by Scott Kelly
YOU HAVE TO go to the ends of the Earth in order to leave the Earth. Since the space shuttles were retired in 2011, we’ve depended on the Russians to launch us into space, and we must start with a journey to the Baikonur Cosmodrome on the desert steppes of Kazakhstan. First, I fly from Houston to Moscow, a familiar journey of eleven hours, and from there ride in a van to Star City, Russia, forty-five miles away—anywhere from one to four hours, depending on Moscow traffic. Star City is the Russian equivalent of the Johnson Space Center; it’s the place where the cosmonauts have been trained for the last fifty years (and, more recently, the astronauts who will travel to space with them).
Star City is a town with its own mayor and a church, museums, and apartment blocks. There is a giant statue of Yuri Gagarin, who became the first human in space in 1961, taking a simple, humble socialist-realist step forward while holding a bouquet of flowers behind his back. Years ago, the Russian space agency built a row of town houses especially for us Americans, and staying in them is sort of like staying on a movie set based on a Russian stereotype of how Americans live. There are huge fridges and huge TVs but somehow everything is slightly off. I’ve spent a lot of time in Star City, including serving as NASA’s director of operations there, but it still feels foreign to me, especially in the heart of the frozen Russian winter. After a few weeks of training, I find myself longing to head back to Houston.
From Star City we fly 1,600 miles to Baikonur, once the secret launch site for the Soviet space program. People sometimes say that a place is “in the middle of nowhere,” but I never say that anymore unless I’m talking about Baikonur. The launch site was actually built in a village called Tyuratam, named for a descendant of Genghis Khan, but was referred to as Baikonur, the name of another town several hundred miles away, as subterfuge. Now this is the only place called Baikonur. Early on, the Soviets also referred to their launch facility as Star City so as to further confuse the United States. For an American who grew up and trained as a Navy pilot during the tail end of the Cold War, it will always feel a bit strange that I’m invited into the epicenter of the former Soviet space program to be taught its secrets. The people who live in Baikonur now are mostly Kazakh, descendants of Turkic and Mongol tribes, with a minority of ethnic Russians who were left behind after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Russia leases the facilities here from Kazakhstan. The Russian ruble is the main currency, and all the vehicles have Russian license plates.
From the air, Baikonur seems to have been flung randomly onto the high desert steppes. It’s a strange collection of ugly concrete buildings, horribly hot in summer and harshly cold in winter, with mounds of rusting, disused machinery piled everywhere. Packs of wild dogs and camels scrounge in the shadows of aerospace equipment. It’s a desolate and brutal place, and it’s the only working human spaceport for most of the world.
I’m descending toward Baikonur in a Tupolev 134, an old Russian military transport plane. This aircraft might once have been outfitted with bomb racks and in a pinch could have served as a bomber, part of the Cold War arsenal the Soviets developed with the purpose of attacking my country. But now it’s used to transport international crews of space travelers—Russian, American, European, Japanese, and Canadian. We are former enemies remade as crewmates, on our way to the space station we built together.
The front of the plane is reserved for the prime crew (my two Russian crewmates and me) and a number of VIPs. Occasionally I wander toward the back, where I’ve flown on previous trips to Baikonur. Everyone has been drinking since we left Star City this morning, and the junior Russian personnel have their own party going on back here. Russians never drink without eating, so in addition to vodka and cognac they are serving tomatoes, cheese, sausage, pickled cucumbers, dried salty fish chips, and slices of salted pork fat called salo. On my first trip to Kazakhstan, in 2000, I was making my way through the party at the back of the plane to find the bathroom when I was stopped and forced to drink shots of samogon, Russian moonshine. The junior guys were so drunk they were stumbling around from the turbulence and alcohol, spilling the stuff on themselves and on the floor of the plane, all while chain-smoking. We were lucky to have made it to Kazakhstan without exploding into a giant fireball of moonshine and jet fuel.
Today everyone is drinking heavily again, and we are pretty well fueled by the time we plunge from the clouds over the flat, frozen desert and touch down on Baikonur’s single runway. We climb out, blinking in the cold, and encounter a welcoming party: officials from Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, and Energia, the company that builds the Soyuz spacecraft, one of which will take us into orbit to dock with the International Space Station. The mayor of Baikonur is here, as well as other local dignitaries. My Russian crewmate Gennady Padalka strides forward and speaks sternly to them as we stand at semi-attention, “My gotovy k sleduyushchim shagam nashey podgotovki.” (“We are ready for the next steps of our preparation.”)
