by Scott Kelly
If I was a kid now, I imagine I would be diagnosed with ADHD. But back then, I was just a bad student. I learned to squeak by on whatever native intelligence I had, even though I never did any homework. My brother remembers a day in high school when our father sat us down and explained that he could get us into a welders’ union when we graduated. He figured a trade would probably be our best option for a career because we were such poor students. Mark realized then that if he wanted to do something with his life more exciting or lucrative than welding, he had better improve his grades. So he got his ass in gear and did, starting that day. I have no recollection of this conversation, as I was probably looking out the window at a squirrel.
Meanwhile, the principal of our high school, Jerry Tarnoff, was begging me not to quit my trigonometry course, attempting to impress upon me that I had potential if I could just focus. I tried to explain to him how impossible it was for me to pay attention in that class, in any class. His words had no effect on me. I quit trigonometry. After that, whenever I saw him in the hallways, I would avoid his gaze. I was surprised by how much it bugged me to know I had let him down. Still, he never seemed to give up on me. Years later, he came to both of my space shuttle launches, and I think it meant a lot to him to see that his faith had paid off for at least one student.
The only thing that I could really connect with enough to succeed at was my work as an EMT. Mark worked with the local volunteer ambulance unit, too. Later, our dad twisted some arms (maybe literally) to get us hired at the paid ambulance service in nearby Orange, which was a rougher town than West Orange. We got the chance to see more kinds of medical emergencies and learned from them. I spent the summer after high school working as an EMT in Jersey City, which was like being thrown into the big leagues. I had found something that was meaningful to me and that I was good at. I decided to become a doctor, and I knew I could be a good one if I could just get through the ten years of training.
By screwing up my college application, I had wound up at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. (I had meant to apply to the College Park campus.) In my freshman year, I started out with great hope that I could turn things around and be a good student, as I had every previous school year. This determination always lasted just a few days, until I realized once again that it was impossible for me to concentrate in class or to study on my own. Soon I was waking up each morning and struggling to think of a reason to go to class, knowing I wouldn’t absorb any of the professor’s lecture. Often, I didn’t go. How was I going to graduate, let alone do well enough to be accepted by any medical school?
Everything changed that afternoon when I picked up The Right Stuff. I’d never read anything like it before. I’d heard the word “voice” used to describe literature, but this was something I could actually hear in my head. Even out in the middle of the swamp, Wolfe wrote, in this rot-bog of pine trunks, scum slicks, dead dodder vines, and mosquito eggs, even out in this great overripe sump, the smell of “burned beyond recognition” obliterated everything else. I felt the power of those words washing over me, even if some of the words I had to look up in the dictionary. Perilous, neophyte, virulent. I felt like I had found my calling. I wanted to be like the guys in this book, guys who could land a jet on an aircraft carrier at night and then walk away with a swagger. I wanted to be a naval aviator. I was still a directionless, undereducated eighteen-year-old with terrible grades who knew nothing about airplanes. But The Right Stuff had given me the outline of a life plan.
3
PAUL MCCARTNEY is singing over the crackly communication system. So far we’ve heard Coldplay, Bruce Springsteen, Roberta Flack. I happen to like “Killing Me Softly,” but I can’t help but think it’s inappropriate considering the circumstances. I’m crammed in the right-hand seat of the Soyuz, acutely aware of the 280 tons of explosive propellant under me. In an hour, we will tear into the sky. For now, soft rock is distracting us from the pain of sitting in the cramped capsule.
