Special Topic

Kurzfassung

Human Spaceflight operations all started with Yuri Gagarin - he was the very first human in history heading towards space with his famous word “Поехали!“ (Let’s go!). Since that historic moment with the start of the Vostok program all the way to the current International Space Station (ISS) program and through several missions during the last decades such as Gemini, Mercury, Apollo, MIR, STS Space Shuttle, Human spaceflight operations concept has evolved to become what we know today. This chapter introduces the concept for Human spaceflight operations currently in use for the International Space Station Program which gathers, as an international project, all the experience made in Human Spaceflight Operations so far. Currently between three and six persons are traveling at an average speed of 27,000 km/h in an altitude of 400 km, in order to perform science in a microgravity environment. From an operational perspective, it is interesting to ask how manned space missions differ from unmanned ones and which assets an astronaut can bring to a space missions. This chapter focuses on the deltas to what has already been presented in previous chapters with regards to unmanned missions. It will lay out what is so special about human spaceflight and what are the big challenges, not just operating a vehicle in which astronauts are living, but driving an entire mission to its success. Special processes, functions and behaviors are required to successfully complete such a manned mission and get the astronauts safely back on Earth.