The next threesome headed for the International Space Station includes two men who never dreamed
they would fly in space, and one for whom being a cosmonaut is a family tradition.
Doctor Steve Swanson was born in Syracuse, New York and moved with his family a number
of times before ending up in Steamboat Springs, Colorado as he entered his teens.
It’s a beautiful place, love the mountains, I love the area, and, uh, when I grew up there
it was definitely like a half agricultural ranching community and half resort, and it
was a great combination.
He stayed at home for college, got his Bachelor’s Of Science in Engineering Physics at the University
Of Colorado, but then went to Florida Atlantic University to get his Masters Of Applied Science
in Computer Systems.
At that point he considered his options, and the job of astronaut seemed to have what he
was looking for.
After a year working as an engineer in Phoenix he got a job as an engineer at the Johnson
Space Center’s Aircraft Operations Division, working on the Shuttle Training Aircraft while
earning his Doctorate in Computer Science from Texas A&M.
He was chosen for the astronaut program in 1998 and made his first flight in 2007 on
a mission to deliver a truss segment to the International Space Station.
Swanson made two spacewalks on that mission, and two more on a 2009 shuttle flight that
delivered another truss segment to outfit the station to perform its mission.
We’re going off now, we’re trying to get science better, we’re also trying to find
maybe a, a place that we could go to, uh, to maybe, you know, get resources off the
moon.
We could go explore Mars.
All these kind of ideas are things I think as human nature we just have to do
Alexander Skvortsov was born in Schelkovo, near Moscow, because his father’s job—as
a cosmonaut—brought the family to Star City, a town with no maternity ward.
But soon after his birth Skvortsov’s father left the cosmonaut corps, and the military
took the family to Morshansk.
And I still love the town, a very big quiet river, a wonderful nature, wonderful forests,
very good people.
I like that town and I have, there are a lot of people who graduated from high school with
me, my classmates, still live there.
After high school Skvortsov set out to fulfill his dream of being a cosmonaut, like his father.
After he completed study at the Stavropol Air Force Pilot and Navigator School, he spent
seven years in the National Air Defense Force before studying at the Military Red Banner
Air Defense Academy.
Skvortsov graduated the academy in 1997, the same year he was selected for the cosmonaut
corps.
He spent six months on the International Space Station in 2010, including serving as station
commander for Expedition 24.
After he returned to Earth he finished his studies at the Russian Academy of Civil Service
to become a lawyer, and he retired from the air force as a colonel in 2013.
It is an enormous joy to look down to Earth, and we really want to see Earth always looking
as beautiful as we see it from space, a blue planet with wonderful nature
Oleg Artemiev was born in Riga, the capital of Latvia, where his military officer father
was stationed.
But the family soon moved to Kazakhstan, to the town now known as Baikonur, when Artemiev
was a small boy.
Although he lived in the place where people were launched into space, he wanted to be
a sailor.
Cosmonauts?
…we always thought of cosmonauts as the people that we always have to go meet and
greet.
They would pull us out of the activities that we actually enjoyed, they would line us up
along the road and make us wave little flags to greet them.
After high school Artemiev went off to train as a sailor, but when that didn’t work out
he went to the Tallinn Polytechnic Institute and graduated into a job as an electrician,
but soon left that to join the Soviet army.
After two years in the service he went to Moscow and was admitted to the Bauman Technical
University, where he earned a degree in low temperature physics and technology; that got
him a job at the Rocket Space Corporation Energia, where he worked building and testing
space vehicles, including preparing the International Space Station’s Zvezda module for launch.
He was selected to start training as a cosmonaut in 2003; in 2009 he participated in the Mars-500
experiment, along with future cosmonaut Sergey Ryazanskiy, on his way to preparing for his
first spaceflight assignment.
I hope that my small contribution will help those who will eventually make a first step
on the surface of Mars or touch an asteroid, bring something good back, maybe even see
some extraterrestrial life.
There are a lot of good jobs on Earth, but this was the ultimate.