The centrifuge at Star City is large enough for people to ride in and subjects them to high G-forces such as those experienced during spacecraft launches and re-entries. (Photo from the New York Times)From The New York Times:
STAR CITY, Russia — Garrett Reisman was on his way to this formerly secret military base for several weeks of training, making his way through Kennedy Airport, when his cellphone rang. It was his boss, Steven W. Lindsey, the head of NASA’s astronaut office.
“Come back to Houston. They’ve canceled your training — they’re playing hardball,” Mr. Reisman recalled his boss saying. He was caught in a momentarily important dispute between NASA and the Russian space agency, Roscosmos.
Ultimately, Mr. Reisman’s aborted trip was just a bump in the road on the way to space: he spent three months aboard the International Space Station earlier this year, performed a spacewalk and even traded jokes over a video link with Stephen Colbert.
Everyone who works with the Russian space program has similar stories to tell of implacable bureaucrats, byzantine rules and decisions that seem capricious at best. And many of those stories are played out here in Star City, where cosmonauts and, now, astronauts from all over the world train to fly on Russian Soyuz spacecraft to go to the $100 billion International Space Station.
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