Star City's pool - European astronaut Andre Kuipers (barely visible on the left) and a...

Star City's pool - European astronaut Andre Kuipers (barely visible on the left) and a Russian cosmonaut, both wearing a 100 kg Orlan space suit, train in the Star City pool. The swimming pool at the Gagarin training center near Moscow is 23 metres in diameter with a modular depth of up to 12 metres; it hosts full-scale models of different space station elements to prepare cosmonauts for different operations in space. Wearing Russian 100 - kg Orlan spacesuit and helped by divers, ESA astronaut Andre Kuipers, from The Netherlands (partly visible on the left, with orange bands), and an unidentified Russian cosmonaut (with blue bands) during training for extravehicular activities (EVAs) at the Gagarin Training Center, also known as Zviezdny Gorodok (“Star City”), near Moscow, near as part of the preparation work on the operations of the European Robotic Arm (ERA) for the International Space Station (ISS) in December 2004. This facility consists in a 23 - m - wide and 12 - m - deep water reservoir, with a capacity of 5,000 cubic meters. It incorporates a platform, which can carry up to 15 tons of mock space station modules for training