The only woman in the Roscosmos cosmonaut squad reported that the preparation for the flight on the ship will take place in the United States
MOSCOW, December 27. /tass/. The flight of the only woman in the Roscosmos cosmonaut detachment, Anna Kikina, may take place in September - October next year as part of cross-flights with the United States on the American Crew Dragon ship. She said this in an interview with the Rossiya-24 TV channel on Monday.
"It is planned that it will take place in September - October 2022, next year, in the fall," Kikina said in response to a corresponding question.
According to the cosmonaut, there are some peculiarities in preparing for a flight on an American ship. "The most important feature is that you don't land on land, if it's normal, but you land on water. <...> You are preparing for this. Well, when preparing, the peculiarity is that all the instructors do not speak to you in Russian, and teach in English," Kikina noted.
As the cosmonaut clarified, the preparation for the flight on the ship will take place in the USA. The first stage of training has already passed, the second will take place in the near future, already in 2022.
Kikina said that she studies the American vehicle and trusts it.
"Yes," Kikina replied when asked if she trusts this technique. "I study it in order to understand how it works, in order to represent the whole process that develops directly in flight."
According to the cosmonaut, Crew Dragon does not have the same flight reliability as Soyuz, but several successful manned flights have already been made, so the equipment is quite reliable. "She also has everything built on redundancy, duplication and the possibility of inclusion in the process at the most acute moments of the crew, in order to duplicate the system, if suddenly those duplicated systems could not work automatically," she added.
Earlier, the head of Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin said that Kikina will make the first flight in 2022. She may be the first to fly on the American Crew Dragon ship under the cross-flight program. In turn, Kikina noted that she was pleasantly surprised by this decision of the management.
