The next thing to come off: the diaper. Pride compels me to report that I’ve never used mine, but those who have are particularly happy to remove it. Now we were down to just our long underwear—100% cotton because, in the event of a fire, it chars nicely without melting or burning. Most astronauts stay in their long johns until it’s time to dock with the ISS, reluctantly changing only because we know there will be TV cameras and looks of horror on the other crew’s faces if we greet them decked out in dirty underwear. The approach to hygiene on the Soyuz is about what you’d expect on a camping trip. Decorum is a relative concept on a vehicle that size; there’s no bathroom, for instance, so if you need to go, your crewmates simply look away politely while you pick up a thing that looks a bit like a DustBuster with a little yellow funnel attached. It’s simple to use: turn the knob to “on,” check that the airflow is actually working, then hold it up close so you don’t get pee everywhere. A quick wipe with a piece of gauze and the funnel is dry.
As soon as I got out of my Sokhol I took anti-nausea meds. Feeling nauseated is inevitable during the first day or so in space because weightlessness completely confuses your body. Your inner ear no longer has a reliable way of judging up from down, which throws your balance out of whack and makes you feel sick. In the past, some astronauts vomited throughout their entire flights; their bodies just never accepted the absence of gravity. I knew mine would eventually adapt, but I didn’t see the point of being sick my first few days in space, so I took the medication that was on offer and didn’t eat very much.
I also didn’t spend a lot of time gazing out the window at first. Unlike the Shuttle, which was powered by fuel cells, the Soyuz is solar-powered; to keep its solar arrays pointed at the sun, the vehicle spins like a chicken on a rotisserie barbecue. Outside the window, then, what you see is Earth, tumbling over and over, which is hard to look at when your stomach is unsettled. I waited until we were going to do an orbit adjust burn, in which case we’d maintain a stable attitude, before admiring the view.
That first evening we did two orbit adjust burns, firing the engines to climb higher toward the ISS. It’s one of the most critical phases of flight on a Soyuz, because an error could rapidly put the rocket ship into an orbit where it would never reach Station at all. “There’s nothing more important than what you’re doing right now” is a standard astronaut adage that’s never more true than when an engine is firing. All three of us stopped and stared, unblinking, at the display readings for fuel pressure, steering and propellant flow—anything that would tell us whether an engine was misbehaving. Collectively, we shared a hair-trigger reflex, but it was my job to act on it and push the appropriate immediate action buttons—there are 24, covered with small flip-lids to prevent inadvertent pushes—to shut down an errant engine manually and switch to backup thrusters, if necessary. But it wasn’t. Behind us, a trail of burning snowflakes from the firing sparkled away into the night.
We’d checked all our thrusters and tested the computers, hand controllers and rendezvous radar that we’d need for docking with the ISS. Only a few hours into our journey, we’d done just about everything we had to do. Floating past the Soyuz TV screen, I noticed we were over the Pacific, off the Chilean coast. At the window, I saw a few lights: fishing boats, I thought. Then they resolved themselves: the Southern Cross. I was looking at a constellation in the night sky, not the sea! It was a strange delight to be that disconcerted while simultaneously at ease.
I realized I was tired. Very tired. I unrolled my sleeping bag, pale green with a white liner, and tied the four corners loosely to the metal rings on the sides of the Soyuz with the strings I found in the bag pocket. I didn’t want to drift around going bump in the night. It was chilly in the capsule now. Fully clothed and wearing calf-length down slipper boots, I got into my bag, stuck my arms through the side holes, pulled on the built-in hood and zipped up. Floating inside, slightly curled like a baby in the womb, I fell asleep almost immediately, with Tom beside me and Roman a few feet away in the re-entry capsule. It was my first night in space since April 2001. Expedition 34/35 had begun.
