Russian rookie takes spaceship’s helm

James Oberg NBC News space analyst

HOUSTON - The radio call sign "Pulsar-1" sounds exotic enough, especially considering it comes from a piloted spaceship. And this weekend, Pulsar-1 will signify a new arrival in human spaceflight that might just carry some of the flash of an astronomical pulsar.

The call sign has been chosen by Oleg Kotov, commander of the Soyuz TMA-10 spacecraft heading for the international space station on Saturday. Riding along will be fellow Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin, who will take charge of the space station, and billionaire space passenger Charles Simonyi.

Cosmonaut commanders tend to pick call signs with classical references — things like jewels, rivers and occasionally constellations. But Kotov, 41, represents a new generation of cosmonauts taking command, and the differences extend far beyond his choice of call signs. He'll be in charge of the Soyuz craft for the flight up to the station, and again for his flight home in six months, even though he's never been in space before. That makes Kotov the first rookie commander of a transport to the international space station, a sign of the confidence that space planners have placed in him.

“These guys are very facile with computers,” NASA astronaut John Grunsfeld, who trained with Kotov, told MSNBC.com in a telephone interview. “On the station, they easily use all the computer tools.”

That's becoming increasingly important — because unlike previous space vehicles with gauges, buttons and cathode ray tubes, the space station is controlled almost exclusively with laptops, through software interfaces.

The new cosmonauts are “a mirror of their changing society,” Grunsfeld continued. He noted that on earthly roads, the next-generation space flier may drive Hondas rather than the clunky Soviet-era Ladas, but they still carry the right tools and can perform all the maintenance tasks and emergency road repairs.

A decade of training
Kotov’s official biography is impressive enough. He is a graduate of a military medical school, and was then assigned to the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center as a medical officer preparing crew members for spacewalks. He was an instructor for crews in training, and was the "crew doctor" for one team preparing for a Mir mission. When selected as a cosmonaut in 1996, he didn’t even have to move.

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Even as he went through cosmonaut basic training — following a curriculum that he himself helped update — he was called upon for a flight-related assignment. In 1998, a former Russian presidential aide named Yuri Baturin was selected to visit Mir briefly as part of high-level evaluations of the future of the station. With the ink on his training certificate barely dry, Kotov was picked to train as his backup.

Baturin’s mission went smoothly, and Kotov was not called upon to fly in his place. But he was ready. That was nine years ago, and now he’s ready to blast off — not as a third-seat passenger with minimum flight responsibilities, as would have been the case in 1998, but as spaceship commander.

“It’s a curiosity to me why it’s taken so long to get him a spaceflight,” said Grunsfeld, who was once teamed with Kotov and Yurchikhin for space station training.

“From Day 1 they were warm and open and helpful,” Grunsfeld recalled, adding that Oleg was “very patient and very nurturing of me coming in late to the training flow.” Both cosmonauts had excellent English skills. “Oleg seemed to me like he was a seasoned commander,” Grunsfeld said.

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