Space Camps (Kazakhstan/ Austria)

Excursions

In March 2012, I was at the historic Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and in April I documented a Martian ice cave mission of the Austrian spacesuit Aouda. I have now revisited these two events in a documentary film and made various comparisons of spacesuits, rockets and capsules, of science and fiction:

Here you can see a ten-minute documentary about the ‘Aouda’ suit as an interview with FlightDirector Alex and SuitTester Daniel at the press event on Sat 28 April:

• which deafens the occupant to the noise of fans and other noises;
• which has to artificially supply its occupants with oxygen-rich supply air and in return has to artificially remove the CO_2-rich exhaust air
• which greatly restricts its field of vision due to its huge dimensions [I mean, I can still pass for slim – at least I can normally see my feet without having to bend down … I can’t see them at all in the suit because I can’t bend down far enough]
• who weighs 45kg and continues to restrict my motor skills with weights and elastic bands
• which also has to satisfy all other life-sustaining needs while working in the suit: the occupant must be able to eat, drink and go to the loo …

Such doubts are naturally also a constant concern for the developers, and so the Munich-based company Techcos was commissioned to test the spacesuit for human safety. The suit’s suitability for use in space was not tested so much, as it is not yet that far. But it was tested whether a person could be strapped into this almost hermetically sealed system and whether it could be used in the alternating climates of ice caves in Central Europe and the Moroccan Sahara. The developers are full of praise for the testers, as they even tested things that they would not have thought of themselves, says Gernot Grömer (ÖWF). In the end, however, the Aouda was issued with a safety certificate. It had passed all the tests with flying colours!

The Aouda is now quasi ‘TÜV’ tested.

Nevertheless, the company is not simply relying on this success, but continues to work and research with determination. A medical team of researchers experiments with the suit’s occupant and monitors Daniel during his work in the cave. Of course – as we heard in the film – paramedics are always present and the situation is always secured: ‘Safety must remain’.

Even the snow chains have been thought of! As I said, you can’t move light-footedly on unfamiliar Martian terrain like you can on Earth. The tester is therefore fitted with snow chains on his boots – their incredibly hard metal tips can be heard rattling bright silver on the stony ground outside the cave. ‘Klingklking, the suit is coming’ … as if you hadn’t already noticed it from the whine of the fans. It’s a strange noise from this 100kg colossus (suit plus human).

So, now slowly again, to read along:

The suit tester first puts on a pair of underwear. Real cosmonauts’ underwear is a corset of tubes that serve to feed the person in the suit and to dispose of his waste. I saw such a suit hanging on the wall at the International Space School in Baikonur (Photo: F. Dreithaler).

The underwear worn by our Austrian colleagues is black, but it is no less full of tubes and fitted with numerous hooks for attaching various items of outer clothing (see photo left by Frank Dreithaler). It also contains numerous elasticated straps to make movement more difficult.

I was wearing a ‘spare shirt’ of underwear as I prepared to put the suit on myself.

The gloves are also three-layered: First you put on a white cloth glove (which I’ve omitted here to save time). Then you put on a ‘Borg’ glove with numerous wires for the sensors on the fingertips and connections. It looks a bit like my cycling gloves at home.

Finally, on top of this come the silver gloves, which are already waiting to be used next to mounds of snow in the shade. The two upper layers of gloves can only be put on once the actual outer suit is in place. This took me three attempts alone … of course … it had to be done quickly.

So, first kneel down and raise your arms! Then two helpers lift the heavy suit from the platform where it is waiting for its wearer.

It’s not so easy to find the right entrance for each arm. After all, there’s a plastic shoulder pad like a rucksack and an arm spreader in the armpits. The arms are accompanied by numerous cables and tubes … The princess often has to have a chambermaid grab her ‘skirt’ so that the numerous items in the suit are properly organised.

