Nov 19, 2008, 15:24 GMT
Star City, Russia - Viewed from one side, they look like thinly-spread but typical US suburban homes. From the other, they are the most incongruous part of the Soviet cement-block landscape.
The six cottages were built to US standards for NASA staffers and astronauts training at Star City, a formerly secret military base in the woods outside Moscow in the 1990s.
They come complete with US light switches, electric plugs and piping that may have padded nostalgia, but 10 years down the line, is not terribly practical.
'When things started breaking, we had to start welding Russian and US pipes together,' said John McBrine, head of US operations at Star City. Now outlets fitted for plugging in US appliances frazzle them with the wrong voltage.
On the 10th anniversary of US-Russian cooperation in the International Space Station (ISS) Thursday, this hard-won US outpost on the hermetic Russian base is suddenly set to become a lot more crowded, and McBrine worries the infrastructure is not quite up to it.
It was a rough start for those working, as McBrine says, '6,000 miles from Houston' just after the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s to put the first American on the Russia's Mir space station.
Trying to get in the training hardware for the mission 'was like hook or crook,' McBrine recalled.
On his first trip, he found himself standing amid 12 barely- movable crates of equipment thinking: 'How am I going to get from baggage claims through customs.'
The support team of five and astronaut Peggy Whitson set up in a low-ceilinged, low-lit building known as the Prophy, short for Profylactarium, where cosmonauts were quarantined before flight and NASA still runs its operations today.
They had no email, phones or faxes and no heating in the buildings where they prepared experiments and hardware for the space station. Training material was in a foreign-language - not one among them spoke Russian.
'We were all winging it. For those who were used to having formulas, it was the wild west out here. We did what the Russians told us to. A lot of people weren't used to that,' McBrine said, explaining some of the early frustration that was famously aired in a scandal-stirring, behind-the-scenes book, Drangonfly: NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir.
There was also the impression in those early years that the Americans were being spied on.
'People were telling me I had a shadow,' McBrine laughed.
The more harrowing realities of NASA being left in the dark over technical dangers aboard Mir, which threatened astronauts' lives, and extreme conditions led to close-knit friendships among NASA mission staff, most of whom are still at the core of the space program.
Today, the NASA headquarters at Star City are called the Soyuz-Apollo Hotel, after the historic first flight of the US and Soviet space programmes in 1975. 'It's the Apollo-Soyuz Hotel,' NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman said. 'That's what the Russians call it.'
There are two full-time NASA staffers at Star City and any number of astronauts, engineers, scientists, doctors, at any one time. This month there are about 40 people, McBrine said.
The door to his townhouse is constantly in use, and at a knock, he yells out: 'Come in, nobody knocks here!'
These homes out in no man's land are now fitted with Huntsville, Alabama area codes and digital phones that are just five-digits away from the Johnson Space Center. 'No drop offs, no delays,' unlike the midnight telecoms with Houston of the 'old days,' McBrine said.
But the walls still leak, staffers say. 'Some things don't change,' he shrugged.
The waters runs down into the basement where NASA personnel over the years have created a little outpost of 'Americana' with private donations over the years dubbed Shep's Bar, after the first commander of the ISS William Shepherd.
Unfinished plywood stairs hide beneath them a bar scribbled thick with black marker except for an honorary square around space-fan Tom Hanks' movie-star signature. Pool and ping pong tables line one side and everything from a boar's head to, of course, space paraphernalia give life to the recreation room.
Here on the low couches, Reisman was beamed through to the big screen for video conferences with support staff during the ISS' 17th mission.
From cosmonauts to national and billionaire space tourists, all who are accredited and stranded for training on the old Soviet base spend some night here. 'They are orphans here, just like the rest of us,' McBrine says.
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