by Scott Kelly
We say our good nights and float back to the U.S. segment, remembering to bring our spoons and leftovers with us. Back in my CQ, I look through the plan for tomorrow, Saturday. As often happens up here, work will continue into the weekend, and I will do my required exercise sessions as well. I take off my pants and secure them under a bungee cord, don’t bother changing my shirt, and brush my teeth. I put on my headset and call Amiko to talk for a few minutes before going to sleep. It’s still early in the evening for her. I tell her about the Dragon capture, about Fifty Shades of Grey, about how the carbon dioxide is bugging me again, about Gennady’s Soyuz story. She tells me about her workday, a lot of which she spent recording an episode of NASA’s Space to Ground web series. Not long ago, she told me that her older son, Corbin, had advised her to take a break from thinking about the space station now and then. “Your work is space, and your home life is space,” he told her. “You never get away from it.” He was right. She is still helping her eighteen-year-old son, Tristan, deal with the consequences of his car having caught fire. She has also been helping my daughter Samantha and running errands for my father. I’m lucky to have Amiko taking care of things for me on the ground, and sometimes it bugs me that I can never do much to help her. This year in space is a test of endurance for Amiko as well, and it’s important for me to remember that.
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IT’S STRANGE WAKING UP here on weekends, even more so than waking up other days, because on weekends it becomes clearer that I’m sleeping at my workplace. I wake up Saturday and I’m still at work; wake up on Sunday, still at work. Months later, I’ll still be here. On the weekends we are usually given time to do personal things—videoconference with family, catch up with personal email, read, get a little break from the relentless red line of OSTPV, and get the rest we need to start another week of long days of exacting work.
But there is a certain amount of mission creep into our time on weekends. The couple of hours of exercise on at least one day of the weekend are mandatory, since the damage to our bodies caused by weightlessness does not observe weekends or holidays. And there is station maintenance that can’t be left until Monday, or that we won’t have time to do when Monday comes around. The weekend is also when we clean, and cleaning is a bit more involved in zero gravity. On Earth, dust and lint and hair and fingernail clippings and bits of food fall, so dusting and vacuuming get rid of pretty much everything. On the space station, a piece of dirt can wind up on the wall, the ceiling, or attached to an expensive piece of equipment. A lot of crap winds up on the filters of the ventilation system, and when too much of it starts to build up, our air circulation is affected. Because the walls get dirty and wet, mold is a concern. And because mold spores don’t fall to the floor but linger in our breathable air, they can pose a serious health risk. As a result, we are expected to clean most everything on station we regularly touch every weekend, with a vacuum and antiseptic wipes. We also take samples from the walls to grow in petri dishes and send back to Earth for analysis. So far they haven’t found anything toxic, but it’s both disgusting and fascinating to see what we are cultivating on the walls.
Then there’s the Saturday morning science. When I was up here four years ago, there was an option to participate in additional science work on Saturday mornings, an idea introduced by an astronaut colleague who wanted to volunteer some of his free time to work on experiments that would otherwise go neglected. Since then, astronauts with a special interest in science could participate in Saturday morning science, and those who had other interests, or who—like me—felt they needed time to recover from the stress of the week in order to be ready for emergency situations, were under no pressure to do so. Now Saturday morning science no longer seems optional. In addition to all that, we need to start unpacking Dragon’s cargo. Some of the cargo on Dragon is time sensitive (live mice and fresh vegetables, most notably). Once everyone is up and caffeinated, Terry and Samantha meet me in Node 2. We arm ourselves with checklists and cameras—a still camera to document each step of our work for later analysis by NASA and SpaceX, and a video camera so mission control can see exactly what we’re doing in real time. When we’re ready, we call down to the ground so they can follow along with us.
When Samantha opens the ISS hatch that leads to the Dragon and slides it out of the way, an unmistakable smell hits me—slightly burned, slightly metallic—the smell of space. Samantha smiles at me when she recognizes it. She has smelled it before, when her earlier crewmates went through a process similar to this one to open the hatch on her Soyuz, and again when two of her crewmates did a spacewalk.
We remove and stow a canvas covering that protects the hatch. Then Samantha and I work together to remove the four assemblies that power the latches and bolts that mated the two spacecraft together. It’s a long, involved procedure to remove and properly cap all the connectors. The biggest risk here is damaging one of the connectors or losing a cap, troublingly easy to do when everything is floating around. We connect cables for power and data between the two spacecraft.
We tell the ground that we have successfully completed these steps.
“Station, Houston on Space to Ground Two, you have a go for step six, ingressing Dragon,” capcom tells us.
“Copy that.”
