimes “overlooks cosmetic perfection” as they called it, or “design issues”. Do you think that those differences in approach aid the cooperation between the two?

MB: In the first place, one thing that I noticed in the 15 to 16 years that I have been working together with Russian space specialists when it comes to engineering solutions is that our approaches are really very similar. There are only so many ways you can solve some of the problems of living and working in space. From that standpoint at the technical level, our approaches are very, very similar.

The bigger picture level that you might say that we have slightly different approaches. I think the biggest notable difference is that the Russian approach seems to be one of more evolutionary steps: “if it is not broken, don’t fix it.”

So you have the venerable Soyuz and Progress vehicles that have been flying since 1967, with, of course, evolutionary changes, upgrades and modifications, whereas in the US we tend to change from program to program “completely throw out the baby with the bath water” and start over again.

So that Space Shuttle does not have a lot from the Apollo program that preceded it. We are starting to be a little bit better about that, and as you see in the Orion and the Aries programs we are starting to use some of the pieces from the Shuttle program. But from the standpoint of “does it have advantages?” it does, because if you look at the Shuttle and the Soyuz, they have backed each other up very well. And because of those differences, we have a redundancy that might otherwise have not been there.

RT: Do you think that your tasks and your priorities may change here in Moscow when NASA implements its Shuttle retirement plan?

MB: One thing that will change is that we’ve been very dependent on the US Space Shuttle to return equipment to the ground, bring back broken items that need to be analyzed and tested, to do troubleshooting, return items that can be refurbished and reused, and just dispose of large amounts of trash that need to be disposed of. That is one “hole”, if you will, in the program that’s kind of been difficult to fill with the present mix of vehicles.

RT: What are the respective advantages of the Soyuz and the Shuttle and disadvantages?

MB: As I said before, I think there are a lot of advantages to the redundancy. And they are very different and their capability. The Soyuz is much smaller, much more robust from the standpoint of basicness and simplicity. The Russians can launch the Soyuz in much, much more difficult weather conditions than we can.

This past Soyuz launch we saw a first, in my recollection, where they could not erect the vehicle on the pad initially because the winds were too high, but those winds were like gale force winds – the winds have to be more than 45 mph – many, many meters per second, whereas on the Space Shuttle we have much more stringent rules – because of the size of the vehicle – it’s like an airplane and it’s much more subject to aerodynamic effects.

On the other hand, the Shuttle is extremely capable. There is nothing else right now that carry the payloads that it can carry, the dimensions of payloads that it can carry. Without the Space Shuttle we would not have been able to assemble the space station in its current configuration – it would have had to look very, very different, and we would have had to rebuild heavy lift vehicles that currently we don’t have, like the Russian Energiya and the US Saturn-5.

So the Shuttle provides a very unique capability and a very large capability – we have the MPLM [Multi-Purpose Logistics Modules] which can carry large pressurized payloads. It allows us to dock to ports on the [International] Space Station which can transit large refrigerator-size racks of equipment. We can’t do that in a Progress or a Soyuz.

So they each bring their own advantages and disadvantages. The Soyuz and the Progress can be prepared much more rapidly. Very rarely you had a delay in the launch of the Soyuz vehicle, unless we asked them to delay it, whereas the Shuttle is extremely dependent on the weather.
So, they each have advantages, they have their disadvantages, and together they make a very good mix of launch vehicles.

RT: Speaking of diversity…You are an American living in Russia. Coming here must have been a culture shock in some way. But you’ve been living here for years. What’s it been like? What are the ups and downs of life in Russia?

MB: It’s been really fascinating. My first trip to Moscow was in 1993. It’s been 16 years, and there have been tremendous changes in the Russian economy and the Russian marketplace. I have to say it’s much easier to live in Moscow now. Before, it was very difficult to find the basic things that are easy for an American to live with. But I’ve been very interested in Russian culture and learning about it. I think that has helped me to learn the language and understand the people. I found that to be a positive experience as opposed to a negative. The hardships, the most difficult thing about living abroad is, of course, being separated from your family, friends and loved ones. On the other hand, I’ve made many Russian friends who are very dear people to me now, so that when I’m in America, I miss them.

RT: What does your average day involve?

MB: A typical day would be that I will come here in the morning, will tag up with our Houston support group. We have two teams that work here in Mission Control. My team, which is the MTL, the Moscow Technical Liaison office, and then we have a Houston support group who are primarily flight controllers – they’re active mission control people. We tag up, find out if there are any technical issues that need to be worked on, I check my email from Houston and find out if anything came up overnight that needs to be responded to. We have an action request system where the flight control team in Houston or in Moscow can assign actions to the technical team and, as part of our liaison work, we look for those actions, parse them out to the appropriate system specialist so that we can get responses, and then we look for responses from the previous actions that we’ve given them. A lot of translation work goes on, actions that were assigned in English that need to be translated into Russian and handed out, and then we get the responses in Russian and we have to translate them back. It is not an easy thing, because NASA is very used to acronyms, and the Russian Space Agency is as well, so we need to learn all the Russian acronyms and the American acronyms and translate them all back together.

I might make a trip out to Star City to participate in a crew training session or brief the crew members on some technical issue with the vehicle. Typically, in the afternoon we have telecons. Afternoon Moscow time is Houston morning time, so the telecons typically begin, and we will participate in one to four teleconferences in a day. My work day usually goes very long, because, unfortunately, when it’s the end of the day in Moscow, if it’s 5pm here, it’s 8am in Houston. People are just starting to work there. It’s easy to work two full shifts staying on the telephone or email, solving technical problems. Sometimes it is just solving non-technical problems that are just translation issues.

RT: Sounds like a very tough job, but also a very exciting job. Do you have a snapshot of something that happened to you here that you remember and look back upon, that stands out in your memory?

MB: I think my favorite experiences of all are launches. I never get tired of seeing a launch, whether it be a Shuttle launch, a Soyuz launch, a Progress launch. I’m very fortunate to have the opportunity to see some of each. In fact last week I was in Baikonur and got to see the launch of Soyuz TMA-15. And to know somebody. Mike Barratt is a good friend of mine, Bob Thirsk I’ve worked with since 1989, so I’ve known these people for a long time. Barratt was someone who has been here during Phase 1, when Norm Thagard was onboard, he was the flight surgeon. So I’ve known these guys for many, many years. To watch a launch is fantastic, but to watch a launch with somebody you know sitting on top of that spacecraft – there’s nothing quite like it in the world, it’s spectacular.

RT: You could be considered quite an expert of Russia by this point. What would be your words of advice to someone just coming here, to someone who is trying to adapt, to make a living here in Russia?

MB: The first piece of advice is to take advantage of every day, to learn a little bit about Russian culture, learn the Russian language, take advantage of the opportunity to get out and use the metro system, and you need a little bit of the Russian language to be able to do that. Have patience and be flexible – it’s not like day-to-day life in Houston or in Huntsville. You have to be patient and flexible. Just enjoy the experience. How many people get the chance to do this and learn to live in a different culture and work with other people on the biggest technical project in the history of mankind?