Endurance

by Scott Kelly

  I call down to the ground to describe my idea about the washers, expecting to get the typical NASA answer that this will require further study and consultation with experts—days of emails, phone calls, and meetings—before they reach the conclusion that it would be an acceptable solution. NASA’s tendency toward an abundance of caution and excessive analysis is both a good thing and a bad thing. We always err on the side of doing things the way they have always been done if those things haven’t killed any astronauts or destroyed any important hardware. Yet this attitude often keeps us from trying new things that would save everyone a good deal of time and trouble. I don’t think the control center always takes into account that our time and energy are resources that can be wasted.

  After a short interlude of consultations, the ground tells us to try removing the washers. Terry and I exchange a surprised look. Maybe the culture in the control center is changing; maybe the flight controllers are getting better at trusting astronauts’ judgment.

  Having been given the go-ahead, I happily pry off the washers using a crowbar and a good deal of effort. Terry has to steady the Seedra in place while I pry, since in weightlessness the mass of the machine doesn’t hold it down against the force I’m applying. Terry and I now can slide the Seedra into its rack perfectly, and the thunk it makes as it slides into position is deeply satisfying. We’ll wait until tomorrow to try powering it up.

  As we are putting our tools away, Terry shouts something with a childlike excitement in his voice: “Hey! Candy!”

  A little piece of something edible looking is floating by. It often happens that bits of food get away from us and provide an unexpected snack for someone days later.

  “Remember the mice,” I warn him, “It might not be chocolate.”

  He takes a closer look at it. “Shit, it’s a used Band-Aid,” he says. He catches it and puts it in the trash. Later that night, we tell Samantha the story and she tells us that last week she ate something she thought was candy and realized only too late that it was garbage.

  That night, floating in my sleeping bag with my eyes closed, I have one of those little convulsions people sometimes get when they are just about to fall asleep, when it feels like you’re falling and you try to catch yourself. In space, these are more dramatic because without gravity holding me to the bed, my body undulates wildly back and forth. And this one was especially dramatic because it coincided with a bright cosmic ray flash. As I try to fall asleep again, I wonder whether the cosmic ray somehow triggered my reflex response or if it’s strictly a coincidence.

  In the daily planning conference, we learn that Terry, Samantha, and Anton will leave on June 11, more than a month late, and the new crew will come up on July 22. Their Soyuz has been docked here since November, and it’s only safe for the spacecraft to sit idle for a certain period of time. It’s not clear how much of this decision hinges on that time constraint, and how much on the determination that their Soyuz is free of the issues that doomed Progress. Either way, the Russian space agency has weighed the risks and decided it will soon be time for them to go.

  After the daily planning conference, I immediately go through the steps of preparing the Seedra to be powered up. When I tell the ground we are ready, there is a dramatic pause.

  “Powering up,” capcom says. “Stand by.”

  We stand by.

  It doesn’t work.

  “Son of a…bitch!” I say, being sure not to key the microphone since we’re on an open channel.

  “We’ll take a look at this and get back to you,” says the capcom.

  “Copy,” I reply, dejected.

  Because it’s Friday, we will have to live with high CO2 levels all weekend; when one Seedra fails, it takes a while for the other to come up to speed, and flight controllers won’t even start trying to figure out what’s wrong until Monday. I’m going to feel like crap all weekend, and it will be even worse because that will be a constant reminder of what a clusterfuck this CO2 situation is, how little the ISS program managers seem to care about our symptoms.

  I knew this year was going to test my psychological endurance more than physical, and I think I was as prepared as anyone could be. Having flown a long-duration mission before, I understand how important it is to manage my energy from day to day and week to week, which includes choosing what to get upset about. But this is incredibly depressing. I float into my CQ to take a few minutes for myself and be pissed.

  I click through some emails, aware that I’m using a bit more force on the laptop than is necessary. There’s one from Amiko wishing me a happy Friday, and I decide to call her before heading over to the Russian segment for dinner. She picks up on the second ring and sounds happy to hear from me. She’s still in the middle of her workday but is looking forward to the weekend. I try to keep the annoyance out of my voice, but she sees right through me.

  “What’s wrong? You don’t sound good,” she says. Even before I can draw breath to answer, she asks, “The CO2 is high, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I say. I tell her the whole saga with the Seedra and what we face for the weekend. I tell her I’m impressed that she could tell the CO2 was high just from my voice.

  “Not just your voice, but your mood,” she clarifies. “When you sound like you’re letting things get to you, I know the CO2 is high.”

  She is the only person on planet Earth who seems to care.

  At Friday night dinner, we talk about the new landing date for Terry, Samantha, and Anton. I will be alone for six weeks on the U.S. segment before their replacements arrive. It’s a long time to be floating around by myself, but being alone doesn’t seem like a bad thing. I like having crewmates, and I’ve especially enjoyed working with Terry and Samantha, but being alone won’t be an unwelcome change. Besides, each time people leave or arrive marks another milestone of my mission that I’ve successfully put behind me.

