>> NARRATOR: The Russian trek into space began on the ground at Star City, the epicenter of the Soviet space program, where an ordeal of training prepared cosmonauts to survive the unknown dangers of outer space. <font color="#FFFF00"> [Captioning sponsored by</font> <font color="#FFFF00"> TERA MEDIA]</font> >> NARRATOR: Russia was enchanted with outer space long before space flight was real. The word "cosmonaut" was first coined in a Russian silent movie, where audiences thrilled to the exploits of a Slavic Buck Rogers. But real space flight was anything but a fantasy. It was fraught with danger and uncertainty with no guarantee of a happy ending. On the day of the first manned space launch in April 1961, Soviet authorities prepared three press releases, two in case the mission ended in disaster. It was also conducted with the passion and power of war, a cold war with the United States. At the tip of the sword was the cosmonaut. The boot camp and training ground where cosmonauts prepared for space then and now was Zvezdny Gorodok, or Star City, the home of the Soviet space program 40 miles northeast of Moscow. >> They picked a spot right near a railway depot and they started building an apartment complex and an administrative building and the first building to house any kind of training facilities. And they moved the cosmonauts out there. Their families would live in comfort, where their instructors would be around them and part of their world on a day-to-day basis. >> NARRATOR: Star City was a community dedicated to the exploration of space, a military and political priority of the Soviet government throughout the cold war. Its approach to cosmonaut training embodied the essence of how the Soviets expected to beat Americans in space. Not only were the drills vastly different than the United States', so were the qualifications of the people picked. >> The first several groups of American astronauts were selected out of the military test-pilot pool. And they were selected because of their background not just in flying unique machines or an aircraft the first time, but because they were trained in aeronautics so that they could communicate with the engineers and therefore improve the machines that they were actually testing. >> NARRATOR: Six of the first seven were in their 30s. One was 40. On the other hand, the first cosmonauts, 20 in all, were new Soviet air force recruits. >> They were young pilots, sort of fresh off the dirt airfield, from about 24 to 26 years old, with a couple hundred hours of flying time, no higher education. They had in essence been to a junior college that simply trained them to fly. >> NARRATOR: While astronauts were expected to fly and design their spacecraft, cosmonauts were not. Sergei Korolev, the architect of the Soviet space program, intended for his cosmonauts to ride into space. Inside the capsule, the flight controls were locked. The only way a cosmonaut could get at them was if the ground control turned over a secret code. That event was reserved for the most dire of in-space emergencies. Otherwise, the spacecraft was controlled entirely from the ground under the ever-watchful eye of Korolev himself. >> He would have it as automated as possible. He knew it wouldn't require a very experienced pilot. In fact, as he used to say, "Rabbits can fly my spacecraft." >> NARRATOR: The sole purpose of the cosmonaut was to survive. They didn't need experience, just guts. While Star City engineers worked out the technical details of rocketing a man into space, its doctors instituted a regimen of training intended to make sure Soviet cosmonauts came back alive. But the problem was that space was a great unknown. They were training for an environment no one had ever been in. There were questions, if not fears, about radiation, weightlessness, the shock to the system of liftoff, or space sickness caused by severe disorientation. Soviet planners identified ten potential disaster scenarios that could extinguish a cosmonaut's life in seconds, from a rocket failing to achieve orbital velocity and falling back, to a crash landing during reentry. As a result, doctors approached the training program as if it were a lab experiment. >> The poor cosmonauts were kind of rats in a maze, and the people moving the cheese around were the Soviet space doctors. It was the doctors who were calling the shots and the doctors who were running amuck. >> NARRATOR: Training was as much a preparation for space as a test of a cosmonaut's physical, mental, and even emotional limits. >> They created a training that would basically stress a human organism to the breaking point simply because they didn't know where that breaking point in space might actually be. >> The Soviets spent much more time on the survival aspects and the escape systems. Because the Americans were going to land in water, they had different recovery systems than... the Soviets were designing to land on land and, therefore, the programs evolved somewhat differently. For example, the cosmonauts all learned to skydive. >> NARRATOR: Cosmonauts had to complete 40 jumps, moving from static-line jumping to free falls. But skill wasn't the only training objective. Another was enduring stress. Cosmonauts had to recite poetry, perform mathematical calculations, even jump blindfolded to see if they cracked under pressure. >> They