We put on goggles and dust masks before opening Dragon’s hatch to protect us from dust and debris that might be floating inside. Samantha opens the hatch and slides it aside, then turns on the light inside Dragon. The first task is to make sure the air gets mixed between the two spacecraft—there is some danger that Dragon could be harboring a pocket of CO2 or some other gas, and without gravity to keep the air constantly mixing, we have to install vent lines that will keep air circulating here as it does in the rest of the station. We take samples of the air inside Dragon to send back for analysis on Earth, and the Russians take their own sample (because NASA has sometimes questioned the Russian space agency’s atmospheric standards, they insist on testing our air as well). We visually inspect the area around both hatches to make sure nothing has been damaged. These berthing ports have been used over and over again, and I’m amazed that so far none of them has failed or shown any signs of wear. Everything has gone just as planned, and we now have 4,300 pounds of cargo to unload.
Our care packages are clearly marked and easily accessible once we open the hatch, as are the mice, the fresh food, and ice cream. Terry and I distribute the packages to everyone, feeling a bit like Santa Claus. These items were gathered from our families and friends months ago in order to be packed into the Dragon. Care package items need to be small, light, and nonperishable. I leave mine in my CQ to open in private later.
The fresh food bags contain apples, pears, red and green peppers. They smell great. We will eat them at nearly every meal for the next few days before they spoil.
I unpack the live mice and transfer them, one by one, from the habitat they launched in to their larger, more comfortable facility in the U.S. lab. They scramble around, trying to make sense of weightlessness. I watch their faces and wonder if their tiny brains can process the change they have experienced. Like people, they’re not looking too good at first.
All the cargo we unload from Dragon must be packed into labeled fabric bags. The labels have bar codes, just like food in a grocery store, as well as printed text indicating what’s in each. Everything has a purpose and a destination—not only to go to a certain module, but to go in a specific bag or locker on a specific wall (or floor or ceiling) of that module. It’s so easy to lose stuff up here that if we were to put something in the wrong place, we may never see it again. This makes the work of unpacking Dragon both tedious and stressful, a combination that seems to occur a lot on the International Space Station. After spending a few hours at the interface between Dragon and ISS, I notice that my arms smell like space.
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SINCE IT’S SATURDAY, I have a bit more time to make personal phone calls to friends and family. I’ve found myself thinking about my mother t
oday—it’s been three years since she died, and though I’m not usually especially attuned to dates and anniversaries, I’m wishing she could see what I’m doing up here. She was so proud of Mark and me when we became astronauts, and she came to all six of our launches in Florida. The further I’ve gone in my career, the clearer it seems to me that the early lessons she taught Mark and me by example have made a huge difference in my life. Seeing her set herself an incredibly tough goal—to pass the men’s physical fitness test to join the police department—and then to conquer it, was worth more than all the pep talks in the world. I remember watching her post her workout schedule on the fridge, detailing which days she would lift how much weight or how far she would run. As the weeks went by and more of those workouts were crossed out, we saw her get stronger. Her accomplishment wasn’t meant to be instructional for Mark and me, but it was.
All the stories I’ve heard about my mother’s years on the police force made me believe she was the best kind of cop. She truly cared about the people she interacted with, even if they were doing dumb stuff, and she put their safety ahead of her own. She could often defuse a situation by listening rather than threatening, and she made compassionate judgments when it might have been easier to arrest an offender. She hated to take people to jail and would often come home late because she had driven someone home herself instead. My mother sustained a lot of injuries on the job. After ten years, her back ailments had become serious enough that she retired on a disability pension and didn’t work again. She wasn’t sorry to leave; she had found police work very demanding, though she was proud of her service and we were proud of her. She was happy to fill her time with her artwork and, later, her grandchildren.
When I get a chance to float into my CQ, I see that Amiko has emailed me. She put some flowers on my mother’s grave today and took a picture to include in the email. Seeing my mother’s name on her gravestone, the bright colors of the flowers, the green of the grass all around—I’m pulled back to Earth all at once. The image reminds me both of the simple wonder of things like flowers and grass and also of the fact that we have to lose the people we love most. Most of all, I’m moved by Amiko’s gesture. She has a lot to deal with on the weekends, but she remembered this date and drove out to the cemetery to do this because I couldn’t.
“Thanks for doing that,” I tell her when I call. “That means a lot to me.” There was more I wanted to say but I can’t quite put it into words. Amiko was with me at the end of my mother’s life. She was with me when I learned I would be going on this mission. She knows, more than anyone but my brother, what it would mean to my mother to see what I’m doing now.
“I remembered what I wanted to tell you,” I say. “I spent all day getting into SpaceX, and now my arms smell like space.”
“That’s so cool,” Amiko says. “Tell me what it smells like.” She knows, because I’ve told her before. She listens again.
We continue to unpack Dragon on Sunday. I work through a few bags of medical supplies, clothes, and food. I’m taking a break to do some cleaning—it’s still Sunday, after all—and not long afterward I hear a fire alarm.