When we got off the bus at the launch site, it was fully dark, floodlights illuminating the launch vehicle so it could be seen from miles around. Though I’ve done it three times before, approaching the rocket I was about to climb into is still an unforgettable experience. I took in the size and power of this machine, the condensation from the hypercooled fuel billowing eerily in a giant cloud, enveloping our feet and legs. As always, the number of people around the launchpad surprised me, considering how dangerous it is to have a fully fueled rocket—basically a bomb—sitting there. At the Kennedy Space Center, the area was always cleared of nonessential personnel for three miles around, and even the closeout crew drove to a safe viewing site after strapping us into our seats. Today, dozens of people were milling around, some of them smoking, and a few of them will watch the launch from dangerously close. Once, I watched a Soyuz launch while serving as backup for one of the crew, I was standing outside the bunker, just a few hundred yards away. As the engines ignited, the manager of the launchpad said in Russian, “Open your airway and brace for shock.”
In 1960, an explosion on the launchpad killed hundreds of people, an incident that would have caused a full investigation and an array of new regulations for NASA. The Soviets pretended it hadn’t happened and sent Yuri Gagarin to space the following year. The Soviet Union acknowledged the disaster only after the information about it was declassified in 1989.
By tradition, there is one last ritual: Gennady, Misha, and I climb the first few stairs heading toward the elevator, then turn to say good-bye to the assembled crowd, waving to the people of Earth one last time.
Now we wait in the Soyuz, something we’ve all experienced before, so we know our roles and know what to expect. I anticipate the excruciating pain in my knees that nothing seems to alleviate. I try to distract myself with work: I check our communication systems and introduce oxygen into the capsule with a series of valves—one of my primary responsibilities as the flight engineer 2, a position that I like to describe as the copilot of the copilot of the spacecraft. Gennady and Misha murmur to each other in Russian, and certain words jump out: “ignition,” “dinner,” “oxygen,” “whore” (the all-purpose Russian swear). The capsule heats up as we wait. The music we hear now is “Time to Say Goodbye” by Sarah Brightman, who was going to travel to the International Space Station later this year but has had to cancel her plans. A Russian pop song, “Aviator,” follows.
The activation of the launch escape system wakes us up with a loud thunk. The escape system is a separate rocket connected to the top of the spacecraft, much like the one on the old Apollo/Saturn that was designed to pull the capsule free in case of an explosion on the pad or a failure during launch. (The Soyuz escape rocket was used once, saving two cosmonauts from a fireball, in 1983.) The fuel and oxidizer turbo pumps spin up to speed with a screaming whine—they will feed massive amounts of liquid oxygen and kerosene to the engines during ascent.
Russian mission control warns us it’s one minute to launch. On an American spacecraft, we would already know because we’d see the countdown clock ticking backward toward zero. Unlike NASA, the Russians don’t feel the drama of the countdown is necessary. On the space shuttle, I never knew whether I was really going to space that day until I felt the solid rocket boosters light under me; there were always more scrubs than launches. On Soyuz, there is no question. The Russians haven’t scrubbed a launch after the crew was strapped in since 1969.
“My gotovy,” Gennady responds into his headset. We are ready.
“Zazhiganiye,” mission control says. Ignition.
The rocket engines of the first stage roar to full capacity. We sit rumbling on the launchpad for a few seconds, vibrating with the engines’ power—we need to burn off some of the propellant to become light enough to lift off. Then our seats push hard into our backs. Some astronauts use the term “kick in the pants” to describe this moment. The slam of acceleration—going from still to the speed of sound in a minute—is heart pounding and addictive, and there is no ques
tion that we are going straight up.
It’s night, but we wouldn’t be able to see anything out our windows even if it were broad daylight. The capsule is encased in a metal cylinder, called a fairing, which protects it from aerodynamic stress until we are out of the atmosphere. Inside, it’s dark and loud and we are sweaty in our Sokol suits. My visor fogs up, and I have trouble reading my checklist.
The four strap-on boosters of four engines each fall away smoothly after two minutes, leaving the four remaining engines of the second stage to push us into space. As we accelerate to three times the Earth’s gravity, the crushing force smashes me into my seat and makes it difficult to breathe.