A real spaceman would have to squeeze into a space capsule in a suit like this. In Baikonur, we saw such a (disused) capsule at the school and photographed it from the inside. Unfortunately, of all things, my memory card was full at some point that afternoon and I’m using photos from colleagues here:

[Photos by Arndt Latußeck]

The hard shell at the bottom left, which is still in the picture, is occupied by the space traveller. The picture, which was taken from the hatch, gives you an impression of the cramped conditions in this real spaceship, which has room for two or three occupants. Below you can see again what it would look like with one occupant:

Russian teenagers in the cosmonaut seat

at the SpaceCamp for young people

in Novosibirsk, spring 2010.

After a very long flight, you might have arrived at Mars at some point. Then you would get out, walk around and maybe actually come across ice caves and then see pictures like this one: The princess (Aouda with Daniel) descends the steps and approaches the camera. For comparison, I’ll put the picture of a Russian cosmonaut suit from Baikonur next to it:

Apart from the colour, there are few differences at first glance. This (old) Soviet (or already Russian?) cosmonaut suit is somewhat reminiscent of early diving suits, such as those worn on board the Swedish ship Vasa in the early modern period. However, it really is a self-contained life-support system. On closer inspection, Aouda turns out not to be quite so finished: the silver-coloured outer skin is virtually just ‘laid over’ the HighTec inside, i.e. a ‘wallpaper’. It is attached to the knapsack, for example, with Velcro fasteners and held together. It is therefore like a dress that has not yet been sewn together, but is only held in place with pins during the fitting at the tailor. This is one of the many details that Flight Director Alex referred to in the video above when he says that the analogue research spacesuit is not yet ‘designed to go into space’.

So, …

Aouda won’t be flying to Mars just yet, but only in the distant future… one hopes. But who knows: sometimes dreams do come true and sometimes even sooner than expected. When Hermann Oberth was on the set of the Fritz Lang film ‘Woman in the Moon’ in the 1920s, he could hardly have dreamt that people would actually fly to the moon just forty years later. 🙂

About the eternal tango of science and fiction …

… which is as much a part of development processes as breathing and socialising are part of being human. Science needs the inspiration of the imagination and the imagination is always fuelled by new findings in science and technology. It cannot be said that one always leads and the other lags behind. Rather, both are in an intimate tango, a dance around and with each other, in which sometimes one has the upper hand and sometimes the other, but the interplay continues and neither ever wins or loses.

The rocket launch as Hermann Oberth imagined it in the 1920s (Fritz Lang film ‘Woman in the Moon’, 1929):

H. Oberth thought at the time that the moon had an atmosphere on the side facing the Earth (however that might work) and that it should be possible to walk there normally due to the gravity that was admittedly present. … He certainly never calculated this exactly, because he also thought that weightlessness on the way to the moon in the rocket would only prevail at the Lagrange point between the moon and the earth, i.e. where the gravitational forces of the moon and the earth just balance each other out. He knew nothing about microgravity elsewhere on the way.
[filmed by Fritz Lang: see the film, which has been very well reconstructed by the Murnau Foundation]
… and for the sake of completeness, here again is the well-known original video of the actual moon landing from 1969.
It’s not so far removed from the fiction of the 1920s, this science of the 1960s. 🙂
As a historian, I think with foresight that it will be the same with Mars. Perhaps not quite as quickly as in the 20th century, because it depends on politics and economics and on the human representatives who determine them, and these cannot be predicted. But from a historical perspective, it is absolutely logical and almost inevitable that it will happen ‘roughly like this’. We humans are just like that. 🙂

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Das Team vom ÖWF am Dachstein …

tolle Truppe! 🙂

Schöne Zeit mit Euch und vielen Dank!

NACHTRAG vom 31.12.2012 – TIME-Magazin kürte “ungewöhnlichstes Foto des Jahres”

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 Dieser Artikel erschien zuerst bei kosmologs.de

Space Suit

Austria’s first Mars expedition took place at the end of April 2012 – spectacular images show the alpinist ‘Daniel’ in a brand new shiny silver spacesuit, ‘walking’ through ice caves, collecting rock and ice samples and exploring an exciting cave system that has not yet been fully explored, accompanied by rovers and flying devices. The primary aim of the mission is to test the space suit, whose name incidentally comes from a princess in Jules Verne’s ‘Around the World in 80 Days’.