This is a ritual, like so many in spaceflight. We Americans have similar staged moments at similar points of launch preparation. There is a fine line between ritual and superstition, and in a life-threatening business such as spaceflight, superstition can be comforting even to the nonbeliever.
We see a strange but welcoming sight at the edge of the tarmac: a group of Kazakh kids, little ambassadors from the end of the Earth. They are round cheeked, black haired, mostly Asian in appearance, wearing bright, dusty clothes and holding balloons. The Russian flight doctor has warned us to stay away from them: there has been concern about a measles outbreak in this region, and if one of us were to be infected it would bring serious consequences. We have all been vaccinated, but the Russian flight surgeons are very cautious; no one wants to go to space with measles. Normally we do what the doctor says, especially since he has the power to ground us. But Gennady walks confidently forward anyway.
“We must say hello to the children,” he says firmly in English.
I’ve known both Gennady and our third crewmate, Mikhail Kornienko (“Misha”), since 2000, when I started traveling to Russia to work on the joint space station program between our two countries. Gennady has a thick head of silver hair and a sharp gaze that doesn’t miss much. He is fifty-six and is the commander of our Soyuz. He’s a natural leader, gruffly shouting out orders when necessary but listening carefully when one of his crew has another perspective. He’s a person I trust implicitly. Once, in Moscow, near the Kremlin, I saw him break away from his fellow cosmonauts to pay his respects at the site where an opposition politician had been murdered, possibly by surrogates of Vladimir Putin. For a cosmonaut, an employee of Putin’s government, that gesture was risky. The other Russians with us seemed to be reluctant even to discuss the murder, but not Gennady.
Misha, who will be my fellow traveler for a year, is fifty-four and is very different from Gennady—casual, quiet, and contemplative. Misha’s father was a military helicopter pilot working with the cosmonaut rescue forces, and when Misha was only five, his father died in a helicopter crash. His early dreams of flying in space were only reinforced by this unfathomable loss. After serving in the military as a paratrooper, Misha needed to get a degree in engineering from the Moscow Aviation Institute to qualify as a flight engineer. He couldn’t get in, because he wasn’t a resident of the Moscow region, so he became a Moscow police officer to establish residency and was then able to study at the institute. He was selected as a cosmonaut in 1998.
When Misha stares at you with his light blue eyes, it feels like nothing is more important to him than fully comprehending what you are saying. He is more open with his feelings than the other Russians I know. If he were American, I could picture him as a Birkenstock-wearing hippie living in Vermont.
We approach the Kazakh kids gathered to welcome us. We greet them, shake hands, and accept flowers that for all I know are covered with measles. Gennady chats with the children happily, his face lit up with his signature smile.
The entire party—prime crew, backup crew, and support
staff—boards two buses for the ride to the quarantine facility where we will spend the next two weeks. (The prime crew and backup crew always travel separately, for the same reason the president and vice president do.) As we are boarding, for a laugh, Gennady sits in the driver’s seat of our bus, and we all take pictures of him with our phones. Many years ago, crews used to travel to Baikonur, spend one day here checking out the Soyuz spacecraft, then travel back to Star City to wait out the two weeks until launch. Now, cutbacks require that we make only one trip, so we will be stuck here for the duration. I take a window seat, pop in my earbuds, and rest my head against the window, hoping to become sleepy enough to take a nap before we get to our hotel-like quarantine facility. This road is in terrible shape—it always has been, and it only gets worse—and the rutted and patched asphalt rattles my head against the window enough to keep me awake.
We pass dilapidated Soviet-era apartment complexes, huge rusted satellite dishes communicating with Russian spacecraft, mounds of garbage randomly strewn about, the occasional camel. It’s a clear, sunny day. We pass Baikonur’s own statue of Yuri Gagarin, this one with his arms raised—not in the triumphant V of a gymnast celebrating a perfect dismount, but the joyful straight-up gesture of a kid about to try a somersault. In this statue, he’s smiling.
