Endurance

by Scott Kelly

  After we finish up with the mouse and communicate with the ground about it, I have my first videoconference with Charlotte. Unlike phone calls, these conferences have to be planned in advance. I’m ready with my laptop and my headset on at the appointed time, and when Charlotte’s round face pops up on my screen she breaks out in a huge smile. The interface is similar to Skype or FaceTime—I can see Charlotte’s face and the room behind her in a large window on the right of my laptop screen, while on the left is a smaller window that shows me floating in my CQ. I haven’t seen her since Baikonur, a month ago. She is eleven and looks different every time I see her—she seems to have aged a year.

  Charlotte is a quiet and thoughtful person by nature, and self-reliant for her age. We connect well in person, but it can be hard to have a phone conversation. During the time I’ve been here, I’ve struggled to connect with her. When I ask her, “How was school today?” I get “Fine.” When I ask her, “How’s your mom?” I get “Good.” “How’s the weather?” “Okay.” She also hasn’t been great about answering emails, even though she is a good writer. It’s disconcerting to reach out to her and never hear back. If she was hurt or unwell or depressed, would she or someone else tell me? In our videoconference she is much more responsive and engaging, true to form. I’ve never been to the apartment she shares with her mother in Virginia Beach, so this is my first glance inside. I can see a small living room, a sofa, a bookshelf. In the background, Leslie walks back and forth with a laundry basket.

  I spend an hour showing Charlotte around the station. She saw it in videoconferences when I was here before, but she was just seven then. I float around with my laptop, pointing its camera around inside the modules where I’ve been working and living, introduce her to my crewmates as they happen to float by, and give her an overview of what I’ve been working on (leaving out the rodent we euthanized). She seems genuinely interested, leaning forward and smiling and asking questions. It’s great to see her animated and engaged. The Cupola is the last stop on our tour, and I time our arrival there to coincide with the station flying over the Bahamas. Charlotte is impressed. While we are talking I snap a few pictures with the camera to email her later. I know she’s seen many pictures of the Earth taken from space, but I hope she’ll enjoy receiving one taken especially for her.

  After saying good-bye to Charlotte, I start getting ready for a birthday dinner for Samantha Cristoforetti. Birthdays are important in Russian culture too, and we make a point of celebrating them up here. This one is especially significant because soon Samantha, Terry, and Anton will be leaving us. As much as I will miss them all, I’m looking forward to breathing some good air (with half as many people exhaling, CO2 levels will come down). I know the dropping CO2 will likely cause the ground to act as though the problem has resolved itself, and I will be upset if that happens.

  When I was packing the few personal belongings I could bring for this year, I included some wrapping paper because I knew I would be giving crewmates gifts on special days. Today I have some chocolate wrapped up nicely for Samantha’s thirty-eighth. As we often do at these dinners, we get to talking about language, specifically the nuances between curse words in English and Russian. Tonight we reach a point of confusion about the multiple ways of using the Russian word for “whore” and decide to call one of our Russian language instructors in Houston. Waslaw tries to explain to us in a combination of Russian and English the difference between blyad and blya. (He and I became friends on a St. Patrick’s Day years ago when a Moldovan drunk started a bar fight with the NASA folks in Star City, Russia.) Then he catches us up with what’s happening in Houston, and we fill him in on what life is like up here. By then it’s pretty late. For a little while, it almost felt like an earthbound Saturday night. It was nice to forget for a while that I will continue to be at work up here for weeks and months and seasons.

  —

  ESSENTIAL TO getting to Mars, or anywhere else in space, is a working toilet, and ours does more than just store waste—our urine processor distills our urine into drinking water. A system like this is necessary to interplanetary missions, since bringing thousands of gallons of drinking water to Mars simply wouldn’t be possible. On the International Space Station, our water system is nearly a closed loop with only occasional need for fresh water. Some of the water we purify to make oxygen.