Astronauts do not scare easily, and this alarm does not exactly scare me, but it certainly gets my attention. Fire is on the short list of things that can kill you in space incredibly quickly. A fire on the old Russian space station Mir blinded and choked the crew within seconds, and if it hadn’t been for their quick reaction they could have died. Some of the older cosmonauts, including Gennady, refuse to cut their hair in space, because Sasha Kaleri was cutting his hair when the fire started on Mir. I know as I hear the first peals of the alarm that I have set it off myself—I’m in the middle of cleaning an air filter, setting free some dust that must have triggered the sensitive smoke detector. Still, an alarm is an alarm, and everyone has to respond according to the checklist. It takes the ground quite a while to recover from the ventilation shutdown that is the automated response to any fire alarm. By the time it’s resolved, I’m in a pretty crappy mood.
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ON A MONDAY MORNING a couple of weeks later, I prepare to start working on the rodent experiment, designed to study the negative effects of spaceflight on mammal physiology, with the goal of developing ways to prevent them. So much of the damage to our tissues mirrors the effects of aging—muscle wasting, bone loss, cardiovascular weakening; the solutions that come from these studies will have wide-ranging benefits for humanity, not just for space.
I get out the scalpels, hemostats, tweezers, scissors, probes, syringes filled with sedatives to spare the mice pain, and fixatives to preserve the tissues. I set up the glove box, a glass case with gloves built into the front that lets me manipulate what’s in the box without exposing it to the rest of the station. On Earth the glove box wouldn’t be necessary for this kind of work, but in weightlessness it’s worth avoiding having scalpels and all the rest floating around the lab. I’ve already discovered that the habitat isn’t fail-safe, and I have to constantly look out for small brown UFOs while floating through the lab.
The scientists who design the experiments conducted on station try to minimize the time and attention required from astronauts. There are many experiments going on here that I know absolutely nothing about because they will be worked on by other crew members or because they don’t require human involvement at all, humming along on their own either inside or outside ISS for the entire year. There are others that require only that I push a button or load a new sample once in a while. Some will take more of my time, such as this rodent experiment. I will spend all day with the mice, and the work will be precise and demanding. In order to carry it out, I trained with the scientists in charge of the research before my launch, learning the skills of dissection.
Terry takes the first mouse out of its habitat and slips it into a small container to transfer to the glove box. With nothing to hold on to, she does a slow circle in zero g, working her paws uselessly. I’ve been watching the mice float and wriggle, and it seems as though they have adapted quite a bit and are learning how to get around in this new environment with its new laws of physics. Even their physical condition has appeared to improve since they’ve been here. I set up the cameras for a live downlink with the scientists on the ground in Alabama and California who will talk me through my work in real time. I put the mouse against a piece of wire mesh—since they seem to like to have something to hold on to—then grip the loose skin on the back of her neck, the way you’d scruff a cat, hold the tail between my pinky and ring finger, and slip the needle and syringe full of sedative into her belly.
Once the drug takes effect, Terry puts the mouse into a small X-ray machine. Next I slice into her abdomen, exposing her organs, then insert a syringe into her heart and draw blood into a tiny tube, not unlike the blood I take from myself for the human research studies, except that this step euthanizes the mouse. I put the tube into a bag and label it carefully. Next I remove the mouse’s left eye, following instructions from the ground. That goes into a container and gets labeled. Then I remove her hind legs. This set of experiments is specifically designed to learn about eye damage, bone loss, and muscle wasting. It’s not lost on me that all of the biological processes affecting this mouse are also affecting my own body.
Early in my career as an astronaut I was skeptical of whether I wanted to fly on the International Space Station: most of what station astronauts do is science. After all, I’m a pilot. The goal that had driven me to become an astronaut was to fly more and more challenging aircraft until I got to the hardest thing there was to fly: the space shuttle. Dissecting a mouse is a far cry from landing a space shuttle—but then again, so is unpacking cargo, repairing an air conditioner, or learning to speak Russian, and I do those things too. I’ve come to appreciate that this job has challenged me to do not just one hard thing, but many hard things.
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MORE THAN four hundred experiments will take place on ISS during this expedition, designed by scientists from many countries an
d representing many fields of study. Most of the experiments in one way or another study the effects of gravity. Pretty much everything we know about the world around us is influenced by gravity, but when you can remove that element from the subject of an experiment—whether it’s a mouse, a lettuce plant, a fluid, or a flame—you have unlocked a whole new variable. This is why the science taking place on station is so far ranging; there are few branches of science that can’t benefit from learning more about how gravity affects their subjects.
NASA scientists talk about the research taking place on station as falling into two large categories. The first comprises studies that might benefit life on Earth. These include research on the properties of chemicals that could be used in new drugs, combustion studies that are unlocking new ways to get more efficiency out of the fuel we burn, and the development of new materials. The second large category has to do with solving problems for future space exploration: testing new life support equipment, solving technical problems of spaceflight, studying new ways of handling the demands of the human body in space. All the experiments of which I am the main subject fall into this second category: the study comparing Mark and me as twins over the course of the year; the study on the effects of a year in space on Misha and me; the work being done on my eyes and heart and blood vessels. My sleep is being studied, as is my nutrition. My DNA will be analyzed to better understand the effects of spaceflight at a genetic level. Some of the studies being conducted on me are psychological and social: What are the effects of long-term isolation and confinement?