Endurance

by Scott Kelly

  Three years later, for my first long-duration flight, 159 days, I was wearing bifocals all the time. After a short period in orbit, my vision got worse, and I wore stronger lenses to correct for the change. When I returned to Earth, within a few months my vision returned to what it had been when I left. But I had other troubling signs: swelling of the optic nerve and what seemed to be permanent choroidal folds. (The choroid is a blood-filled layer in the eyeball between the retina and the sclera—the white part—that provides oxygen and nourishment to the outer layers of the retina. These folds in the choroid could damage the retina and cause blind spots.) My vision symptoms so far this year seem to be similar to the last time, though we are monitoring them closely to see whether they will get worse.

  If long-term spaceflight could do serious damage to astronauts’ vision, this is one of the problems that must be solved before we can get to Mars. You can’t have a crew attempting to land on a faraway planet—piloting the spacecraft, operating complex hardware, and exploring the surface—if they can’t see well.

  The leading hypothesis is that increased pressure in the cerebral fluid surrounding our brains is causing the vision changes. In space, we don’t have gravity to pull blood, cerebral fluid, lymphatic fluid, mucus, water in our cells, and other fluids to the lower half of our bodies like we are used to. So the cerebral fluid does not drain properly and tends to increase the pressure in our heads. We adjust over the first few weeks in space and pee away a lot of the excess, but the full-head sensation never completely goes away. It feels a little like standing on your head twenty-four hours a day—mild pressure in your ears, congestion, round face, flushed skin. As with so many other aspects of human anatomy, the delicate structures of our heads evolved under Earth’s gravity and don’t always respond well to having it taken away.

  The increased fluid pressure may squish our eyeballs out of shape and cause swelling in the blood vessels of our eyes and optic nerves. This is all still a theory, as it’s hard to measure the pressure inside our skulls in space (the best way to measure intracranial pressure is a spinal tap, which I’d very much prefer not to have to undergo, or to perform on a crewmate, in space). It’s possible, too, that high CO2 is causing or contributing to changes in our vision, since it is known to dilate blood vessels. High sodium in our space diets could also be a factor, and NASA has been working to reduce that in order to test whether this makes a difference. Only male astronauts have suffered damage to their eyes while in space, so looking at the slight differences in the head and neck veins of male and female astronauts might also help scientists start to nail down the causes. If we can’t, we just might have to send an all-women crew to Mars.

  Since it’s impossible to re-create the effects of zero gravity in a lab for sustained periods of time, scientists have conducted experiments on people with pressure sensors already installed in their skulls for other medical conditions. These people were taken up on an airplane that can create weightlessness for short periods in order to measure what happens inside their heads when they reach zero gravity. Their intracranial pressure dropped when they got to microgravity, rather than increasing as had been expected. Maybe it takes a while for the fluids to shift, or maybe the leading hypothesis is wrong. Before leaving for this mission, I volunteered to have a pressure sensor installed in my skull, but NASA declined my offer. The risks of drilling a hole in my head before sending me to space for a year were too great.

  In the Fluid Shifts study, Misha and I will be subjects in an experiment that uses a device for relieving the intracranial pressure of spaceflight—pants that suck. This is not a metaphor. We will take turns donning a device, roughly the shape of a pair of pants, called Chibis (Russian for “lapwing,” a type of bird), that reduces the pressure on the lower half of our bodies. The pants look a lot like the bottom half of the robot from Lost in Space, or like Wallace and Gromit’s “wrong trousers.” Reducing the pressure on our lower bodies also reduces the amount of fluid in our heads. By studying the effects of Chibis on our bodies, we hope to understand more about this problem.

  One of the times these pants were used, however, the Russian cosmonaut wearing them experienced a sudden drop in heart rate and lost consciousness. His crewmates thought he was in cardiac arrest and immediately ended the experiment without ill effect. Anytime a piece of equipment has put a person at risk, NASA has been reluctant to use it again. But because the Chibis is still the best possibility we have for understanding this problem, they are making an exception.

  Preparing to don the pants is actually a days-long process. We have to take baseline samples of blood, saliva, and urine, and we also have to take images of blood vessels in our heads, necks, and eyes using ultrasound. So much of the equipment we need to do these tests is only on the U.S. segment, so we spend a few hours packing it up and ferrying it over to the Russian service module. This is going to be the most complicated human experiment that’s ever been done on the International Space Station.

  When it’s time to put on the device, I take off my pants and clamber into the Chibis pants, making sure the seal around my waist is secure. Misha is working the controls, slowly decreasing the pressure on my lower body, and with each incremental change I can feel the blood being pulled out of my head—in a good way. For the first time in months, I don’t feel like I’m standing on my head.

  But then the feeling starts to change. It’s like I’m in an F-14 again, pulling too many g’s. I can feel myself starting to gray out, my peripheral vision closing in, where you are at risk of losing consciousness. The pants are malfunctioning, and I feel like I could have my intestines pulled out in the most unpleasant way possible.