had to prove that they were mentally strong enough by skydiving and reacting in a few seconds to something that will take your life very quickly if you don't perform. >> NARRATOR: The unknowns of space comprised a virtual encyclopedia of uncertainty. The only hard data about orbital flight came from dogs launched into space. One died in orbit. Two others returned severely disoriented. Doctors theorized it was because there was no reference point for up or down, so the ear's semicircular canals did not register movement. Doctors feared space would make cosmonauts too weak to fly, so they trained them on extreme velocity swings, high-speed sleds, and high-powered rotation machines to toughen then up, or at least find out which cosmonaut was best adept at keeping his head and stomach. >> There were a few kind of things that would swing people around to test how quickly they got sick, but it was pretty crude and the first cosmonauts quickly rebelled at it. They just said, "Is this... we're not flying. What are we doing here? This is pointless." >> NARRATOR: Two candidates quit, but the remaining 18 accepted the endless disorientation drills on faith as the only protection against the unknown. If nausea was one hurdle to overcome, another was preparing a cosmonaut to keep from going unconscious. A key to building resistance to that were workouts on the centrifuge machines. >> Centrifuges are essentially a cockpit on the end of an arm and the arm just swings the cockpit, simulated cockpit, in a circle, and it's forcing you to the outside due to centripetal force. And that simulates being in an aircraft that's pulling Gs. It was also useful in the space program because the capsules were exposed to high acceleration during the launch and high deceleration during their reentry. >> NARRATOR: On the Earth's surface, humans are exposed to one G. A person weighing 100 pounds exposed to six Gs feels as if they are 600 pounds. >> Under high G exposure, the blood is actually pulled from the upper part of your body down towards your legs. If you can't keep the blood flowing from your heart to your brain, obviously you'll black out or pass out. This training in the centrifuge teaches you techniques to keep the blood flowing by tensing your body. That raises your blood pressure essentially and keeps the blood flowing to your brain. >> NARRATOR: By the winter of 1960, the pressure became even more intense when Soviet Premier Khrushchev urged the space program to take whatever steps necessary to beat the Americans into space. In an all-out rush to get there first, the training program suffered its first fatality. It was a sobering reminder of the real dangers that surrounded putting a human being into space. >> NARRATOR: 20 recruits entered the first cosmonaut training program in March 1960. It began with a seven-mile run through the woods of Star City. At 9:00 a.m. they attended classroom lectures about weightlessness, G force, and how a rocket worked. In the afternoon they played hockey, an exercise in collegial teamwork. After ten months of classroom lectures, college-like exams, and a battery of physical tests and challenges, the top six were elected to advanced training. Sergei Korolev, the head of the Soviet space program, took the opportunity to show the men he called his "young eagles" the Vostok capsule that would carry them into space. >> They were surprised. It was a cannon ball. Where were the wings? You imagine Soviet air force pilots kind of crowding around. You've got a couple of engineers in their white lab coats pointing out the various parts of the spacecraft. "Here's the retrorocket. Here's the equipment module. Here's... you know, here are the straps that hold the sphere to the equipment module." >> NARRATOR: Cosmonaut training put a high premium on intelligence and physical stamina, but charm may have been equally important in advancing the career of a young cosmonaut named Yuri Gagarin when his boss asked him to sit in the space capsule. >> Gagarin does something that apparently charmed Korolev. Before he entered the spacecraft, he stopped and he knelt and he took off his shoes. It was like the peasant entering the castle of the lord of the manor. And Korolev was completely charmed by it because it showed that he was actually a fairly humble young man, but also that he had a respect for what he was about to undergo. >> NARRATOR: The elite cosmonauts became known as the Vanguard Six. They were the competition to America's Mercury Seven for the prize of being the first in space. Ironically, one of the key factors in the final selection was size. A cosmonaut had to be around five feet four inches and weigh no more than 160 pounds. The reason was that the Soviet engineers built a one-size-fits- all space suit. As Korolev remarked, it was easier to find the right-size cosmonaut than to engineer a different-size suit. By January 1961, cosmonaut training for the Vanguard Six reached high gear. The Soviet launch vehicle, the Vostok, was ready. Though built to strike American cities in the cold war, it was set to carry the first man into space. It stood 126 feet tall, had four stages, 20 main engines, and 12 smaller ones, capable of reaching an orbital velocity of 18,000 miles in eight minutes. Engineers had confidence in the Vostok. The great unknown was whether or not a