  We are sent fresh water on resupply rockets, but we don’t need it often. The Russians get fresh water from the ground, which they drink and turn into pee, which they give to us to process into water. Cosmonaut urine is one of the commodities in an ongoing barter system of goods and services between the Russians and the Americans. They give us their pee, we share the electricity our solar cells have generated. They use their engines to reboost the station into the proper orbit, we help them when they are short on supplies.

  Our urine processor, though, has been broken for about a week, so our urine is simply filling a holding tank. When it’s full—it takes only a few days—a light will come on. In my experience, the light tends to show itself in the middle of the night. Replacing the tank is a pain in the ass, especially for a half-asleep handyman, but it’s not an option to leave it for the morning. The first person to get up won’t be able to pee, which isn’t good space station etiquette. When you float in there in the middle of the night to find that light illuminated, it really sucks.

  Now, in the light of day, I need to swap out the broken part, the distillation assembly. I’ve consulted with the ground, and they concur. If everything goes right, the repair will take half the day. I’ve removed the “kabin” (the walls and the door) from the toilet in Node 3 so I can get at the machinery underneath. (The spelling is attributed to a transliteration error between Russian and English that stuck.) The kabin gets pretty gross, even though we try to clean it regularly. I float the kabin to Node 1, where it will clog up this space for other people until I move it back again, another incentive to get the job done efficiently.

  While I’m cleaning and then moving the kabin, the ground is taking care of “safing” the equipment, which means making sure everything I will be working on is powered down correctly so I don’t electrocute myself or cause an electrical short. (The risk of electrocution is ever present on the space station, especially on the U.S. side. We use 120-volt power, which is more dangerous than the 28 volts used on the Russian segment. We train for the possibility of electrocution and often practice advanced cardiac life support on board, using a defibrillator and heart medications meant to be injected into the shinbone.) Once I get word from the ground that I can go ahead, I remove the electrical connectors on the distillation assembly, put caps on the connectors to protect them, and undo all the bolts. The distillation assembly is a large silver drum that works like a still, evaporating water from the urine. This is our only backup, so I have to be careful not to damage it.

  Another resupply rocket launched today from Baikonur, a Russian Progress. My Russian crewmates on station followed the launch closely, getting updates from Russian mission control, and Anton floated down to let us know when it had reached orbit successfully. But now, less than ten minutes later, mission control in Moscow reports that a major malfunction has occurred and that the spacecraft is in a wild out-of-control spin. None of the workarounds they try correct the problem.

  Up here, we talk about what it will mean for us if Progress is lost. We go over the supplies we have on board—food, clean clothes, oxygen, water, and replacement parts. Another resupply rocket exploded on the launchpad last October, this one built by the American company Orbital ATK, which means we are already behind on supplies. The Russians will run low on food and clothing, which means we will share ours with them and eventually run low ourselves. Misha, Gennady, and Anton keep us updated throughout the day, each time looking more and more concerned. Each of the cosmonauts had some personal items on board Progress, and sometimes those packages contain jewelry and similar irreplaceable items. Misha confides in me about some of the items that are on b
oard, his wide blue eyes showing his anxiety.

  “Maybe they’ll regain control of it,” I tell him with a pat on the shoulder, though we both know this is becoming less likely by the minute. I would like to spend more time talking over the problem with my crewmates, but I have a half-assembled toilet to fix. I’m disconnecting and capping the connections where our urine flows into the assembly on one end and where the liquid by-products left over, brine and a kind of graywater, come out. Every few days we pump the brine out of the holding tank and into Russian tanks that will later be pumped into empty water tanks on Progress, which will eventually undock and burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere. The graywater will be processed into drinking water.

  I pull out the broken distillation assembly, double-bag it, label it, then store it in the PMM (Permanent Multipurpose Module, sort of a storage closet off Node 3) until it can be returned to Earth on a SpaceX. Engineers on the ground will examine it and, if they can, repair it to be sent up again. The next step is to fit the new assembly in place and torque it to a specific value. I start hooking up the fluid lines again very carefully, making sure not to combine clean water and urine lines, then connect the electrical cables. I am taking pictures of all of my work so the ground can later verify I did everything properly.

