14 DAY TRIAL // One of the least known aspects concerning the crews that fill the posts aboard the International Space Station is the fact that astronauts and cosmonauts are subjected to a large amount of regulations, which some say prevent the crew from bonding. The Russian soon-to-be commander of the ISS, Gennedy Padalka, said before the Thursday launch of the Soyuz TMA-14 rocket mission to the orbital lab that each of the crew members on the lab had to eat their own food and even use only their national toilets and exercising equipment, without asking for any help from astronauts belonging to other nations.
“What is going on has an adverse effect on our work. Cosmonauts are above the ongoing squabble, no matter what officials decide. We are grown-up, well-educated and good-mannered people and can use our own brains to create normal relationship. It's politicians and bureaucrats who can't reach agreement, not us, cosmonauts and astronauts,” the 50-year-old Padalka said as quoted by the Russian Novaya Gazeta newspaper.
The long-experienced cosmonaut is a veteran of the ISS, and the current assignment is the second time he will command the space station, following Expedition 9, in 2004.
Alexander Vorobyov, a spokesman for the RosCosmos Russian space agency, stated that he would not comment on the statements until he read the full article in the newspaper. The arguments, Padalka shared before the launch, started in 2003, when the Russian Federation began to charge fees to other space agencies whenever their astronauts would use a Russian facility. Naturally, all the other agencies responded with the same action, and things went downhill from there, the cosmonaut added.
Padalka explained about the answer officials gave him when he asked if he could use the American exercise bicycles aboard the ISS that, “They told me: 'Yes, you can.' Then they said no. Then they hold consultations and they approve it again. And now, right before the flight, it turns out again that the answer is negative. They also recommend us to only use national toilets.” He also argued that sharing food and other conveniences made the crew feel like a team in the past, and that this very valuable cooperation could go down the drain, if the current course of action continued.
In addition to criticizing RosCosmos on this front, the cosmonaut also complained that the state of the Russian modules that were affixed to the ISS was way behind the high-tech modules attached by the Japanese and the Americans. Padalka pinpointed that his country's portions were built on obsolete technologies, dating back to the mid-1980s, whereas the other segments were much newer and well-equipped.