John Phillips and I belong to an aviation society called th Quiet Birdmen. Here is the society’s magazine article I submitted following John’s address on August 3, 2026.

John flew to the International Space Station three times. The first was in 2001 on the space shuttle Endeavor for 13 days to help build the station. The third flight was also on the shuttle toward the end of construction. Between those, in 2005, he went up on a Russian Soyuz FV rocket and spent six months there.

The Soyuz FV is of ICBM heritage. There have been more Soyuz launches than any other rocket in history. So why were we going up on Russian rockets?

John pointed out that in the early days of the ISS, mixing crews of Russian and American astronauts was just sort of a sharing thing. Then in 2003, the Columbia crashed, and the shuttle didn’t fly again for about two years. That’s when he went up on the Soyuz. And then from 2011, when we ended the space shuttle program, until we started flying the Crew Dragon, the SpaceX vehicle, there were another nine years when the only way up there was on a Russian rocket. So, we had American crews training in Russia, learning to be flight engineers on a Russian rocket. And he said that the vehicle you go up in is your lifeboat the whole time you’re there. There have been some exceptions, but for the most part, you ride a vehicle up there; it’s your lifeboat for six months, and you ride the same vehicle down.

The capsule consists of three modules designed to carry a three-person crew. You take off and land in the middle module. The front module is kind of a living area. The aft module contains equipment and is not even pressurized. After takeoff, you move from the middle module to the front module, and as John explains it, it goes from being three guys in the backseat of a Volkswagen to three guys in a minivan.

John trained for three years, splitting time between Star City outside of Moscow and Houston. He notes that the training was interesting but demanding, and he was always tired. Then, as launch time neared, he found the differences between NASA’s engineering culture and Russian culture interesting. There is not a lot of ceremony prior to a NASA launch. But the Russians treat every major event like it’s sacred and it’s a party.

The launch actually occurs at a base in Kazakhstan. It’s at 46 degrees of latitude. When you launch a spacecraft, to get the most boost from the Earth’s rotation, you launch due east. But to launch due east from the base would mean dropping rocket parts over China. So the ISS orbits at an inclination of 51.6 degrees because of a combination of physics and geopolitics.

Some of the rituals prior to a Russian launch involve putting flowers on Yuri Gagarin’s grave, watching a movie set in Kazakhstan that one crew failed to watch earlier and had a bad trip, letting a priest splash water on your face with a brush, and following Yuri Gagarin’s tradition and peeing on the shuttle buses’ tires.

The launch sequence is smooth. Right after liftoff, you only feel 1.38 g’s. But as fuel burns off, you accelerate to 4.5 g’s. The whole thing is pre-programmed, and you are just along for the ride. Once you reach orbit, you shut everything down and nap for 24 hours until the rocket catches up with the space station.

John’s talk included much more detail than we can cover here and took us all the way until he was back on terra firma. Thank you, John, for making our meeting most interesting.