by Scott Kelly
Terry Virts and me taking a break from the workday in Node 1, our living room and dining room onboard the ISS Credit 5
There are a lot of things about living in weightlessness that are fun, but eating is not one of them. I miss being able to sit in a chair while eating a meal, relaxing and pausing to connect with other people. Eating on the space station, at my workplace, three times a day, while constantly floating and steadying myself, is hardly the same. My egg burrito will float if I let go of it, as will my spoon, egg crumbs, a squeeze bottle of mustard that came up on the last resupply rocket, and a tiny perfect sphere of coffee. The “table” we use for eating has Velcro strips and duct tape to help us keep things in place, but it’s still a challenge to manage all these potentially floating components. I bite the coffee sphere out of the air and swallow it before it can drift into a piece of equipment, or onto a crewmate or my pants (as they need to last six months). The biggest concern is food getting stuck on the hatch seal between modules, one of which is right by the table where we eat. We need to be able to close and seal that hatch quickly in an emergency.
As I’m eating, Terry floats in and wishes me a good morning while looking for coffee. Terry’s astronaut class of 2000 has gotten a raw deal in terms of flight opportunities, since the Columbia disaster grounded the fleet at the same time they completed their initial training and became eligible to fly. Terry didn’t get his chance on the shuttle for ten years. He served as the pilot for STS-130, the mission that delivered the last two modules to the International Space Station—Node 3 and the Cupola. Terry should have then had the chance to command a shuttle mission of his own, but the program ended soon after. He had to wait another four and a half years before flying again, on this mission.
Like me, Terry was a test pilot before joining NASA—in his case, with the Air Force. He has thick dirty-blond hair, a pleasant demeanor, and his default expression is a smile. His call sign is “Flanders,” after the lovably square character Ned Flanders on The Simpsons. Terry has the positive attributes of Ned Flanders—optimism, enthusiasm, friendliness—and none of the negative ones. He is one of a small handful of vocally religious astronauts, and while some of my colleagues are bothered by this, I’ve never had a problem with Terry on this issue or any other. I’ve found him to be consistently competent, and as a leader, he is a consensus builder rather than an authoritarian. Since I’ve been up here and have been commander, he has always been respectful of my previous experience, always open to suggestions about how to do things better without getting defensive or competitive. He loves baseball, so there’s always a game on some laptop, especially when the Astros or the Orioles are playing. I’ve gotten used to the rhythm of the nine-inning games marking time for a few hours of our workday.
Terry eats a maple muffin top while I’m finishing my egg burrito. Next, I eat a pouch of rehydrated oatmeal with raisins. The food portions are small, to discourage waste, so we often wind up eating a few different things for one meal. We are going to have a long morning, and I don’t know when we’ll be able to break for lunch.
My crewmates and I converge in the U.S. lab for the daily planning conference with mission control in Houston, people at other NASA sites, and their counterparts in Russia, Japan, and Europe. I find I’m adapting to being up here quicker than last time, both physically—in terms of living in weightlessness—and in terms of following the routines, using the equipment, doing the work. I have a different outlook this time knowing that I’m going to be here so long. I’m running a marathon rather than a sprint. As I pace myself for a year’s stay, I have to constantly remind myself that for certain things, better can be the enemy of good enough.
The conference generally starts at 7:30 a.m. our time. I say good morning to Samantha, who is already there; Gennady, Misha, and Anton will take part in the conference from the Russian segment. Once we are all assembled, Terry grabs the microphone from its position Velcroed to the wall.
“Houston, station on Space to Ground One, we are ready for the DPC.”