Austria is actually working on developing a spacesuit that is effectively its own spaceship – a spaceship to wear with a mass of approx. 45 kg. The electronics are hidden in the ‘rucksack’ of this suit and are of course subject to secrecy. Real spacesuits must later have a breathing air treatment system and they must also be pressurised, as the Martian atmosphere is much thinner than the Earth’s atmosphere. But this simulation is not that far along yet … For now, the focus is on testing the telemetry and other internal technologies. The Austrian spacesuit Aouda should enable its occupant to communicate not only with the ground station on Earth (here: in Innsbruck), but also with various unmanned rovers that could land on Mars at the same time.

Parallel landings are also being considered for real Mars missions, i.e. two simultaneous missions to the red planet that land at different locations. This would increase the safety of space travellers in the event of an accident.

In fact, explains Gernot Grömer from the ÖWF, no spacesuit has ever been completed in Europe. However, the newly minted doctor has set his mind on doing just that. He wants to produce a fully functional spacesuit that is better than anything that has ever existed before. Of course, there are already suits for extra-vehicular activities on the ISS or even for a moon landing. But Mars! That’s a completely different terrain! You’re much further away from home on Earth, much longer on your own with longer signal propagation times, etc. In addition, Mars – in contrast to the moon and free space – has an atmosphere and therefore, for example, different external pressures, no micrometeorites, but instead changeable weather: there are sandstorms in its deserts and ice glaciers at the poles … so … ‘On to Mars!’, as Gernot always says so beautifully.

At the entrance to the cave

Spaceman Daniel is now ready to enter the caves. A short shoot for the press (e.g. also on spiegel-online.de, Der Standard (Vienna), which also distributed it via APA…) is of course a must – as with any decent space (suit) mission 😉 Incidentally, the press is just as international as the team of scientists, engineers and experimenters responsible. It’s a real big event here at the ice caves, whose rock is described by a geologist present as ‘boring lime stone’.

The current Austrian ‘Mars’ mission is taking place in the World Heritage cave system on the Dachstein near Obertraun. The Austrian Space Forum (ÖWF) is testing a newly developed space suit called ‘Aouda.X’ here. The OPS, i.e. the local control centre, was set up in a separate room in the cable car mountain station with the characteristic name ‘Dachsteinwarte’. The employees in the OPS team, the organisation in general and also the builders and testers of rovers and flying devices are a truly colourful international team from France, Poland, Spain, Italy, Germany, the USA, India, the Netherlands, Denmark … In fact, the ÖWF works together with renowned space research institutes, e.g. JPL, NASA, etc. The language on the site is therefore English, the protocol is strictly adhered to as in Sissi’s time at the Viennese court: every check is obligatory and every answer is binding, the people who work in space travel are friendly and open, as is the case everywhere in space programmes today, where many different characters come together.

In short: it’s like space programmes all over the world. The only difference here in the Alpine republic is that in Austria the flight director not only greets me with a friendly ‘oah, Susanne, loang nimmer gseen’, but also with a kiss on the hand. 🙂

Now our Alponaut has to work on a crystal block. Although this purely mechanical work step was more for press photos, scientific experiments were actually carried out. The test subject was covered with numerous electrodes for medical examinations. He also pulled the ‘Cliffbot’ of the President of the French Mars Society, Alain Souchier, over steep slopes. The Cliffbot, Alain explained to me in the car in the morning, is a device that is thrown down the slopes and examines them without having to endanger a person. Some slopes – especially here in the ice cave – you don’t want to or can’t climb. This is already true for normal people and even more so for people in 45kg spacesuits.