cosmonaut could survive riding it into space and back. Ejection seats and launch sleds rehearsed parachute escapes, disorientation capsules simulated a spacecraft out of control, and centrifuges surpassed the G force of liftoff. But the one condition trainers feared the most was zero gravity. >> The received opinion in aerospace medicine was that you might go insane in weightlessness; you might have some sort of bizarre physiological reaction. No one quite knew for sure. >> NARRATOR: Soviet test pilots flying aerial dives from 20,000 feet accidentally encountered zero gravity. It was applied to cosmonaut training using Ilyushin 76 aircraft, similar to the American KC-135s, or the "Vomit Comet," as it was called. >> We can simulate being in a zero-gravity environment. Get in an aircraft that will do a parabola, climb at 45 degrees, and then gently push over so everything in the aircraft floats until it gets pointed downhill at 45 degrees and then pull out. That only enables you to have 25 or 30 seconds of zero gravity and that's true zero gravity, but again it's only a few seconds. >> NARRATOR: But the weightless drill was nowhere long enough to duplicate the actual experience they would confront in space. >> The early cosmonauts were laboring under the pressure of knowing that this was largely the unknown, that everybody was sort of guessing and they were going to be the ones who were on the front lines. >> NARRATOR: Cosmonauts even trained for conditions that were statistically unlikely to occur, like being stranded on Earth. At best, Soviet doctors designed tests and trainings that prepared cosmonauts for space, but in many cases training drills were also intended to see if cosmonauts could obey orders under duress. >> So they would put people in an isolation chamber in the dark for days at a time and just to see their reactions, see how they followed orders, see how they continued with the communications protocols. They also did things like put them in heat chambers just to sort of bake them for days at a time to see whether living in, you know, a chamber that was 100 degrees for three or four days would drive them crazy. >> NARRATOR: The most dangerous isolation-chamber test of all put some cosmonauts in pure oxygen to see what breathing it might do to a body. A young lieutenant named Valentin Bondarenko decided to cope with the week-long test by keeping a hot plate inside to cook meals. But that turned into a prescription for disaster. >> He had the medical leads attached and was taking them off and then cleaning the attach points on his skin with a little ball of cotton swathed in alcohol and he kind of carelessly flicked the swab onto a hot plate. The cotton ball ignited. >> NARRATOR: The chamber ignited like a photo flashbulb and killed Bondarenko. The timing couldn't have been worse. Launch day was fast approaching and the time had come to make the final selection of the cosmonaut who would be first in space. Yuri Gagarin topped cosmonaut training's arduous drills with Gherman Titov. But more than skill was required in the selection. As a contest in the cold war, the government wanted a model Communist, not just the best trained cosmonaut. >> Gagarin got the slight edge because he was, first of all, proletarian. His parents came from a small farming village. His father was in essence the village carpenter, whereas Titov's family was a little more bourgeois. I mean, his father was a schoolteacher. >> NARRATOR: Gagarin was picked to be first in space, but nearly lost the honor. The tragedy of Bondarenko's death completely unnerved him, and General Nikolai Kamanin, the head of cosmonaut training, nearly replaced him with Gherman Titov. >> He got just a little nervous and apprehensive about all the other things. "Are the parachutes working? How is the ejection seat, you know? Where is my survival kit?" And Kamanin thought that showed he might be weakening a little bit, not showing the right spirit, and was prepared to put Titov in his place. But then he looked back a little bit and realized that it was justifiable. >> NARRATOR: In spite of misgivings and apprehensions, after 18 months of intensive training, 27-year-old Gagarin was good to go. The day set for launch was April 12, 1961. >> He woke up on the morning of April 12, 1961, and put his pressure suit on with its orange coverall and the big fishbowl helmet and he marched out to the pad and gave a nice speech. He got in the spacecraft and they lit it up and the first words he said as it took off were... was the Russian word <i>"Poekheli."