Mission control answers with a bright “Good morning, station!” even though it’s 2:30 a.m. in Houston. We go over the day’s plans for a few minutes, mostly about the details of the Dragon capture. We’d been given a general timeline, but now we nail down exactly what time we need to get started with the procedure, the status of Dragon, whether it’s behaving as expected, and when it will be in certain positions relative to the station. When we are done with Houston, they hand us over to the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Then Huntsville hands us over to Munich so we can coordinate with the European Space Agency. Then we talk to “J-COM” in the Japanese mission control in Tsukuba, Japan. Then it’s time to talk to Russia: Terry turns it over to the cosmonauts by saying “Dobroye utro, Tsup va Moskvy, Anton pozhaluysta.” (“Good morning, Control Center Moscow. Anton, please.”) Then Anton takes over the mic because he’s in charge in the Russian segment, and he leads the planning meeting with the Russians. Their meeting style is very different from ours—the ground asks the cosmonauts how they are feeling, which seems like a waste of time because they never say anything other than “khorosho”—good. At times I’ve dared them to say “not great,” “just okay,” or even “I feel like shit,” but they refuse to take me up on it even when I offer them money.
The cosmonauts report on the atmospheric pressure of the station, information their flight controllers can see plainly on their own consoles. Next, they have to read back a list of deorbit parameters that, again, the ground already has—they sent them up to us. I find this waste of time maddening, but maybe it’s an excuse to talk to the crew and gauge their moods and frustration levels.
The Russian space agency has a much different system for compensating their cosmonauts than we do: Their base salaries are much lower, but they get paid bonuses for each day they fly in space. (I get only five dollars per diem, but my base salary is much better.) However, their bonuses are decreased whenever they make “mistakes,” those mistakes defined rather arbitrarily. I suspect that complaining, even making very legitimate complaints, can be defined as a mistake, costing them money and, potentially, the chance to fly in space again. As a result, everything is always “khorosho.”
All of this coordinating with sites all over the world might sound time-consuming, and it can be, but no one would ever suggest changing it. With so many space agencies cooperating, it’s important that everyone knows what everyone else is doing. Plans can change quickly, and a misunderstanding could be costly, or deadly. We do this whole circuit of control centers both morning and evening, five days a week. I’ve chosen not to think about how many times I’ll do these before I come back to Earth.
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DRAGON IS in its orbit ten kilometers away from us, matching our speed of 17,500 miles per hour. We can see its light blinking at us on the external cameras. Soon, SpaceX mission control in Hawthorne, California, will move it to within two kilometers. Then authority transfers to mission control in Houston. There are stopping points along the way, at 350 meters, then 250 meters, then 30 meters, and finally the capture point at 10 meters. At each stopping point, teams on the ground will check Dragon’s systems and evaluate its position before calling “go” or “no go” to move on to the next stage. Inside 250 meters, we will get involved by making sure the vehicle stays within a safe corridor, that it is behaving as expected, and that we are ready to abort if required. Once Dragon is close enough, Samantha will capture it with one of the station’s robot arms. This is a glacially slow and deliberate process—one of the many things that’s very different between movies and real life. In the films Interstellar and 2001: A Space Odyssey, a visiting spacecraft zips up to a space station and locks onto it, a hatch pops open, and people pass through, all over the course of a few minutes. In reality, we operate with the knowledge that one spacecraft is always a potentially fatal threat to another—a bigger threat the closer it gets—and so we move very slowly and deliberately.
Samant
ha is going to operate the robot arm from the robotics workstation in the Cupola today (the robot arm’s official name is Canadarm2 because it was made by the Canadian Space Agency). Terry will be her backup, and I will be helping out with the approach and rendezvous procedures. Terry and I squeeze in with her, watching the data screen over her shoulder that shows the speed and position of Dragon.
Samantha Cristoforetti is one of the few women to have served as a fighter pilot in the Italian Air Force, and she is unfailingly competent. She is also friendly and quick to laugh, and among her many other qualifications to fly in space, she has a rare talent for language. She has a native-level fluency in English and Russian, the two official languages of the ISS—she sometimes acts as an interpreter between cosmonauts and astronauts if we have to talk about something nuanced or complicated. She also speaks French, German, and her native Italian, and she’s also working on learning Chinese. For some people who hope to fly in space, language can be a challenge. We all have to be able to speak at least one second language (I’ve been studying Russian for years, and my cosmonaut crewmates speak my language much better than I speak theirs), but the European and Japanese astronauts have the added burden of learning two languages if they don’t already speak English or Russian.