Far over the horizon a launch tower rises above the same deteriorating concrete pad from which Yuri first rocketed off Earth, the same pad from which nearly every Russian cosmonaut has left Earth, the same pad from which I will leave Earth two weeks from now. The Russians sometimes seem to care more about tradition than they do about appearance or function. This launchpad, which they call Gagarinsky Start (Gagarin’s Launchpad), is imbued with the successes of the past, and they have no plans to replace it.
Misha’s and my mission to spend a year on ISS is unprecedented. A normal mission to the space station lasts five to six months, so scientists have a good deal of data about what happens to the human body in space for that length of time. But very little is known about what happens after month six. The symptoms might get precipitously worse in the ninth month, for instance, or they might level off. We don’t know, and there is only one way to find out.
Misha and I will collect various types of data for studies on ourselves, which will take a significant amount of our time. Because Mark and I are identical twins, I’m also taking part in an extensive study comparing the two of us throughout the year, down to the genetic level. The International Space Station is a world-class orbiting laboratory, and in addition to the human studies of which I am one of the main subjects, I will also spend a lot of my time this year working on other experiments, like fluid physics, botany, combustion, and Earth observation.
When I talk about the International Space Station to audiences, I always share with them the importance of the science being done there. But to me, it’s just as important that the station is serving as a foothold for our species in space. From there, we can learn more about how to push out farther into the cosmos. The costs are high, as are the risks.
On my last flight to the space station, a mission of 159 days, I lost bone mass, my muscles atrophied, and my blood redistributed itself in my body, which strained and shrank the walls of my heart. More troubling, I experienced problems with my vision, as many other astronauts have. I have been exposed to more than thirty times the radiation of a person on Earth, equivalent to about ten chest X-rays every day. This exposure will increase my risk of a fatal cancer for the rest of my life. None of this compares, though, to the most troubling risk: that something bad could happen to someone I love while I’m in space with no way for me to come home.
Looking out the window at the strange landscape of Baikonur, I realize that for all the time I’ve spent here, weeks in fact, I have never really seen the town itself. I’ve only been to the designated spaces where I have official business: the hangars where the engineers and technicians prepare our spacecraft and rocket for flight; the windowless fluorescent-lit rooms where we get into our Sokol pressure suits; the building where our instructors, interpreters, doctors, cooks, management people, and other support staff stay; and the nearby building, affectionately called Saddam’s Palace by Americans, where we stay. This opulent residence was built to accommodate the head of the Russian space agency and his staff and guests, and he allows the crews to use it while we’re here. It’s a nicer place than the other facility, and far nicer than the austere crew quarters housed in an office building where shuttle astronauts used to spend quarantine at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Saddam’s Palace has crystal chandeliers, marble floors, and a four-room suite for each of us, complete with Jacuzzi tubs. The building also has a banya, or Russian sauna, with a cold pool to jump into afterward. Early in our two-week quarantine I go out to the banya to find a naked Misha beating on a naked Gennady with birch branches. The first time I saw this scene I was a bit taken aback, but once I experienced the banya myself, followed by a dip in a freezing cold pool of water and a homemade Russian beer, I completely understood the appeal.
Saddam’s Palace also has an elaborate dining room with pressed white tablecloths, fine china, and a flat-screen TV on the wall that constantly plays old Russian movies the cosmonauts seem to love. The Russian food is good, but for Americans it can start to get old after a while—borscht at nearly every meal, meat and potatoes, other kinds of meat and potatoes, everything covered with tons of dill.
“Gennady,” I say while we are eating dinner a few days into our stay. “What’s with all the dill?”
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“You guys put dill on everything. Some of this food might actually be good if it weren’t covered in dill.”
“Ah, okay, I understand,” Gennady says, nodding, his signature smile starting to emerge. “It’s from when the Russian diet consisted mostly of potatoes, cabbage, and vodka. Dill gets rid of farts.”
Later I google it. It’s true. As it happens, getting rid of gas is a worthwhile goal before being sealed into a small tin can together for many hours, so I stop complaining about the dill.