Walking bent over in the cave proves to be very strenuous for the suit testers!

The suit is always accompanied by at least one member of the suit team and one from the security team. As with real space flights, the safety of the suit occupants and the experimenters is of course always the top priority. After all, it is people who are being worked with here and for whom these technologies are being developed – real living people whose lives the suit is intended to preserve. That’s why the test subjects are of course also very carefully monitored.

However, the aim is also to recreate the situation on Mars as realistically as (currently) possible. Of course, everyone probably realises that you can’t just use Velcro fasteners to hold the individual parts of the suit in place on Mars. However, the suit on Mars certainly makes movement more difficult under pressure and with even more load – even if the gravity on Earth’s small neighbouring planet is only a third as great as here.

The spacesuit tester (pictured: Daniel Föger) is therefore fitted with an exoskeleton, i.e. various expanders are pulled over his black underwear. Here you can see the right elbow of a tester, to which an additional weight is attached. This device makes movement so difficult that it comes very close to the actual conditions on Mars.

About humans (not superhumans) in space …

On the third day of testing I was able to catch this picture: Yes, the testers are definitely very athletic, i.e. it is really tiring to work for hours in the cold and darkness of the cave under these conditions. It’s also certainly no ‘walk in the park’ that the real astronauts undertook to repair the space telescope around 20 years ago…

But: They are still reasonably ‘ordinary’ people (kryptonite in their suits doesn’t embarrass them), which means you can learn something like this! If you train hard enough, any reasonably healthy person can achieve this physical feat.

So I can say with a clear conscience that what the guys are doing is really hard physical work – but it can be done and learnt by people: You don’t have to be a superhuman or a demigod to do it. Personally, I find that a reassuring realisation.

How do you feel in the suit?

I myself have also had the honour of trying it out. (A big thank you to Austria!) At the moment, the two testers so far (both ‘Daniel’) are men, but the suit is also to be adapted for women. Two parameters are crucial, says the developer at the press conference: ‘When someone tells me they want to be a tester, my first two questions are about shoe size and chest size’. In principle, however, the suit can be customised for people of both sexes from 160 to 195 cm tall.

You just need to be in very good physical condition to withstand the weight of the suitfor a long time. Fortunately, Mother Nature has equipped me with a solid bone structure and I also seem to be reasonably fit (compared to others). After all, I currently live in the foothills of the Harz Mountains and, as I don’t have a car, I always have to cycle up the mountains and hills. In addition, my years of hiking in the desert and the heavy rucksacks full of books and laptops I used to carry between Berlin’s libraries and universities during my studies have contributed to my physical condition. However, the average European certainly needs a lot of training to work in a suit for longer periods of time: after all, 45kg (which the suit weighs) is about twice as much as you are allowed to take as luggage on a normal airliner – and most people find their suitcase heavy.

In addition, a support system in the axles keeps the arms slightly away from the body at all times so that the air in the suit can circulate properly. I personally find this a bit tiring in the long run. I would compare it to the posture in standard dancing (e.g. Viennese waltz): As a lady, I have my arm bent on the gentleman’s shoulder, where it rests loosely, however. You don’t lean on your dance partner, you have to be strong enough to support your own arm. It’s similar here in the suit – except that the arms are spread out directly by a plastic support.

Checklist of the chambermaids:

Astronaut in underwear (the ‘chain mail’ of the 21st century, made of black functional fibre, very interesting material) first gets an exoskeleton, which makes movement more difficult. Then you have to manoeuvre yourself into the suit top with the help of two or three members of the suit team, followed by the trousers, gloves and boots. The gloves, by the way, are three-layered: first a thin white cloth glove – as worn by elegant ladies in the 19th century. It’s just to make it more comfortable for the tester. Then there is a glove that looks more like a Borg creature from Star Trek because it has electrodes instead of fingernails, and finally there is a silver-coloured protective glove that is attached to the suit sleeve with a metal ring and thus seals the system underneath. Last but not least, the helmet is put on the tester – and when that happens, you typically have about two hours of donning procedure behind you. As I said: the Viennese court protocol in Sissi’s time was certainly similar – and the rebellious, stubborn double monarch would certainly be overjoyed and extremely insightful about the necessity of this if she could see what Austria Felix is up to on the Dachstein these days.