  “Hey, something’s not right with this,” I announce to Misha and Gennady. “I’m gonna have to—” I reach for the seal at my waist, prepared to break it, canceling the experiment. At the same instant, I hear Gennady yelling.

  “Misha, shto ty delayesh?” What are you doing? Gennady doesn’t yell much, so when he raises his voice you can be sure you have likely screwed up. In this case, I look over at the pressure gauge, which is not supposed to go past 55. Misha has it down to 80, the maximum negative pressure.

  Fortunately neither I nor the equipment sustains any permanent damage, and we are able to go on with the experiment. I stay in the pants for a couple of hours, doing various medical tests like measuring blood pressure and taking ultrasound images of my heart, neck, eyeball, and a blood vessel just behind my temple. This is where my space tattoos come in handy. Shortly before my launch, I visited a Houston tattoo parlor and had some black dots placed on the most-used ultrasound sites (on my neck, biceps, thigh, and calf) so I wouldn’t have to locate the exact spot each time. It’s saved me a huge amount of trouble already. We measure my cochlear fluid pressure (by sticking an instrument in my ear) and my intraocular pressure (by tapping a pressure sensor on my anesthetized eyeball). We scan my eyeball with a laser, which can register changes like choroidal folds and optic nerve swelling.

  During the time we’re doing this, I feel as good as I’ve felt in space. The constant pressure in my head clears, and I’m sorry when it’s time to shed the pants and shut the experiment down.

  Later in the day, I’m sitting in the Waste and Hygiene Compartment. I’ve been sitting for a while, in fact—sometimes this process takes a while in the absence of gravity. Samantha is brushing her teeth just outside the kabin, which is like a stall in a public restroom—and I can hear her humming to herself, as she often does while she works. I can see her socked feet under the wall, hooked under a handrail to keep her steady. Her toes are close enough that I could reach out and tickle them, but I decide against it.

  This scene probably sounds a bit odd to those who haven’t experienced the loss of privacy on a space station, but we get used to it. I’ve just been reading about how the men on the Shackleton expedition had to hunker down behind snow drifts and had only chunks of ice to clean themselves with, so I count myself lucky. Because I have nothing else to d
o while I sit, I watch Samantha’s feet hooked under the handrail, keeping her body perfectly still, and I think about the complexity of that simple task. If you showed me nothing but a foot hooked under a handrail in zero gravity, I could estimate how long that person has been in space with a high degree of accuracy. When Samantha was new up here, she would have hooked her feet too hard, used too much force, and tired out her ankles and big toe joints unnecessarily. Now she knows exactly how little pressure she needs to apply. Her toes move with the elegance and precision of a pianist’s fingers on a keyboard.

  Last night we enjoyed our final Friday dinner with Terry, Samantha, and Anton. Since the loss of the Progress, the Russians are running low on food and other supplies, and though we’ve made it clear we will share food, things won’t be the same for a while. I bring over a salami my brother sent up on the last SpaceX, and I eat some of the last of the Russian meals, a “Can of White” (chicken with white sauce), and some American “Bags of Brown” (some sort of irradiated beef thing). The Russians also have something called “the Appetizing Appetizer,” which it is not.

  A few of us say we have been craving fruit recently, which is no surprise given that there has been no fresh food in our diets since shortly after Dragon arrived. Our dried, bagged, and canned fruits are not the same as the real deal. I share the fact that I recently had a craving for a cheap domestic beer in a small bar glass with warm, bitter foam like my dad used to drink. This craving is weird, because I haven’t had that kind of beer since college and would never choose to drink it on Earth. I’m more of a hoppy India pale ale kind of guy. Maybe there’s some nutrient in cheap beer I’m missing. We talk about whether we are going to get scurvy, and what it is exactly, what the symptoms are. I scratch my balls to get a laugh. Just the word “scurvy” sounds horrible, we agree. I wonder whether the members of the Shackleton expedition got scurvy; I will look at the book again tonight before I go to sleep. When the next SpaceX resupply gets here at the end of June, it will bring fresh fruits and vegetables as well as desperately needed supplies, chief among them the shit cans that are so vital to life in space. My brother has also announced he is sending me a gorilla suit on SpaceX. I asked why I needed a gorilla suit on the space station.

  “Of course you need a gorilla suit,” he responded. “There’s never been a gorilla suit in space before. You’re getting a gorilla suit. There’s no stopping me.”

  I’m concerned about devoting cargo space to something that seems frivolous. There are those who look for reasons to criticize NASA and any expense that appears to be excessive, and I know those people would get out their calculators to figure the cost for sending a gorilla suit into orbit. Mark tells me that after being vacuum-packed for flight in space, the gorilla suit is no bigger or heavier than a sweatshirt we might send up as a shout-out to an alma mater or an organization.