  As we eat, I say, “I guess I’ll be able to float around naked in the U.S. segment.”

  “You can float around naked now, if you want to,” Samantha says with an offhanded shrug, digging in the bottom of a bag of ravioli.

  “Guys, do you think the Soyuz landing will definitely be in June?” Anton asks Terry and me.

  Terry and I look at each other, then at him.

  “Anton, aren’t you the Soyuz commander?” Terry asks rhetorically.

  “Da,” says Anton. He shakes his head and smiles, acknowledging the strangeness of the situation. We should be asking him for information, not the other way around. “I thought you might have heard something I didn’t.” At times, it seems the Russian space agency deliberately keeps their cosmonauts in the dark.

  “We’ll let you know if we hear anything,” Terry promises.

  It seems as though we could use some better communication all around.

  —

  ALONG WITH Saturday morning science, we sometimes have other activities scheduled on weekends that weren’t high enough priority to make it into the regular schedule. Today is one of those. Samantha is going to set up and test out a new piece of equipment designed by the European Space Agency: an espresso machine. Apparently when you have Europeans in space, you also have to have good coffee—the instant stuff just isn’t the same. After working through the procedures to brew a small bag of espresso, including multiple troubleshooting calls to the payload operations center in Huntsville, the historic first espresso shot in space is brewed. I take a picture of Samantha holding the espresso in a special cup designed to allow sipping in zero g. As she takes the first drink, I say, “That’s one small step for woman, one giant leap for coffee,” over the space-to-ground channel. I’m pretty pleased with my line. The machine cost more than a million dollars to build, certify for flight, and launch; there are only ten espresso packets on board, making Samantha’s drink a very expensive cup of coffee—worthy of a historic quote.

  —

  A USEFUL WAY to think of an orbiting object like the International Space Station is that it is going fast e
nough that the force of gravity keeps it curving around the Earth. We think of objects in orbit as being stable, staying at the same distance above the planet, but in reality the small amount of atmospheric drag that exists at 250 miles above the Earth’s surface pulls on us even when we are whizzing along at 17,500 miles per hour. Without intervention our orbit would tighten until we eventually crashed into the Earth’s surface. This will be allowed to happen some day when NASA and our international partners decide that the station has finished its useful life. It will be deorbited in a controlled manner to make sure that when it hits the planet, it will be in a safe area in the Pacific Ocean, and I hope to be there to watch. This is how the Russian space station Mir ended its life.

  We keep ISS in orbit using a Progress that is docked here. Mission control calculates how long to fire its engine, and that force boosts us back into the proper orbit. Sometimes we wake up in the morning to learn that a successful reboost has taken place while we slept.

  This morning, though, an attempted reboost failed. The Progress engine burned for just one second, not the several-minute burn we usually do. Once again, a Progress has failed to function properly, and, once again, we must worry about what that will mean for us.

  We are not in any immediate danger of crashing into the Earth—it would take many months for our orbit to decay to a dangerous degree—but we also use the Progress engines to move the station out of the way of space junk, so the failure could have frightening consequences. This is another strike against a piece of hardware everyone had thought of as rock solid, challenging our confidence in the Soyuz spacecraft, which are made with identical or similar components and by the same manufacturer—including the one that is meant to be my ride home.

  Now that we have lost the supplies that were supposed to reach us on the Progress, we have to be more vigilant about the trash we pack into the empty visiting vehicles, making sure we aren’t disposing of anything usable. Terry and I spend some time going through bags of stuff that other crew members have discarded, looking for uneaten food, clean clothes, or other consumable supplies. While we work, we talk about whether or not Terry’s Soyuz will leave anywhere near on time. As I’m sorting out food packets and talking, I find myself holding something made of fabric. It’s some dude’s used underwear. I stuff it into the trash and excuse myself to wash my hands a hundred times, an unsatisfying process without running water.

  The good news is that the Node 3 Seedra is working again. It had failed because the fan that pushes air through the system wasn’t starting. After some investigation and discussion, the ground devised a solution to fix it by replacing just the fan motor without pulling the whole unit out of the rack. That worked, miraculously, and now we are breathing clean air again. It’s remarkable how good this is for morale.

  That Friday night, we are having dinner on the Russian segment, and we know it will be one of our last with Terry, Anton, and Samantha. Terry floats to the U.S. segment to retrieve the last of the ice cream that came up on SpaceX, and when he comes back he has a troubled look on his face.

  “Scott, the ground is trying to get in touch with you,” he says. “You need to call your daughter Samantha right away. They said it’s an emergency.”

  “Why didn’t they call me here?” I ask. There is another space-to-ground channel in the Russian segment.

  My crewmates all look at me with concern. They know that I got a similar call on the space station five years ago, when my sister-in-law was shot.