As in any proper spacesuit, you can of course eat, drink and go to the loo in the Aouda … There are four powerful fans whose whine not only makes the ‘suit’ audible from afar, but whose functionality is also displayed down in the control centre on a large screen next to the images from the OPS, from the helmet camera and next to other functional displays such as temperature, CO2 content and humidity in the helmet.

‘Never before has a development team in Europe completed a spacesuit,’ states Dr Gernot Grömer, Head of Development, and is already planning the next test of the Aouda next February in Morocco. Princess Aouda will then walk through the Sahara and will probably already have incorporated the experience gained from the tests here.

I hope that I will be able to join her again. After all, you can also take part with your own experiments. The announcement is currently running until July, and you can apply with your own projects.

White ice, red stones

… the colours of Austria and Mars. 🙂 Look and be amazed: the Alpine republic is ahead on Mars and that’s why every assembly is opened with ‘Hello Marsians’.

Ice caves could also exist on Mars and other bodies in the solar system. It is therefore important to equip all remote sensing devices for this and to test them extensively under terrestrial conditions first. You can still take the helmet off a ‘test astronaut’ on Earth if you realise that something has slipped inside – if you only noticed this on Mars, it would really be too late.

Rover parade

In addition to a spacesuit, numerous rovers and flying machines were also tested in the caves. The ‘part-time scientists’ were delighted with the many different ground structures they found in this cave: from snow and ice to gravel tracks, sandy soils softened by melting and many different degrees of hardness of the limestone subsoil …

The French Cliffbot for exploring cliffs has already been mentioned above and should be supplemented at this point by a reference to various flying machines that are also being built by amateur engineers and scientists. Among them are Gerhard’s helicopter and Christian’s hexacopter – both from the ÖWF. The Polish rover MAGMA is operating very successfully in the cave; it is a transporter developed by the private company ABM-Space in the Copernicus city of Thorn (Torún). The test team is very satisfied with the results and we immediately agreed to co-operate on the didactic processing of the results.

An American-French professional team of geoscientists built the WISDOM instrument – a radar device that can sound the ground to a depth of 2 or 3 metres. Here it is still being pushed by the development team on a wheelbarrow: bit by bit, it advances the 5 metre long track in steps of one decimetre. The laptop on the wheelbarrow shows the frequency spectrum that is being transmitted and received. The language in this illustrious team, which also includes a Hungarian and an Austrian student, constantly switches back and forth between English and French. 🙂

Mission accomplished

It’s easy to imagine that after working in the cave for a long time, you are very dazzled. The helmet also fogs up quickly when leaving the 0 °C ice cave and entering the 20 to 30 °C terrain on the western slope of the Dachstein, and the tester has correspondingly more difficulty climbing down the stairs from the cave.

In addition, there is of course always a slight restriction of the field of vision, as you can’t easily turn round. As long as you only look straight ahead, your field of vision is normal. However, the thick suit prevents you from looking at your own feet and you can only turn backwards by turning your entire body.

When taking off the helmet, the top is removed first. It takes two or three assistants to remove the heavy equipment from the test subject. The candidate kneels on a (spacey silver-coloured) cushion. You can also see the candidate’s heavily treaded shoes. Various spikes were also tested in the ice cave, which made walking on the massive ice plateaus much easier.

nota bene: It goes without saying that the World Heritage cave was kept clean! Everyone who had to walk on the mirror-smooth ice surfaces for scientific reasons wiped their shoes well beforehand. Really!

Where is that?