  As I’m working, the ground tells us Progress has officially been declared lost. With a sinking feeling, I float over to the Russian segment to confer. Misha meets me in the service module, and it’s clear he’s heard the bad news.

  “We’ll give you guys anything you need,” I say.

  “Thank you, Scott,” Misha says. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such despair on another man’s face. We don’t normally worry about shortages, but losing Progress suddenly makes us think about how much we depend on a steady stream of successful resupply missions. We can afford one or two failures, but then we will have to start rationing.

  Even more than our concern about supplies, though, is concern for our colleagues who will be launching soon: the rocket that doomed Progress is the same rocket that launches the manned Soyuz. Our three new crewmates, due up in a little less than a month on May 26, are about to trust their lives to the same hardware and software. The Russian space agency must investigate what went wrong and make sure there won’t be a recurrence. That will interfere with our schedule up here, but no one wants to fly on a Soyuz that’s going to do the same thing this Progress did. It would make for a horrible death, spinning out of control in low Earth orbit knowing you will soon be dead from CO2 asphyxiation or oxygen deprivation, after which our corpses would orbit the Earth until they burn up in the atmosphere months later.

  I finish making all the connections on the urine processor. Some of the cargo that was lost on Progress was fresh water, and unless we can make our own, the six of us won’t last long. I double-check all the connections, then ask the ground to power it up. It works. The ground congratulates me, and I thank them for their help.

  Because the next Soyuz launch is delayed, that means Terry, Samantha, and Anton will be delayed in their return as well. They have each assured their space agencies that they are willing to stay on station as long as necessary, which I think reflects well on them, even if it’s also true they have no choice. I know this must be stressful for them—we each know how long we’ll be here and pace ourselves accordingly. I can’t imagine having to call my family and tell them I’m not coming back when I’d said I would, and that I have no idea when I’ll return. I can only sympathize with my crewmates. Outwardly, they all appear professional and upbeat. Terry tells me he sees this as a positive thing: it’s a privilege to live in space, and now he gets to stay longer and complete more of the things he wanted to do, like taking pictures of specific places on Earth and filming an IMAX movie he had a particular fondness for. Samantha’s attitude is more casual. “What are you going to do?” she asks, then points out that she will likely exceed the world record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman, 195 days.

  When I finally finish the huge job of changing out the urine processor, it is satisfying knowing that we will be able to process urine and make clean water. But it’s also strangely unsatisfying in that all I’ve done is put everything back the way it usually is. I reinstall the kabin, making sure all the tools are stowed properly, downlink the photos, then run on the treadmill for half an hour.

  While I’m running, a smoke alarm annunciates loudly. The treadmill under my feet stops automatically. The emergency signals are designed to get our attention, and they do. Even as I’m unhooking my running harness and scrambling to respond to the alarm, I’m pretty sure I know what caused it—as I was running I probably liberated some dust from the treadmill or maybe caused the motor to smoke a bit by pushing against the treadmill in an effort to get my heart rate up. The fire alarm also automatically shuts down ventilation in Node 3, and that shuts down our Seedra. After we’re fully recovered from the alarm, the ground informs us that they can’t restart the Seedra and aren’t sure why. I’m less than thrilled by the prospects of rising CO2 until we can get it running again.

  I’ve been looking forward to my videoconference with Amiko all day. Once a week we get to see as well as hear each other, for a length of time varying from forty-five minutes to an hour and a half. We have developed a ritual at the end of each videoconference: Amiko picks up her iPad and carries it around the house so I can see inside each room. It makes me feel connected to home to see our sofa, our bed, the pool, the kitchen—all of it flooded with sunlight, each of the objects held down by gravity. Once, in the kitchen, I noticed a warning light on the fridge—the water filter needed to be changed. I pointed it out to Amiko so she could have clean water too.