When I first met Samantha, I would have described her as a hip young European; she has a worldly, sophisticated air about her. I found out later that she had participated in foreign exchange programs when she was young, attending high school in Minnesota for a year, spent a lot of time in Germany, and went to Alabama one summer when she was a teenager to attend Space Camp, a simulated astronaut training program. She has a seriously geeky side—she often tweets about science fiction like Doctor Who and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and a lot of people were surprised and moved when she tweeted a picture of herself wearing a Star Trek uniform and giving a Vulcan signal out to the cosmos when Leonard Nimoy died. I am impressed with how well Samantha deals with the European Space Agency’s control center in Munich; at times they seem indifferent and inattentive to what we are doing on board, which can be frustrating. She brings good humor to the most boring or annoying situations.
Before Samantha left Earth, she took Terry to her hair salon in Houston so her stylist could teach him to replicate her sleek asymmetrical haircut in space. Haircuts are one of the many tasks ISS crew members have to perform for one another (in addition to giving simple medical tests, drawing blood, doing ultrasounds, and even performing basic dentistry). Terry and Samantha posted pictures of the hairstyling lesson on Twitter, and their followers seemed tickled by the idea that Terry, the upcoming commander of the International Space Station, was being trained as a temporary cosmetologist. Halfway through their mission together, the big day came: Samantha felt her hair was getting too long and asked Terry to get out the equipment. Because we can’t leave bits of hair floating in the air for others to inhale, our haircut equipment includes a vacuum cleaner. Terry tried his very best, but he still screwed it up—the layers that Samantha’s stylist had made seem so easy to replicate under Earth’s gravity were now floating all over the place. Samantha has spent the rest of her mission with her thick, dark hair sticking out from her head in a perfect brush that reminds me of a Russian fur hat.
The capcom speaking to us on the ground today is David Saint-Jacques, a Canadian astronaut. The term “capcom” is left over from the early days of Mercury when the astronauts went to space in capsules—one person in mission control was designated the “capsule communicator,” the sole person in voice contact with the astronaut in space. “Capsule communicator” was shortened to “capcom,” and the name stuck. Today David is talking us through the capture process, announcing Dragon’s position as it moves, controlled by the ground through each of its preplanned stops.
“Station, Houston, on Space to Ground Two. Dragon is inside the two-hundred-meter keep-out sphere.”
The keep-out sphere is an imaginary radius boundary around the station, meant to protect us from accidental collisions. “The crew now has the authority to issue an abort.” This means that we can stop the process ourselves if we lose contact with Houston or if Dragon is outside the corridor. As Dragon approaches station, the early morning light catches the jagged edges of the Himalayas below. The Earth seems to zip by at an impossible speed.
“Houston on Two for rendezvous,” Terry says. “Houston, capture conditions are confirmed. We’re ready for Dragon capture. We’re ready for step four.”
“Copy that, stand by for capture, and just for your situational awareness, we expect that to take us about five or six minutes.” Teams on the ground will give us one final go/no go for capture.
When the Dragon is within ten meters, we inhibit the station’s thrusters to prevent any unintended jolts. Samantha takes control of the robotic arm, using her left hand to control the arm’s translation (in, out, up, down, left, right) and her right hand to control its rotation (pitch, roll, and yaw).
“Station on Two for rendezvous,” we hear from mission control. “You are go for capture sequence.”
“Station copies,” Samantha answers.
Samantha reaches out with the robot arm, watching a monitor that offers a view from a camera on the “hand,” or end effector, as well as two other video monitors showing data describing Dragon’s position and speed. She can also look out the big Cupola windows to see what she’s doing. She moves the arm out away from the station—very slowly and deliberately. Closing the space between the two spacecraft inch by inch, Samantha never wavers or goes off course. On the center screen, the grapple fixture on Dragon grows larger and larger. She makes very precise adjustments to keep the spacecraft and the robot arm perfectly lined up.