In the Salzkammergut, where you can have fun…

The Dachstein is located in the beautiful Salzkammergut, one of the most beautiful and romantic regions of Austria. The next largest town is Hallstatt, a village in an idyllic lakeside location. The mayor of this small community is delighted to be opening the largest four-star establishment for the current season. Very close to the famous Bad Ischl, where Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria once got engaged to the Bavarian Princess Sissi, Princess Aouda is now doing gymnastics in ice caves. Tourism is booming in this region – especially on a weekend as beautiful as this one at the start of the season. Skiing, mountain hiking and cave tours are part of the typical holidaymaker’s repertoire here.

The organisers – the ÖWF

The Austrian Space Forum is an independent association of enthusiasts, hobbyists and researchers. Gernot Grömer even describes it as the ‘European way’ that hobbyists and so-called professionals work together here in peaceful harmony and conduct research together. It is a peculiarity here in ‘old Europe’, as in America there is typically a wide gap between those who earn their money with research and those who do it after work according to their mood. This is different in Europe, he emphasises proudly, because here ‘amateurs’ and ‘professionals’ work together in a very lively exchange. It is generally accepted here that a house builder may well have more experience with a particular practical task than a young engineer. Conversely, a young engineer fresh from university may be able to contribute some enriching ideas and methods. In this way, old and young, men and women, educated and autodidacts work together in a cosy atmosphere and enrich each other.

The ÖWF is particularly proud of this peaceful and cosy coexistence. And honestly – as an outsider here, I enjoy it! That’s exactly how you want it to be.

Since 2009, the ÖWF (founded in 1997) has tested the Aouda and other devices several times in places around the world and systematically developed them further in this way. Chief developer Gernot Grömer was recently awarded his academic ‘knighthood’ as a doctor: Congratulations!!!

A journalist I meet as an onlooker at the site makes a razor-sharp diagnosis of what all these people have in common: It’s a good dose of idealism! They are building devices here that will one day fly to Mars. However, manned missions to Mars are not conceivable for at least another 20 to 30 years, and by then most of the people working here will no longer be alive or will at least have retired. So it’s as if you start building a house with the near certainty that you will never live in it yourself and probably won’t live to see the people who will occupy it.

I guess that’s how engineers… or researchers (m/f) par excellence – they want to make the world a little bit better for everyone and every little step counts. A goal (e.g. the flight to Mars) is not always set to actually be achieved. Rather, it merely serves as a guide. For each of us, it is probably relatively unimportant whether the manned Mars flight actually takes place with Aouda – but developments are always iterative processes and you learn something with every test. e.g. the realisation that ‘this material is not suitable for this purpose’ can also be a realisation … and perhaps as such an incentive for another scientist (m/f) to develop an adequate material…

Research is a fascinating and broad field!

… and a fascinating other world … far away from the ivory tower and yet so alienating for many laypeople … not least because of the scientists, tinkerers and inventors who are working on such unusual issues.

That is why the Austrian Space Forum (ÖWF) is rightly proud to be able to conduct its basic research independently.

Since Saturday, there has been a lot of tweeting about the activities and experiments on Twitter . The ÖWF has invited people to a tweetup! Hashtag: marstweetup

Of course, the Austrians also have their own live blog.

Scientific outreach programmes funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education (schools): Sparkling Science.

School interns wanted at ÖWF: Fancy a space adventure during the summer holidays? Here you will find the connection!

Experiments for Morocco 2013 register now! (ÖWF, Contact)

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Gimmick: Martians are not green … otherwise they’d be Orionians 😉

well, we learnt this in passing: ‘hello Marsians’ was the opening line of every meeting. Everyone felt addressed, as they instantly became quiet. But no one in the room had a different taint to that of typical Earthlings.

Conclusion: Mars people are – contrary to popular belief – definitely not green. But Trekies have known that for a long time anyway: after all, Orions are green – here the Orion Vina in ‘The Cage’ – and you should watch out for them. 🙂

UPDATE from 31 December 2012: ‘most unusual photo of the year’ voted by TIME magazine