</i> And if you listen to him, it's as if he's saying, "Here we go." >> NARRATOR: Gagarin endured six Gs at liftoff, an orbital speed of 18,000 miles per hour, and zero gravity 203 miles above the earth. (<i> Russian radio transmissions</i> ) >> NARRATOR: During reentry, Gagarin's training was put to the test. The craft started rotating wildly. His vision became blurred under the force of ten Gs. Finally Soviet space managers, fearing a hard landing that might kill its pilot, had Gagarin eject from the capsule. >> He parachuted out near Saratov and came down in a muddy field where a peasant woman was standing there in horror. And he's saying, "No, no, I'm a Soviet man. It's all right. Lead me to a telephone." >> NARRATOR: Gagarin's flight, his first and last, was over in one hour and 48 minutes. He had achieved the one standard used to measure success: he survived. That same day Gagarin flew to Moscow's Red Square. The Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and thousands welcomed home the first man in space. While Gagarin was receiving a hero's welcome, Soviet doctors and scientists were analyzing every aspect of man's first space voyage. Much to their surprise, they discovered zero gravity didn't kill or even make Gagarin crazy. In fact, space flight was far less of an ordeal than training. With each mission of the Vanguard Six, the grip of doctors on cosmonaut training would loosen to a new approach to preparing cosmonauts for space. >> NARRATOR: Yuri Gagarin was more than the first man in space. He was in essence the first human experiment in space. When he returned from his 108- minute flight, he returned with the first data about the effects of space on the human body, opening the door for a generation of cosmonauts. >> (<i> translated</i> ): Gagarin proved that space orbit was possible, that humans could not only survive in space, but live in space. We used the path he paved. >> Gagarin proved that the training had been far more rigorous than it needed to be and that you did not need to be a 25-year-old physical superman with a perfect heart rate and perfect blood pressure and the ability to withstand 12 Gs to fly in space. >> NARRATOR: More data was gathered four months later after a second cosmonaut, Gherman Titov, launched in August 1961. If Gagarin showed rigorous training wasn't needed, Titov proved it didn't really work. >> Gherman Titov was a full day in space and unfortunately Titov was sick for most of it. >> NARRATOR: Titov, like future cosmonauts, was struck with space motion sickness. Scientists soon learned there was nothing like it on Earth, nor was there any medication to treat or prevent it. But later flights proved it went away in a matter of hours. With hard information, the Soviets began to reshape the cosmonaut training program, beginning with a new choice of candidates. They no longer searched for young, superfit humans. They now sought older candidates who, like American astronauts, had engineering degrees and air force command experience. They also chose women. Among the first was Valentina Tereshkova, a young textile worker, parachute hobbyist, and now Star City's first female cosmonaut. >> The rigorous training that had applied to the first cosmonauts really didn't apply here. They were subjected to far fewer tests. There was going to be a greatly reduced number of chamber tests and observations and medical examinations. The classroom training was shortened somewhat because they again had a better idea of what a cosmonaut needed to know to survive a flight. >> NARRATOR: Tereshkova launched in 1963. The widely held belief that space required ordeal-like tests of endurance evaporated as a confident Soviet space program showed the world that a woman could ride into space. Tereshkova's flight marked an end to the regimen of cosmonaut training that stressed physical conditioning and marked the beginning of a new approach that stressed the use of simulators and mock-ups. The Soviets now aimed for the moon and longer flights in space. >> In order to be trained for these much more complex missions that would involve maneuvering in space and long-duration flights and rendezvous and docking with other spacecraft, obviously the training facilities had to be upgraded. The first thing that happened is that the Soviet air force took the cosmonaut training center, took Star City away from the aerospace medical people and made it in essence a different kind of military unit. They weren't just parachutists who were kind of being, you know, shot out of a cannon to survive a ride around the world now just to impress the world and impress the Americans. Now they were supposed to be part of crews building spacecraft for the exploitation of space. >> NARRATOR: Star City still resorted to arduous physical training with isolation chambers, centrifuges, and high- velocity swings, but now that weightlessness and space sickness were not seen as dangerous, cosmonauts evolved from passengers to pilots and now required more skill training. Ironically, one of its prime sources of information, as it reinvented cosmonaut training, came from its space rival, the United States. >> We have you go for orbit. You're go for orbit. >> NASA was substantially far ahead. They had done a whole variety of things the Soviets were having a tough time doing-- the training methods, the simulators that NASA had, all of which were public knowledge. You could write to NASA and get handy pictures and probably diagrams of all of them and adapt it to their purposes so that they would hopefully have more capable space crews and more effective training. >> NARRATOR: Star City boosted cosmonaut training to a new level of technical proficiency, but the old problem of training for the unknown still remained. Near disaster and death would penetrate the vulnerabilities of a program charged with training people on Earth for a mission in outer space. >> NARRATOR: By 1964 the Soviet space program was devoted to landing on the moon, a new phase of competition with the United States. Central to that success was training cosmonauts to leave a space capsule and walk in space. To