Getting up to the ISS really doesn’t take that long: you could make it there from Earth in less than three hours if you had to, and recently, several crews have done so, in the interests of efficiency. But we were allotted more than two days, as Soyuz crews usually have been, and I was glad of that time to ramp down from the adrenaline of launch and get used to the reality of being in space. On Station, we’d be conducting and monitoring scientific experiments, maintaining and repairing the spaceship itself, communicating constantly with Mission Control—the schedule would be packed.
A full day in limbo, before all that started, gave us a chance to adapt and reflect, almost undisturbed. On the Soyuz, unless you’re directly over Russia, you don’t have communication with the ground. A few times a day, then, we’d give Mission Control in Korolev a summary of the status of the vehicle, and they’d give us any data we needed for rendezvous and docking. Otherwise: peace and quiet. We were alone.
I woke at 5:30 DMT (Decreed Moscow Time) and quickly calculated: seven hours of sleep. I felt rested, though puffy-faced and congested—typical adaptation symptoms. My joints ached somewhat after being motionless for so many hours during launch and I had a bit of a headache, but the main thing I was aware of was a quiet sense of joy.
The night before, digging through the storage locker by his seat in the re-entry capsule, Tom had discovered cards from our spouses. I’d saved mine, tucking it away in my left leg pocket. Now, while the sun was coming up, I wanted to read it. As I opened the envelope, two small paper hearts floated out, turning slowly and catching the sun’s rays. I trapped them carefully in my hand and held them as I read Helene’s words. I decided those hearts would keep me company in my small sleeping pod on the ISS over the next five months, delicate and vivid reminders of my life on Earth.
By this point Tom was waking too, so we rooted around for nasal spray and anti-nausea pills in the large toolbox-sized metal box called, prosaically enough, container #1. Roman was also stirring. We took turns peeing, then retrieved breakfast: canned cheese bread, dried fruit and a juice box. Coffee would have been nice, we agreed, but we’d have it soon enough, in pouches, on the ISS.
Roman was already moving quickly and energetically, smoothly efficient, as if his last long stay in space had been only yesterday. This Soyuz was his, and he treated it with proprietary care and respect. He soon settled down to watch the old Soviet comedies from the 1960s that Energia had loaded on his iPod. Tom was unobtrusive, solicitous and clearly happy to be back in space. He moved more deliberately and patiently, ever helpful. I felt relaxed and lazy, like a bubble in a languid stream. I took off my Omega Speedmaster watch to play with it in weightlessness. With a little push it became a metal jellyfish, the strap pulsing in and out like a living thing.
My body was starting to remember zero gravity, which, when you get used to it, is like being on the best ride at the fair, only it never stops. You can flip and tumble and float things across the spaceship, and it never gets old. It’s just a constant, entertaining change of rules. And as my vestibular system adapted during our day of downtime, I started to be able to look out the window for longer and longer periods of time. The world was rolling by underneath, every place I’d ever read about or dreamed of visiting streaming past. There was the Sahara, there was Lake Victoria and the Nile, snaking all the way up to the Mediterranean. Explorers gave their lives trying to find the source of the Nile, but I could detect it with a casual glance, no effort at all.
The night sky was beautiful, too: fine-spun necklaces of countless tiny lights dressed up the jet-black cloak covering Earth. Looking out on the second day of our mission, I became aware that in the far distance, there was a distinctive-looking star. It stood out because, while all the other stars stayed exactly the same size and shape, this one got bigger and bigger as we got closer to it. At some point it stopped being a point of light and started becoming
something three-dimensional, morphing into a strange bug-like thing with all kinds of appendages. And then, isolated against this inky background, it started to look like a small town.
Which is in fact what it is: an outpost that humans have built, far from Earth. The International Space Station. It’s every science fiction book come true, every little kid’s dream realized: a large, capable, fully human creation orbiting up in the universe.
And it felt miraculous that soon we’d be docked there, and the next phase of our expedition would begin.