The arm creeps out slowly, slowly. It’s almost touching the Dragon.
Samantha pulls the trigger. “Capture,” she says.
Perfect.
“We have nominal capture confirmed at 5:55 a.m. Central Time, while the station and Dragon fly over the northern Pacific Ocean, just to the east of Japan.”
Samantha’s round face has been a study of concentration, her bright brown eyes seeming almost not to blink. The moment capture is confirmed, her face relaxes into a huge smile and she high-fives Terry and me.
Terry speaks: “Houston, capture is complete. Samantha did a perfect job grappling Dragon.”
“Copy and concur. Great job, guys. Congratulations.”
Samantha takes the mic. “I just wanted to say thank you to the folks at SpaceX and you guys in Houston. It’s been just amazing, watching the launch and knowing that it was headed our way and sure enough came knocking on our door. It was steady as a rock and we’re very happy to have it here. It’s exciting to have a new SpaceX dock. There’s lots of science, and even coffee is in there. That’s pretty exciting. So again, thanks a lot and great job to everybody.”
“Thank you, Sam, and thank you, Terry, there’s a bunch of very grateful people on the ground to see this go as smoothly as it has today. Nice job.”
Now control is passing to the robotics officer in Houston (we call him “Robo”), who will maneuver Dragon into a position to be attached to the berthing port on the Earth-facing side of Node 2. Robo is controlling the robotic arm by typing in angles for the joints—they are analyzed by software to ensure the trajectory is safe before they are implemented. Once Dragon is lined up correctly, I will get involved again, monitoring when Dragon comes close enough to the station for “soft” berthing—four nine-inch latches reach out and grab Dragon and pull it into final contact with the ISS—followed by “hard” berthing, sixteen bolts driven through the connection between the space station and the Dragon to securely mate the two spacecraft.
The process of pressurizing the space between the Dragon and the station (the “vestibule”) takes several hours and is important to do correctly. The danger Dragon poses to the station is not over: a mistake in this procedure could cause depressurization. So Samantha and I work through the steps one by one, making
sure to do it right. First we check the integrity of the seal between the station and the Dragon by introducing air into the opening between them, a bit at a time. As when we arrived in the Soyuz, if the air pressure inside the vestibule were to decrease, even a tiny bit, that would indicate that the seal has been compromised and that opening the hatch would mean venting our breathable air out into the cosmos.
After a number of iterations of this process—introduce air, wait, measure pressure; repeat—we declare the seal safe, but we will wait until tomorrow to open the hatch. That step requires its own sequence of exacting steps. I’ve seen crews push themselves to get through the entire process because they were so eager to get into their care packages and fresh food. The process takes hours, though, and especially after the morning we spent with capture, it doesn’t seem like a good idea to push things—there’s too much risk of making a mistake. It will take us the next five weeks to unload all the cargo.
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WHEN I FLOAT into my CQ for a moment to check my email, it’s the first time I’ve had the chance to pause and think today. The carbon dioxide level is high today, nearly four millimeters of mercury. I can check it on the laptops and see exactly what the concentration of CO2 is in our air, but I don’t need to—I can feel it. I can sense the levels with a high degree of accuracy based only on the symptoms I’ve come to know so well: headaches, congestion, burning eyes, irritability. Perhaps the most dangerous symptom is impairment to cognitive function—we have to be able to perform tasks that require a high degree of concentration and attention to detail at a moment’s notice, and in an emergency, which can happen anytime, we need to be able to do those tasks right the first time. Losing just a fraction of our ability to focus, make calculations, or solve problems could cost us our lives. And we are still learning about the long-term effects of breathing so much CO2. It may cause cardiovascular problems and other issues in the future that we don’t yet understand.