Gennady reports to the control center that we are all feeling fine and reads off data from the monitors. My knees hurt, but the excitement of launch has masked the pain some. The second-stage rockets fire for three minutes, and as we are feeling their thrust, the fairing is jettisoned away from us in two pieces by explosive charges. We can see outside for the first time. I look out the window at my elbow, but I see only the same black we launched into.
Suddenly, we are thrown forward against our straps, then slammed back into our seats. The second stage has finished, and the third stage has taken over. After the violence of staging, we feel some roll oscillations, a mild sensation of rocking back and forth, which isn’t alarming. Then the last engine cuts off with a bang and there is a jolt, like a minor car crash. Then nothing.
Our zero-g talisman, a stuffed snowman belonging to Gennady’s youngest daughter, floats on a string. We are in weightlessness. This is the moment we call MECO, pronounced “mee-ko,” which stands for “main engine cutoff.” It’s always a shock. The spacecraft is now in orbit around the Earth. After having been subjected to such strong and strange forces, the sudden quiet and stillness feel unnatural.
We smile at one another and reach up for a three-handed high-five, happy to have survived this far. We won’t feel the weight of gravity again for a very long time.
Something seems out of the ordinary, and after a bit I realize what it is. “There’s no debris,” I point out to Gennady and Misha, and they agree it’s strange. Usually MECO reveals what junk has been lurking in the spacecraft, held in their hiding places by gravity—random tiny nuts and bolts, staples, metal shavings, plastic flotsam, hairs, dust—what we call foreign object debris, and of course NASA has an acronym for it: FOD. There were people at the Kennedy Space Center whose entire job was to keep this stuff out of the space shuttles. Having spent time in the hangar where the Soyuz spacecraft are maintained and prepared for flight, and having observed that it’s not very clean compared to the space shuttle’s Orbiter Processing Facility, I’m impressed that the Russians have somehow maintained a high standard of FOD avoidance.
The Soyuz solar arrays unfurl themselves from the sides of the instrumentation module, and the antennas are deployed. We are now a fully functional spacecraft in orbit. It’s a relief, but only briefly.
We open our helmets. The fan noise and pump noise blending together are so loud we have trouble hearing one another. I had remembered this about my previous mission to the ISS, of course, but still I can’t believe it’s so noisy. I can’t believe I’ll ever get used to it.
“I realized a few minutes ago, Misha,” I say, “that our lives without noise have ceased to exist.”
“Guys,” Gennady says. “Tselyi god!” An entire year!
“Ne napominai, Gena,” answers Misha. Gena, don’t remind me.
“Vy geroi blya.” You’re freaking heroes.
“Yep,” Misha agrees. “Totally screwed.”
Now we are in the rendezvous stage. Joining two objects in two different orbits traveling at different speeds (in this case, the Soyuz and the ISS) is a long process. It’s one we understand well and have been through many times, but still it’s a delicate maneuver. We pick up a strange broadcast over Europe:
…scattered one thousand four hundred feet. Temperature one nine. Dew point one seven. Altimeter two niner niner five. ATIS information Oscar…
It’s some airport’s terminal broadcast, a recording giving pilots information about weather and approaches. We shouldn’t be receiving this, but the Soyuz comm system is horrible. Every time Russian mission control talks to us we can hear the characteristic dit-dit-dit of cell phone interference. I want to yell at them to turn off their cell phones, but in the name of international cooperation I don’t.
A few hours into the flight my vision is still good, with no blurring—a positive sign. I do start to feel congested, though, which is a symptom I’ve experienced in space before. I feel my legs cramp, from being crammed into this seat for hours, and there is the never-ending knee pain. After MECO, we can unstrap ourselves, but there isn’t really anywhere to go.
