In the Memory of Another Space Docking

1.Prologue

Watching Crew Dragon's successful berthing at the ISS on May 31, 2020, and laughing at Musk's "Trampoline is working" joke I remembered another event happening a quarter of a century ago: In June 1995 the Shuttle moored to the Mir Station and during 3 years 7 American missions to the Russian space station was accomplished. It was a time of hope that Russia, which has become free of communistic dictatorship several years ago will be so forever and the largest by area in the world country is on its way to the globalizing world of modern states. However, this essay is not about political issues and what happened with Russia and the Russian space exploration program during the last 20 years but about my very modest participation in this Russian-American cooperation in space 25 years ago. And the story itself is below.

2. Internship

It happened that in May 1994 I spent in Washington DC having business training in the framework of Gore-Chernomyrdin business management training program and at the beginning of June moved to Houston TX, where had an internship in Tenneco Company to get some knowledge and experience of work in the natural gas industry. And I got some, see my picture in fig. 1 where I am shown during my visit to a fully automated offshore platform in the Gulf of Mexico.

But my solid enough aerospace background was with me too and being in Houston I got contacts in the aerospace industry of course. One of them with legendary Angelo Miele from Rice University who is well-known in the area of applied aerodynamics, optimization, and numerical methods. You can see Angelo and me at Rice University in fig. 2. He liked my presentation of what was done by our team in the field of structural analysis and optimization and presented me to NASA, particularly to NASA's Lockheed Affiliation, situated on the NASA 1 Highway, see me there in the picture of fig. 3.

Fig.1. At the automated gas pumping platform in the Gulf of Mexico

Fig.2. Angelo Miele and I in Rice University

Fig.3. Lockheed Affiliation on the NASA Road 1 Highway

3.Docking Module

Visiting Lockheed and NASA, making presentations there, I managed to hook the actual task of dynamic analysis for the Mir Orbital Station – Shuttle docking module in the process of the forced landing of the Shuttle with this heavy cargo on board. The fact is that the docking module was designed and built by the Energy Space Corporation situated in Podlipki, Russia, and in 1994 it was supposed to be put and was put in a year into orbit by the Shuttle. In short, the drawings of this module were given to me at Lockheed's branch. After negotiations the order for such analysis was received, model, fig. 4, created and analyzed by Sergey Rychkov, and in October 1994 I presented the results to NASA. We got very accurate data that were used later by Lockheed.

Fig.4. The Digital Twin of Mir-Shuttle Docking Module

The docking module was delivered to the orbit and installed on the Mir Station at the end of 1995, fig. 5.

Fig.5. Shuttle Atlantis docked to the Russian Mir Orbital Station (photo NASA)

4.Conclusion

Both trips to the USA in 1994 were very interesting for me, particularly the internship program. And there were some out of curriculum activities too. We had high-level official receptions and dined both in the Senate and in the Russian Embassy (vodka in the Embassy of Russia was poured by huge black guys in white gloves, which was really impressive). I worked in Washington DC and Houston, visited San Francisco Bay Area, stayed in Monterey and Carmel CA, sailed from Lake Charles LA to the gas pumping platform in the Gulf of Mexico, flew by chopper above Texas, made pics of alligators in Louisiana met lots of new friends.

Looking back I have to notice that it was impossible even to imagine in those time that one day, particularly on April 29, 2014, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, a target of U.S. sanctions sparked by the Ukraine crisis, said that those sanctions would boomerang against America's space effort and essentially told NASA to take a flying leap ... on a trampoline. Elon Musk remembered these words and on May 31, 2020, we heard the following: "The trampoline works". It's very sad to see that our hopes of the 90s were not realized and Russia in 2014 stepped and still is going by its way to isolation and confrontation with another civilized world.