—
THE DAY AFTER we arrive in Baikonur we have the first “fit check.” This is our opportunity to get inside the Soyuz capsule while it’s still in the hangar and not yet attached to the rocket that will launch us into space. In the cavernous hangar known as Building 254 we pull on our Sokol suits—always an awkward process. The only entrance into the suits is in the chest, so we have to slide our lower bodies into the chest hole, then struggle to fit our arms into the sleeves while blindly pulling the neck ring up over our heads. I often come away from this procedure with scratches on my scalp. Not having hair is a disadvantage here. The chest opening is then sealed through a disconcertingly low-tech process of gathering the edges of the fabric together and securing them with elastic bands. The first time I was introduced to this system I couldn’t believe those rubber bands were all that was meant to protect us from space. Once I got to the space station, I learned the Russians use the exact same rubber bands to seal their garbage bags in space. In one sense I find this comical; in another way I respect the efficiency of the Russian philosophy on technology. If it works, why change it?
The Sokol suit was designed as a rescue suit, which means that its only function is to save us in case of a fire or depressurization in the Soyuz. It’s different from the spacesuit I will wear during spacewalks later in my mission; that suit will be much sturdier and more functional, a little spaceship in its own right. The Sokol suit serves the same purpose as the orange NASA-designed pressure suit I used to wear to fly on the space shuttle. NASA introduced that suit only after the Challenger disaster of 1986; before that, shuttle astronauts wore simple cloth flight suits, as the Russians did before a depressurization accident killed three cosmonauts in 1971. Since then, cosmonauts (and any astronauts to join them in the Soyuz) have worn the Sokol suits. In a weird way, we are surrounded by the evidence of tragedies, too-late fixes that might have saved the astronauts and co
smonauts who took the same risks we are taking and lost.
Today is like a dress rehearsal: we suit up, perform leak checks, then get strapped into our custom-made seats, built from plaster molds taken of our bodies. This is not for our comfort, which is not a particularly high priority for the Russians, but for safety and to save space—no sense building more seat than is strictly necessary. The custom-molded seats will cradle our spines and absorb some of the impact on the hard return to Earth a year after we depart.
As much time as I have spent in the Soyuz simulators in Star City, I’m still amazed by how difficult it is to wedge myself and my pressure suit into my seat. Each time, I have a moment of doubt whether I’m going to fit. But then I do—just barely. If I were to sit up out of the seat liner, my head would smash against the wall. I wonder how my taller colleagues do it. Once we’re strapped in, we practice using the hardware, reaching out for buttons, reading data off screens, grabbing our checklists. We discuss what we might want to have customized for us, down to details such as where we want our timers (used for timing engine burns), where we want our pencils, and where we want the bits of Velcro that will allow us to put things “down” in space.
When we finish, we clamber back out of the hatch and look around the dusty hangar. The next Progress resupply vehicle is here; it looks very similar to the Soyuz, because the Russians never create two designs when one will do. In a few months, this Progress will deliver equipment, experiments, food, oxygen, and care packages to us on the ISS. After that, a Soyuz will launch in July carrying a new three-person crew. Somewhere in this hangar, the parts for the next Soyuz to fly after that are being assembled, and another one after that, and another one after that. The Russians have been launching the Soyuz since I was three years old.
The Soyuz spacecraft—Soyuz means “union,” as in “Soviet Union,” in Russian—is designed to maneuver in space, dock with the station, and keep human beings alive, but the rockets are the workhorses, humanity’s answer to the pull of Earth’s gravity. The rockets (which for some odd reason are also called Soyuz) are prepared for launch in an assembly and test facility across from the hangars known as site 112. Gennady, Misha, and I cross the street, pass the gathered Russian media, enter that enormous building, and stand in another cavernous, quiet room, this time regarding our rocket. Gunmetal gray, it lies on its side. Unlike the space shuttle or the colossal Apollo/Saturn that preceded it, the Soyuz spacecraft and rocket combination is assembled horizontally and rolled out to the launchpad in that position. Only when it reaches the launchpad, a couple of days before we launch, will it be set upright to vertical, pointing toward its destination. This is yet another example of how the Russians and Americans do things differently. In this case, the procedure is less ceremonial than the NASA way, with its stately, majestic rollouts of vertical launch vehicles balanced on an enormous crawler transporter.