Soyuz

He was selected as an ESA astronaut in 2009, and he has already flown two missions to the ISS.

The first time he traveled there aboard Soyuz in 2015, and then he returned to orbit as part of Crew-7 in 2023.

This time it was for a long-duration mission, during which he also served as the commander of the ISS.

And with that impressive background in mind, I wanted to know whether there was one experience from orbit that still shapes how he views exploration today and where it's heading in the future.

Colonel Shane Kimbrough is a retired NASA astronaut, a U.S. Army colonel, whose career has taken him farther than most of us can imagine.

Over three space missions, he has spent nearly 400 days in space, commanded the International Space Station, completed nine spacewalks totaling more than 59 hours, and become one of the few astronauts to fly aboard the Space Shuttle, the Russian Soyuz, and SpaceX's Crew Dragon.

But behind those extraordinary accomplishments is something our listeners know well, an industrial and systems engineering mindset.

Shane earned a master's degree in operations research from Georgia Tech, and throughout his career from Army Aviation to leading crews aboard the International Space Station, he's relied on systems thinking, teamwork, risk management, and continuous problem solving in environments where there is little room for error.

um and then if it's it's it's a critical thing the good thing we do now is we're going to have that researcher or that scientist on the on the phone with us while we're doing it we'll put a camera over our shoulder they can watch us doing everything we're doing so that we don't mess up you know their five to ten years of work um to get to that point we don't want to do that we have messed things up in the past and we found ways to do that better And that's to bring them into the conversation and also put a camera, you know, give them video insight into what we're doing so that we don't mess it up.

Oh, interesting.

So you've been one of the few astronauts who've flown aboard the Russian Soyuz, the space shuttle, and then the SpaceX Crew Dragon.

I probably got those in the wrong order, but it would be really fascinating just to hear, I mean, Can you just talk about the difference in those three generations of technology or even from like a human factors perspective? Because that's a really unique experience just to hear about those three, those three different experiences and how they've changed over the years.

The Ukrainians don't like the idea of Russia having respite, so they're trying to stop it.

And they launched a strike against the respite factory and where the Soyuz rockets are assembled.

Here's a report from the United States by Scott Manley.

Hello, it's Scott Manley here.

But yeah, a lot of people have been asking about this missile attack on the Soyuz factory in Russia.

So this happened, I believe, Friday night, about 4 a.m. local time.

And it looks like it's a pair of FP-5 Flamingo cruise missiles launched from Ukraine, which made it the 800 or sorry, 900 kilometer distance and hit the factory.

Clean rooms don't like things getting damaged and destroyed and fire and stuff like that.

That wasn't enough.

What else does Putin have to do for us to be like, we can't continue our partnership? Let's get the Soyuz

production line blown up.

Yeah.

He flew space missions and worked closely with Russian, Japanese, and European astronauts and their affiliated space agencies.

In addition to being a space station commander and space shuttle mission specialist, Leroy was also a certified co-pilot of the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

In September 2006, Leroy became the first American to visit the Astronaut Research and Training Center of China.

There, he met the first two national Chinese astronauts, Yang Liwei and Fei Junlong.

So, uh, so, uh, when, when did the Soviets and the Americans start to work together?

So we started working together after the Apollo program, uh, and it was decided, um, on both sides to be favorable to, uh, at least, um, you know, in the public, uh, pretend to get along.

And so they, we did the Apollo-Soyuz test project, and what that was, the idea was an Apollo capsule and a Soyuz, uh, capsule would dock together in space and, you know, be the symbolic handshake through the hatchway, uh, between the Americans and, and the Soviets.

So, uh, the, yeah, so the Americans went to work on the adapter, the docking adapter.

I went into intensive language training and ultimately, uh, did a f- a fairly reasonable job at mastering, uh, conversational and technical Russian.

And, um, and so lo and behold, uh, about five and a half months into my training living over in Russia, um, they figured out that I was too tall to safely fit into the Soyuz capsule in an emergency.

And this was a, a big deal because the, the Soyuz was going to be the lifeboat for the Inter- future International Space Station, of which the Russians would be a partner.

And, uh, and so, uh, after, uh, a lot of hand-wringing, um, it was decided to pull me from this, uh, this training and replace me with one of my colleagues, which is also a funny story I'll tell you briefly.

But, uh, as a result of getting booted from, uh, the, uh, the Russian training program, they started calling me Too Tall Parazynski.

Um, [chuckles] but unfortunately, uh, uh, in the intervening months, there had been a collision on that side of the space station.

They needed to do emergency spacewalks.

And poor Wendy, she was too short to fit into the, the Soyuz...

Both nations have also developed what the defense community calls kinetic anti-satellite weapons, systems capable of physically destroying satellites in orbit.

In 2021, Russia tested such a weapon against one of its own defunct satellites, creating a debris field in low-Earth orbit that forced the International Space Station crew to shelter in their docked Soyuz vehicles.

The message was not subtle.

When the Air AF formally organizes its headquarters around the air and space mission, it is acknowledging that defending the space infrastructure that civil aviation depends on is a core military responsibility.