  Today, I can see Amiko sitting on our sofa with light streaming in the window to her right. We talk about how each of our days has gone so far, then she reminds me about next week’s videoconference: she has offered to have some of my friends over to our house so I can visit with them. She mentions that in the course of preparing for guests, she discovered that the speakers by our pool aren’t working, and she hasn’t been able to troubleshoot the problem on her own yet.

  “I’ll figure it out before Saturday,” she says.

  “Let’s just fix it now,” I suggest, and within minutes she’s pointing the iPad camera at the web of cords on the back of the stereo components in the closet while I squint at the fuzzy image on my screen, trying to figure out which connection isn’t working.

  “Push that button on the left,” I suggest. She tries to comply. “No, not that one, the one next to it.”

  “I’m pushing it,” she says. “It’s just not working.”

  The videoconference ends abruptly when we lose comm coverage. The image on my screen is static—the larger window showing Amiko, her face drained and expressionless in the dark closet; the smaller window showing my own face, frozen around the words I was saying. We both look incredibly annoyed. What if this were to be the last time we saw each other? I stare at the two faces for a moment, then turn off my laptop. The CO2 is climbing, and I can feel the accompanying headache coming on.

  A couple of hours later, when we have coverage again, I call Amiko’s cell.

  “I just wanted to tell you I’m so sorry I wasted our videoconference trying to fix the speakers,” I say. “I should have just left it for later.”

  “I know you don’t like to leave things undone,” she says. The warmth is back in her voice. We talk for a bit longer, then say good night.

  The next day I suggest to Amiko that she could download the stereo manuals from the manufacturer website, which made it easier to fix the problem. The following week, our videoconference party goes off without a hitch.

  —

  STILL NO WORD from the Russians on why the Progress malfunctioned. We don’t know whether they have a good theory and just haven’t confirmed it or if they actually have no clue whatsoever. Terry, Anton, and Samantha still don’t know what their landing date will be. Every afternoon Terry floats over t
o the Russian segment through the dark, angled corridor of PMA-1 and into the FGB, over the tons of cargo strapped to the floor. Arriving in the open space of the service module, Terry pauses to look out the three Earth-facing windows in the floor that make the module feel like a glass-bottom boat, then asks Anton, who is always hanging halfway out of his crew quarters working on his laptop with his headset on, whether he has heard anything new about the Soyuz return. According to Terry, Anton shrugs and says no. Gennady tells us Moscow has identified a possible culprit for the Progress failure. He also tells us that our Soyuz, the one we came up here in and that Gennady will take back down with two other people in September, might have the same issue—a sobering thought that we could have been hopelessly lost. Not good news.

  Since the ground was never able to get the Node 3 Seedra working again after the fire alarm, today Terry and I are working together to repair it. The experience is kind of like doing a transmission overhaul—a complicated, absorbing, detailed job—but our lives just happen to depend on this one. The other Seedra has not been operating smoothly, which puts a lot of pressure on us to make sure this one is repaired.

  Dismantling the beast with Terry’s help is much better than struggling with it on my own, but it’s still unbelievable how much of a pain in the ass this thing is. The valves are positioned in places where no human hand can reach them, and we have to use four different-size wrenches, each turning a bolt only ten or twenty degrees, multiple times. It takes half an hour just to remove one bolt, and Terry tears up the back of his hand so much in the process he has to bandage it—in space, blood wells up into spheres and, if liberated, floats everywhere. We are finally able to get the Seedra out of its rack and float it to the Japanese module, where there is more room to work. Moving such a large mass is a slow and deliberate process. After a break to eat lunch, we return to finish the job. The next day, once we think we have it fixed, we return Seedra to Node 3 to reinstall it into its rack. It doesn’t fit. We try different angles, different approaches, use more or less force, jiggle it, bang into it with our shoulders. Gennady comes down to add some extra muscle. Nothing works. Terry and I examine the beast and realize that there are some washers on the bottom of it that seem to serve no other purpose than to hold it in place once it’s seated correctly. (They were probably designed to protect the Seedra from the vibration of launch.) If we remove those, I think it could shift down a bit and settle properly into place.