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” I say, for their benefit more than mine. I go to my CQ, where I can talk privately. Only then do I realize that we don’t have communication coverage, and I won’t be able to make a call for twenty minutes. I spend that time thinking about Samantha, about what she was like as a spirited toddler, as a bright-eyed school-age kid, as a moody teenager. I still blame myself for the problems Samantha and I have had in our relationship since her mother and I split up. The teenage and young adult years are a stormy time for a lot of kids, and I know that Samantha has had to deal with fallout from the divorce, caring for her mother and her younger sister in ways that I don’t even know about. It’s been an ongoing struggle to get to a place where we can be comfortable with each other without fear of blowups.

  When the satellites are finally aligned, I put on my headset and click on the icon to place a call to Samantha’s cell. She answers on the second ring.

  “Hi, Dad.” She knows it’s me because calls from the space station are all routed through the Johnson Space Center.

  “Are you okay? What’s going on?” I ask, trying to sound calm.

  “Not much,” she says. “I’m at Uncle Mark and Gabby’s. Everyone has left, and I’m lonely.” I can tell from her tone that nothing is wrong. She sounds bored.

  “That’s it? There’s no emergency?” I ask, feeling my concern subside and give way to irritation. It felt like the times I’d lost track of one of the girls at a shopping center and looked for them long enough to start fearing the worst.

  Samantha explains that she had flown to Tucson for the high school graduation of her cousin Claire, Mark’s younger daughter. Samantha had chosen to go to the graduation because she has been going through a hard time and was feeling cut off from our family while I am away. She thought it might make her feel better to be at a gathering of Kellys. But the night after the graduation Mark and Gabby had left town, and shortly after that, Claudia, Mark’s older daughter, left as well, leaving Samantha by herself in an empty house. She had felt abandoned and wanted to get home, and when she didn’t get a response to a number of emails, she had called Spanky. When he conveyed her request to mission control, her request had been misinterpreted as an emergency.

  The absurdity is not lost on me that I’m in space for a year, and she’s lonely. But I’m also reminded just how much my family is sacrificing for this mission.

  She apologizes for scaring me and promises to leave a clearer message next time. I go back over to the Russian segment to rejoin the festivities, my mood somewhat dampened.

  That night, I have one of those twilight falling-asleep dreams. For some reason, I’m focused on the death of Beau Biden, the vice president’s son, who passed away from brain cancer yesterday at forty-six. I never met him, but I heard great things about him. His death bothers me more than I would have expected. In my half-awake state it occurs to me that one day we’re all going to be dead, that we will all be dead much longer than we were alive. In a sense I feel I know what it will be like, because we were all “dead” once, before we were born. For each of us, there was a moment when we became self-aware, realized that we were alive, and the nothingness before that wasn’t particularly objectionable. This thought, strange as it may be, is reassuring. I wake up long enough to type an email to Amiko about it.

  People often ask me whether I had any epiphanies in space, whether seeing the Earth from space made me feel closer to God or more at one with the universe. Some astronauts have come back with a new view of humanity’s role in the cosmos, which has inspired new spiritual beliefs or caused them to rededicate themselves to the faiths they grew up with. I would never question anyone else’s experience, but this vantage point has never created any particular spiritual insight for me.

  I am a scientifically minded person, curious to understand everything I can about the universe. We know there are trillions of stars, more than the number of grains of sand on planet Earth. Those stars make up less than 5 percent of the matter in the universe. The rest is dark matter and dark energy. The universe is so complex. Is it all an accident? I don’t know.

  I was raised Catholic, and as is the case in many families, my parents were more dedicated to their children’s religious development than they were to their own. Mark and I attended catechism classes until one day in the ninth grade, when my mother got tired of driving us. She gave us the choice of whether to keep going or not, and, as many teenagers would, we chose to opt out. Since that day, organized religion has not been part of m
y life. When Samantha was ten years old, she asked me at dinner one evening what religion we were.

  “Our religion is ‘Be nice to other people and eat all your vegetables,’ ” I said. I was pleased with myself for describing my religious beliefs so concisely and that she was satisfied with it. I respect people of faith, including an aunt who is a nun, but I’ve never felt that faith myself.

  —

  WE WILL be spending a lot of time this week working on an experiment called “Fluid Shifts Before, During, and After Prolonged Space Flight and Their Association with Intracranial Pressure and Visual Impairment”—“Fluid Shifts” for short. Misha and I are the subjects of the experiment, and it promises some of the most important results for the future of spaceflight.

  Maybe the most troubling negative effect of long-duration missions in space has been damage to astronauts’ vision, including mine on my previous mission. At first, these changes were assumed to be temporary. Once astronauts started flying longer and longer missions, though, we showed more severe symptoms. For most, the changes gradually disappeared once the mission was over; for some, the symptoms seemed to be permanent. When I flew my first mission on the space shuttle, in 1999, I didn’t need corrective lenses, but while on the mission I realized things were getting blurry in the middle range, ten or twelve feet—across the flight deck of the space shuttle. Back on Earth, my symptoms quickly resolved. My second flight was eight years later, by which time I had started using reading glasses. After about three days in space, I no longer needed them. The improvement lasted for about three months after I returned to Earth.