Gennady opens the hatch to the orbital module, the other habitable part of the Soyuz, where the crew can stay if it takes more than a few hours to get to the station, but this module doesn’t have much more space. I disconnect my medical belt, a strap that goes around my chest to monitor my respiration and heartbeat during launch, and float up to the orbital module to use the toilet. It’s nearly impossible to pee while still halfway in my pressure suit. I can’t imagine how the women do it. After I get back into my seat, mission control yells at me to plug my medical belt back in. We get strapped back in a few hours before we will be docking. Gennady scrolls through the checklist on his tablet and starts inputting commands to the Soyuz systems. The process is largely automated, but he needs to stay on top of it in case something goes wrong and he has to take over.
Soyuz rendering showing the three sections of the spacecraft: orbital module, descent module, service module Credit 2
When it’s time for the docking probe to deploy, nothing happens. We wait. Gennady says something to Russian mission control in rapid-fire Russian. They respond, sounding annoyed, then garble into static. We are not sure if they heard us. We are still a long way from ISS.
“Fucking blya,” Gennady groans. Fucking bullshit.
Still no indication the docking probe has deployed. This could be a problem.
The process of docking two spacecraft together has remained pretty much unchanged from the Gemini days: one spacecraft sticks out a probe (in this case, us), inserts it into a receptacle called a drogue in the other spacecraft (the ISS), a connection is made, everyone cracks sex jokes, we leak-check the interface before opening the hatch and greeting our new crewmates. The process has been reliable for the past fifty years, but this time the probe doesn’t appear to have worked.
The three of us give one another a look, an international I-can’t-fucking-believe-this look. Soon, ISS will be looming in the window, its eight solar array wings glinting in the sun like the legs of a giant insect. But without the docking probe, we won’t be able to connect to it and climb aboard. We’ll have to return to Earth. Depending on when the next Soyuz will be ready, we might have to wait weeks or months. We could miss our chance altogether.
We contemplate the prospect of coming back to Earth, how ridiculous we’ll feel climbing out of this capsule, saying hello again to people we’ve just said the biggest good-bye in the world to. Comm with the ground is intermittent, so they can’t help us much in our efforts to figure out what’s going on. I turn to see Misha’s face. He is shaking his head in disappointment.
Once Gennady and Misha transition the computer software to a new mode, we see that the probe is in fact deployed. It was just a software “funny.”
All three of us sigh with relief. This day hasn’t been for nothing. We are still going to the space station.
I watch the fuzzy black-and-white image on our display as the docking port on ISS inches closer and closer. I wonder if it’s true that the probe is actually okay. The last part of the rendezvous is exciting, much more dynamic than the space shuttle docking ever was. The shuttle had to be docked manually, so it was a slow ballet with little room for error. But the Soyuz normally docks with ISS automatically, and in the la
st minutes of the approach it whips itself around quickly to do an adjustment burn. Even though we’d known to expect this, it’s still attention getting, and I watch out the window as the station comes flying into view, its brilliant metal sparkling in the sunlight as if it’s on fire. The engines fire briefly, and we hear and feel the acceleration. Leftover fuel vents outside, glinting in the sun. With the burn complete, we snap back into position to move toward the docking port.
When we finally make contact with the station, we hear and feel the eerie sound of the probe hitting, then scratching its way into the drogue, a grinding metal-on-metal sound that ends with a satisfying clunk. Now both ISS and the Soyuz are commanded to free drift—they are no longer controlling their attitude and are rotating freely in space until a more solid connection can be made. The probe is retracted to draw the two vehicles closer together, then hooks are driven through the docking port to reinforce the connection. We’ve made it. We slap one another on the arms.
I join Gennady in the orbital module, where we struggle out of the Sokol suits we put on nearly ten hours earlier. We are tired and sweaty but excited to be attached to our new home. I take off the diaper I’ve been wearing since I left Earth and put it in a Russian wet trash bag for later disposal on the ISS. I get into the blue flight suit I call my Captain America suit because of the huge American flag emblazoned across the front. I hate these flight suits—the Russian who has been making them for years can’t be made to understand that we stretch an inch or two in space, so within a few weeks I will no longer be able to wear the Captain America suit without having my balls crushed.