Not that weather ever matters with the Soyuz. It’s freezing in Baikonur and the skies are clear. To Malenchenko’s right is Tim Peake, a Briton from the European Space Agency. To his right is flight commander Yuri Malenchenko of the Russian Federal Space Agency. It is December 15, 2015, just after 5 p.m., and Kopra is in the leftmost seat - the copilot’s seat - for Expedition 46 to the International Space Station (ISS). In every sense, Tim Kopra ’13BUS is locked in. Now he’s inside the real thing - a Soyuz spacecraft poised atop a slim Soyuz rocket at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in the desert steppe of Kazakhstan.
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Though the spacecraft is fully automatic, no system is infallible, and the astronaut has practiced, ad nauseam, manual docking and manual descent in the Star City simulator. He knows this board like the back of his gloved hand, having spent much of the past two years in Star City, the Russian space-training complex near Moscow.
Through the visor of his helmet he studies the control panel, its dials and buttons marked with Cyrillic characters. When the rocket zooms toward the atmosphere’s dome, the astronaut will feel the pressure of five times his weight - nearly a thousand pounds - drive into his chest. That’s the best way to take the g-forces. In his white suit he lies in the custom-contoured seat, knees bent.
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