Soyuz missions and taxi flights. New opportunities for technology development. An example: The ENEIDE mission

Abstract

The Soyuz vehicle represents today a key Spacecraft: it provides astronaut transfer from the ground to the ISS and it ensures, at the same time, the possibility to escape from it. A Soyuz capsule therefore has to remain always attached to the ISS to be potentially used as Crew Escape Vehicle in case of need. To maintain the full operability the Soyuz needs to be replaced every six months by a new one. The mission aimed to launch a new spacecraft and to retrieve the “used” one is called Taxi Flight. The Russians, since few years, offer commercial seat available during this mission on the bases of commercial contracts. Several Space Tourists already made use of this opportunity like Dennis Tito or Mark Shuttleworth. But a Taxi Flight is not only a good opportunity for Space Flight; it could represent also a unique chance for scientist and engineers to find new flight opportunities to carry out experiments. It is possible to fly a piece of equipment onboard ISS for up 10 days, with the possibility to have also other resources available, like crew time, telemetry, commanding, etc. Of course to exploit such an opportunity and to develop space hardware, a company willing to carry out its own experiment need to have in-house resource to support the mission. Often the resources are not enough or the specific know-how for a space mission is missing. But today to help the users, very often represented by a SME, there is in ESA a dedicated team, supported by national user support centers, able to transform an idea into a consolidated flying experiment. The paper is aimed at presenting the reference scenario, the approach and methodologies used and offer a guide for future users. The example of three experiments flown in the Soyuz 10S mission is presented together with the strategy used to pass from the idea to the results in less than nine months.