9
AIM TO BE A ZERO
A FRIEND OF MINE was once in a crowded elevator in Building Four South at JSC in Houston when a senior astronaut got on and just stood there, visibly impatient, waiting for someone to divine that he needed to go to the sixth floor, and push the button. “I didn’t spend all those years in university to wind up pushing buttons in an elevator,” he snapped. Incredibly enough, someone did it for him. This incident made such a big impression on my friend that I heard about it, and probably a lot of other people did, too. For me, it was a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of ever thinking of yourself as An Astronaut (or A Doctor, or A Whatever). To everyone else, you’re just that arrogant guy on the elevator, craving significance.
Over the years, I’ve realized that in any new situation, whether it involves an elevator or a rocket ship, you will almost certainly be viewed in one of three ways. As a minus one: actively harmful, someone who creates problems. Or as a zero: your impact is neutral and doesn’t tip the balance one way or the other. Or you’ll be seen as a plus one: someone who actively adds value. Everyone wants to be a plus one, of course. But proclaiming your plus-oneness at the outset almost guarantees you’ll be perceived as a minus one, regardless of the skills you bring to the table or how you actually perform. This might seem self-evident, but it can’t be, because so many people do it.
During the final selection round for each new class of NASA astronauts, for example, there’s always at least one individual who’s hell-bent on advertising him- or herself as a plus one. In fact, all the applicants who make it to the final 100 and are invited to come to Houston for a week have impressive qualifications and really are plus ones—in their own fields. But invariably, someone decides to take it a little further and behave like An Astronaut, one who already knows just about everything there is to know—the meaning of every acronym, the purpose of every valve on a spacesuit—and who just might be willing, if asked nicely, to go to Mars tomorrow. Sometimes the motivation is over-eagerness rather than arrogance, but the effect is the same.
The truth is that many applicants don’t have any realistic idea of what it means to be an astronaut. How could they? In the movies, astronauts are not toiling over Russian vocabulary work sheets. They’re superheroes. Even the most level-headed among us have been influenced to some degree by that image. I know I was. So one purpose of that week at JSC is to dispel any comic-book notions about what working for NASA is really like. And some people do take a look around and run for the hills.
Those who aren’t scared off are, in between familiarization sessions and tours, put through their paces. We give them an intelligence test and an aptitude test for manipulating robotic equipment such as Canadarm2, which requires the ability to visualize in 3-D (it’s quite tricky). We even suspend applicants in simulated zero gravity to get a sense of their hand-eye coordination. Other assessments, like figuring out who plays well with others, are less formal. Applicants certainly know during the social mixer with astronauts from the office that we are evaluating them as potential crewmates, but they probably don’t know who else has input. One Chief Astronaut used to make a point of phoning the front desk at the clinic where applicants are sent for medical testing, to find out which ones treated the staff well—and which ones stood out in a bad way. The nurses and clinic staff have seen a whole lot of astronauts over the years, and they know what the wrong stuff looks like. A person with a superiority complex might unwittingly, right there in the waiting room, quash his or her chances of ever going to space.
Which is a good thing, really, because anyone who views him- or herself as more important than the “little people” is not cut out for this job (and would probably hate doing it). No astronaut, no matter how brilliant or brave, is a solo act. Our expertise is the result of the training provided by thousands of experts around the world, and the support provided by thousands of technicians in five different space agencies. Our safety depends on many tens of thousands of people we’ll never meet, like the welders in Russia who assemble the Soyuz, and the North American textile workers who fabricate our spacesuits. And our employment depends entirely on millions of other people believing in the importance of space exploration and being willing to underwrite it with their tax dollars. We work on behalf of everyone in our country, not just a select few, so we should behave the same way whether we’re meeting with a head of state or a seventh-grade science class. Frankly, this makes good sense even if you’re not an astronaut. You never really know who will have a say in where you wind up. It could be the CEO. But it might well be the receptionist.