accomplish that feat, engineers developed a special pressurized suit, then made its testing a year long-part of cosmonaut training. When it was over, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov was selected to take the first space walk in March 1965. >> They tried to prepare him for the experience by putting him through all kinds of rigorous physical training, by having him learn how to swim and dive, by putting him in the zero-G aircraft, getting in and out of the suit, by putting him in the chamber and bleeding the air out of it. >> NARRATOR: Still the only way to test the pressurized suit and the viability of a space walk was to do it. Nothing on Earth prepared him for what was about to happen as the space suit began to react differently than it had on the ground. >> The space suit became rigid like a balloon far more than anyone had anticipated on Earth-- the combination of lack of air pressure and lack of gravity. In fact it ballooned so thoroughly that his fingers were out of the gloves at one point. It had just expanded beyond the ability of his hands to remain in the gloves. >> NARRATOR: The cosmonaut could not fit back through the airlock. Leonov dropped the pressure inside the suit by almost 200% by opening a special seal, a quick improvisation that saved his life. Leonov survived, but his near disaster transformed cosmonaut training at Star City. The new directive was to manufacture better, more realistic space-like environments and immerse cosmonauts into them to rehearse space missions. To do that, cosmonauts began training in water. >> It was impossible to recreate the space environment on Earth. There were compromises you could make having people simulate space walks in underwater tanks. That became a common practice after the mid 1960s. >> NARRATOR: Space walks were practiced in a new training pool or neutral buoyancy tank. It held 1.3 million gallons of water, 36 feet deep. In space suits bound with weights and pumped full of air, cosmonauts practiced maneuvers from ratcheting bolts to entering and exiting a capsule. It is still used today. >> The reason the pool provides us such good training for people in a space suit is you can take a 150-pound person, put a 100- pound space suit on them, put them in the pool, and they can function almost like they're in a weightless environment because we have assistant divers that will attach weights at different locations on that suit so that they're buoyant, so they don't have to hang on to a handle or stand on a platform. And what that enables them to do in the pool is if they're using a tool, their body will react much as if it's in zero gravity. We just have to be in an environment that makes you think about force reactions when you exert yourself or move a mass. >> NARRATOR: Besides the new neutral buoyancy tanks, cosmonaut training began using flight simulators and spacecraft mock-ups. >> (<i> translated</i> ): In our mission we learned what to expect from the simulators. Physical conditioning is always important. The body has to be strong and in shape or else it's impossible to be in space, but simulators add a new degree of confidence. >> Being able to put crews in those simulators is the single biggest innovation in space flight training that both sides came to and turned out to be the thing that in essence made all the difference. They would mimic the operations of a real spacecraft. If you threw a switch that turned down the lights and lowered the air pressure, the same thing would happen in the spacecraft. And this allowed them to put crew members together to rehearse every moment of every space flight-- and not just space flights as they went well, but more importantly to rehearse the days when things don't go well. >> NARRATOR: Simulators and mock-ups improved cosmonaut training, but it didn't win the race to the moon. Superior rocket technology did. (<i> garbled radio transmissions</i> ) After the Americans landed on the lunar surface in 1969, the Soviets refocused on a new objective: long-term space flight. >><i> Beautiful.</i> >> NARRATOR: Cosmonauts prepared for expedition-length space flight with rigorous ground training. In June 1970, cosmonauts Nikolayev and Sevostianov went into space for a record 18 days. >> They returned back absolutely... absolutely devastated, you might say. After that we decided that the space station is... may be kind of a power for the future in the manned space flight with a training facility on board with a big space for a human to be stationed in space. >> NARRATOR: The prolonged weightlessness of 18 days in space resulted in many problems. The skeletal and muscle systems were weakened by as much as 40%. The cosmonauts lost so much water they were dehydrated. There was even a decrease in leg size. Soviet planners realized they needed to train while in space, and they needed a bigger craft to do that-- a space station. The vehicle they developed was the Salyut, a three-chamber space station, the first ever built. >> (<i> translated</i> ): No two missions are alike, but the most dangerous are always the first ones where new maneuvers are tested, like the first man in space or the first space walk and unfortunately the first mission to our space station. You can only know what to expect after it's over, and then sometimes it's too late. >> NARRATOR: Cosmonaut training was like a suit of armor intended to shield cosmonauts from space dangers. But no matter how thick the armor, there were always areas of vulnerability. That was especially true of training for the space station. >> The idea of putting crews in that kind of environment forced a radical change in the way training was conducted. You had to spend much more time training them in how to physically live in space. It wasn't just let's eat food out of the squeeze tubes and things like that and remain strapped in. They had to learn how to exercise. They had to learn how to manage their diet. There was a whole variety of psychological and physiological work that needed to be done. >> NARRATOR: The first mission ever undertaken to a space station turned out to be disastrous. In June 1971, cosmonauts Volkov, Dobrovolskiy, and Patsayev, three senior air force pilots, crewed the mission to the Salyut space station. The mission was to last for one month. Ironically, they were not the primary cosmonauts, but a backup team. They had trained individually, but not that long as a team, and were cleared for takeoff after a primary crew member became ill days before liftoff. Typically the capsule could only accommodate two cosmonauts, but the mission required three. To fit the extra man, the decision was made to abandon their pressurized space suits-- a deadly idea if the capsule were to lose pressure. The launch was perfect. Three days later the capsule docked with the space station, a maneuver practiced in simulator training. But the mission was troubled. On board a small fire broke out, equipment broke down, and tempers flared up. Ground control ordered the crew back a week early. >> The crew sort of staggered through its mission and equipment did keep failing. There were tremendous personal conflicts within the crew. >> NARRATOR: In spite of the problems, the crew completed its mission, becoming the first to rendezvous, dock, and stay aboard a space station. But during reentry, trouble began. Ground controllers lost contact with the crew perhaps because of a broken antenna. Nonetheless, the capsule returned safely. But the recovery team soon discovered the reason for the communications breakdown. When they opened the capsule, they found the crew dead. >> They died of embolisms. There was a valve on their Soyuz orbital module that opened prematurely. It opened while they were still in space, after they had discarded their reentry module, and the air started whistling out of the spacecraft. The spacecraft depressurized and the crew died within probably 30 seconds. They were unable to find the valve, find a handle to crank to close that valve, because it was kind of hidden beneath one of the seats. It was not supposed to be operated at this time. >> NARRATOR: After the deaths of the three cosmonauts, Star City took a harder look at cosmonaut training. Individual training continued, but new drills were instituted that focused on how crews worked together. The exercises were conducted on water and land to simulate life- and-death emergencies. A favorite proving ground was the wilds of Siberia in winter. Crews had to spend up to three days and two nights on the coast of the Arctic Sea, where temperatures fell to 40 below zero and minus 60 with the wind chill. The crews were observed to see how they got along, who gave orders and who followed them in the course of constructing shelter, building fires, and preparing meals. How cosmonaut crews worked together under extreme duress became a key ingredient in picking crews. The Soviet trainers' vow that the deaths of the first space station cosmonauts would not be in vain was realized. No cosmonaut ever died in space again. But a greater threat faced Star City, one that even cosmonaut training could not guard against. 28 years after cosmonaut training began, the Soviet Union fell. In its cataclysmic crash, Star City and the Soviet space program were thrown into chaos. >> NARRATOR: Star City, the home of the Soviet and Russian space program, kept pace with the training needs of every new cosmonaut mission, moving from conditioning on the ground to conditioning in flight. The duress of zero gravity during expedition-length flights required cosmonauts to train aboard the space stations to maintain skeletal and muscle strength. While cosmonaut training literally reached new heights, big changes were underway on the ground. The once secret Soviet home of space exploration did something that was previously inconceivable: it invited American astronauts to its training program. In 1972, the United States and Soviet Union signed a treaty to begin working on a joint project known as the Apollo-Soyuz mission. For the first time, Americans came to Star City. >> That presented a giant problem. It was a little secret facility. So they had actually built a hotel for the American astronauts. And at the same time, realizing that Apollo-Soyuz was only the one flight, they started looking around for other international partners. (<i> garbled radio transmissions</i> ) >> NARRATOR: The Apollo-Soyuz program succeeded in bringing together Americans and Russians in space. It also ushered in a new era of other nations training at Star City. >> Ultimately you had French astronauts, an English scientist. There were apartment blocks built for crew members who would be visiting from