If you enter a new environment intent on exploding out of the gate, you risk wreaking havoc instead. I learned this the hard way in graduate school, when we were in the lab designing low-pressure fuel pumps. We tracked our progress using different dyes, and at the end of the first day, we had an array of jars filled with leftover dye. I very efficiently took charge and poured them all down the drain in the corner of the room. Why bother asking questions? I already knew what needed to be done. Well, as it turned out, that particular drain was actually part of the lab’s data collection system and therefore had to be kept spotless. The professor who ran the place couldn’t believe I’d dumped dye all over it. Now the whole system had to be purged and purified, which meant a lot of extra work for him and other people. I’m sure that if he connected the dots today, he’d say, “That guy became an astronaut? But he’s an idiot!”
When you have some skills but don’t fully understand your environment, there is no way you can be a plus one. At best, you can be a zero. But a zero isn’t a bad thing to be. You’re competent enough not to create problems or make more work for everyone else. And you have to be competent, and prove to others that you are, before you can be extraordinary. There are no shortcuts, unfortunately.
Even later, when you do understand the environment and can make an outstanding contribution, there’s considerable wisdom in practicing humility. If you really are a plus one, people will notice—and they’re even more likely to give you credit for it if you’re not trying to rub their noses in your greatness. On my second National Outdoor Leadership School survival course I shared a tent with Tom Marshburn, my crewmate on Expedition 34/35. Tom is the ultimate outdoorsman: a vastly experienced mountaineer, he’s summited on several continents and also walked the Pacific Trail—alone—from Canada to Mexico, covering more than a marathon’s distance each day. And yet during our course in Utah, he never imposed his expertise on anyone or told us what to do. Instead, he was just quietly competent and helpful. If I needed him, he was there in an instant, but he never elbowed me out of the way to demonstrate his superior skills or made me feel small for not knowing how to do something. Everyone on our team knew that Tom was a plus one. He didn’t have to tell us.
So how do you get to be a plus one, someone who adds value? I wasn’t certain when I was training for mission STS-74 in 1995, so as I mentioned earlier, I watched Jerry Ross, the most experienced astronaut on our crew, to see how he did things. After a while, I noticed that he was regularly coming into the office an hour early and quietly plowing through our commander’s inbox, taking care of all the administrative details himself so the commander could focus on the important matters. I’m sure Jerry wasn’t asked to do this, and he never mentioned it, let alone expected any recognition for it. He was voluntarily pushing the elevator buttons for someone else, so to speak, without fanfare or resentment. It was classic exp
editionary behavior, putting the needs of the group first.
It was also a big part of what made him a plus one on our crew. Not only did he bring a wealth of experience and knowledge, but he conducted himself as though no task was beneath him. He acted as though he considered himself a zero: reasonably competent but no better than anyone else.
That made a lasting impression on me. Especially when I’m entering a new situation and don’t yet have the lay of the land, I think about how to aim to be a zero and try to contribute in small ways without creating disruptions. Approaching the ISS in December 2012, our crew talked about how to do this. Leaving Earth, we’d been treated like conquering heroes. But when we opened the hatch and floated into the ISS, we’d just be the new guys, the ones who didn’t know where anything was. We’d be joining a crew of three people who’d been working and living on the ISS for months; they’d have developed their own shorthand for communicating, their own ways of doing things, their own routines. They’d probably be happy to see us—fresh supplies!—but also a little wary. What if we put trash in the wrong place or inadvertently ate the last pouch of peach ambrosia that someone had been saving for a treat?
We could also create bigger problems. When you first come into the Station after a few days of confinement in a Soyuz, you’re disoriented and clumsy (not least because you’re probably pretty anxious to get to a more-or-less private bathroom). It’s like being a baby bird and not quite knowing how to fly yet. You might float past what just looks like a bunch of junk on the wall but is actually a biological experiment—bump it accidentally and years of science (and someone’s life work) might be destroyed. This actually happened during my second mission: someone on our crew brushed up against an experiment as we entered the ISS, wiping out a whole month’s worth of data.
An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth Page 17