other organizations and staying there. So it was a great time of expansion. >> NARRATOR: Cosmonaut training had a new hurdle to overcome: how to build teams of cosmonauts from foreign countries. It had been hard enough among Russian crews. Now they had to do it among different cultures and nationalities. >> (<i> translated</i> ): We had to forget we were individuals and concentrate on how to work as a team. We made ourselves see only what we had in common and not what separated us. >> NARRATOR: For Americans, the training meant long hours. Before an astronaut acclimated to space, he or she had to get used to a new culture and system. >> The hours were fairly long. We would spend anywhere from four to six hours in Russian language class per day, another two to four hours in technical systems. You'd have to study in the evenings. It was a difficult day. >> NARRATOR: Turning an astronaut into a cosmonaut was a challenge. The difficulties were compounded by the differences between the Soviet and American approach to training. American astronauts were subjected to all kinds of medical tests that they thought were unnecessary. >> Sometimes you had the doctors saying to an American astronaut, "You will take this test," and an American astronaut saying, "The hell I will." The basic difference that Star City has as a training facility, in contrast to NASA, is that it still has all the aspects of a military organization. >> NARRATOR: Star City's strict military approach made cosmonaut training tougher on Americans, both on the ground and in space. American training stressed teaching astronauts to fly, but in cosmonaut training they were required more often to ride. >> One American astronaut had what he thought was a very cordial partnership with his Russian commander on the ground. When they got into space, it was entirely different. The Russian commander was the Russian commander and it was his way or the highway and the highway was closed. It even extends to the point where a Russian commander will slap the hands of a passenger whether he's an American or French astronaut. >> NARRATOR: By the start of cosmonaut training's third decade, Star City had prepared over 100 men and women for space, from 17 other countries as well as the Soviet Union. What began as a program pioneering the unknown perils of space under the direction of physical trainers and doctors evolved into technical trainings in mock-ups and simulators, and finally the complexities of training crews from different cultures and nationalities to work together for space expeditions measured in months at a time. But of all the challenges it had to overcome, none was more difficult than the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. >> Russia's economic problems basically devastated Star City and all the technical institutes in the Soviet Union. There was no money. The ruble was devalued dozens of times. The management of Star City in the early 1990s and to this day has been forced to scramble to taking tourists, train basically anybody who has a checkbook to pay the bills. The Russian government was encouraged to make a deal to fly American astronauts in order to make money. >> NARRATOR: The Russian economic crisis transformed Star City. Its vaunted training program became a financial asset to sell or rent. So was the Mir space station, the last great project of the Soviet Union. Out of necessity, Star City became partners with NASA's Johnson Space Center, training astronauts for visits to Mir. >> You could sign up for cosmonaut training yourself and spend $5,000 for a week or two of being tortured by these former Soviet aerospace doctors and trainers. >> NARRATOR: A ten-minute ride on the centrifuge sold for a $1,000. And there were bigger and more expensive adventures for sale. An American millionaire named Dennis Tito paid $20 million to orbit the Earth with cosmonauts in 2001. Through innovation and effort, Star City is surviving the new realities of the post-Communist era, but the city once famous as the first community dedicated to the exploration of outer space may belong more to history than to the future. Cosmonauts still train here, but the pioneering efforts that invented space medicine, the isolation chamber, zero-gravity tests, and the rigors of physical and mental conditioning are behind them. >> It evolved to a very effective level where, crude as it might have been by Western standards, it still prepared people more than adequately for the stress of living in space. They have learned what it takes and do what needs to be done on these long-term visits where they're locked into chambers going around the Earth for six months at a time. >> (<i> translated</i> ): We will continue. We will explore the stars. That's what we came to do and we will find a way to do it at Star City. It is something that is a part of us. >> NARRATOR: The future challenge of cosmonaut training will depend on what new mission Russian space planners come up with. If they are true to the earliest Russian space pioneers, it will be to colonize the planets. If that's the case, the next chapter may be to train whole families for space expeditions. <font color="#FFFF00"> [Captioning sponsored by</font> <font color="#FFFF00"> TERA MEDIA]</font> [Captioned by <font color="#FF0000"> The Caption Center</font> WGBH Educational Foundation]