  As we finish dinner, we talk about all we have accomplished on this expedition: the visiting vehicles (including the ones that didn’t make it), difficult and risky maintenance on the spacesuits, important life-science experiments, and the rodent research, which we will finish up the day after tomorrow. We also talk about our evolving relationships with the various control centers—Houston, Moscow, Europe, Japan—and how much the mutual adoration society, as I call it, has gotten out of control. It seems that no one can do anything, either in space or on the ground, without receiving a short speech of appreciation: “Thank you for all your hard work and your time on this, awesome job, we appreciate it.” Then the speech has to be repeated back: “No, thank you, you guys have been just awesome, we appreciate all your hard work,” ad nauseam. It all comes from a well-meaning place, but I think it’s a waste of time. I’ve often had the experience of finishing up some task and then moving on to the next thing, when a “thank you” speech comes back at me. This requires that I stop what I’m doing to float back to the mic, acknowledge those thanks, and return them in roughly equal proportions—multiple times a day. If you consider the cost of constructing and maintaining the space station, the mutual adoration society probably costs taxpayers millions of dollars a year. I’m already thinking about putting a stop to it when Terry, Samantha, and Anton leave.

  On Wednesday, the day before the Soyuz is to leave, Terry must hand over command of the station to Gennady. There’s a little ceremony, a military tradition drawn from the Navy change-of-command ceremony, that lets everyone know clearly when responsibility for the station transfers from one person to another. The six of us float somewhat awkwardly in the U.S. lab while Terry makes a speech. He thanks the ground teams in Houston, Moscow, Japan, Europe, and Canada, as well as the science support teams in Huntsville and other places. He thanks our families for supporting us on our missions.

  “I’d like to say a few words about the crew I launched with,” Terry says, “Anton and Samantha, my brother and sister.” This might sound a bit exaggerated, but I know from experience how flying in space as a crew brings people together. Terry would do anything for them, and they for him. “We got to spend two hundred days in space together, including a few bonus days, and I couldn’t have asked for a better crew.

  “So now Expedition Forty-three is in the history books, and we turn it over to a new chapter and Expedition Forty-four.” With that, he hands the microphone to Gennady, who checks to see if it is still on.

  “No matter how many flights you have,” Gennady says, “it’s always like a new station, always like first flight.”

  This makes everyone smile, because Gennady has more spaceflights than any of us (this is his fifth), and he will soon set a record for most days in space of any human. Gennady wishes Terry, Anton, and Samantha a “soft, safe landing and the best return home.” Terry tells the control center that this concludes the handover ceremony, and another milestone of my mission is crossed off. The next handover ceremony will be in September when Gennady leaves and I become commander.

  Later that night, Terry asks me what landing is like in the Soyuz. He’s trained for this, of course, and he has been told what to expect by Anton and by the training team at Star City; still, he is curious to hear my experience. I think of how to set him up for what to expect without scaring him too much.

  We call Samantha over so she can hear it too, and I describe what my experience had been last time: As we slammed into the atmosphere, the capsule was engulfed in a bright orange plasma, which is a little disconcerting, sort of like having your face a few inches away from a window while on the other side someone is trying to get at you with a blowtorch. Then, when the parachute deployed, the capsule spun and twisted and turned violently in every direction. If you can get in the right frame of mind, if you can experience it like an adventure ride, this can be great fun. On the other hand, some astronauts and cosmonauts, after their first Soyuz landing, have said that they were being thrown around so violently they became convinced something had gone wrong and they were going to die. There can be a fine line between terror and fun, and I want to give Terry and Samantha the right mind-set.

  Terry has experienced the ride back to Earth on the space shuttle, and I tell him the Soyuz reentry is much steeper. “The shuttle reentry feels like cruising down Park Avenue in a Rolls-Royce,” I tell him. “Riding the Soyuz is more like riding a Soviet beater car down an unpaved street that leads off a cliff.”

  They both think this analogy is funny, but they also appear a little worried.

  “As soon as you realize you aren’t going to die, it’s the most fun you’ll ever have,” I tell them. “I’ll tell you the truth—the ride is so much fun, I would sign up for another long-duration mission just to get to take that ride again.” Terry and Samantha look skeptical, but it’s true.

  —

  OUR CREWMATES ARE leaving today. There is a ceremony for the hatch closing, seen live on NASA TV, as they depart. It starts out a bit awkwardly, since all six of us are crammed into the narrow Russian module where their Soyuz is docked. I snap some pictures of Anton, Samantha, and Terry posing in
the open hatch. Then those who are staying wish them good luck and a soft landing. Anton hugs Gennady, whom he looks up to so much. Then he hugs Misha. Then he hugs me. Samantha hugs Gennady, then Misha, then me. It seems to me that Samantha gives me an extra-big hug, and after she has disappeared I realize that I won’t be in the physical presence of a woman again for nine months. The three of them float into the Soyuz and give one last wave while we take their pictures.

  Anton and Gennady wipe down the hatch seal in the vestibule, to make sure that no foreign objects keep the hatch from sealing properly. Gennady closes the hatch on our side while Anton is closing it from their side. And that’s it. It reminds me of seeing off Charlotte at the airport at the end of a visit—after spending so much time together, I give her a hug, watch her walk down the jetway, and after a final wave, she disappears. It’s a weird thing: I’ve spent so much time with these people, but with a few good-byes and hugs, our shared experience is over in an instant.

  I’m not scared for my departing crewmates, any more than I’m scared for myself, but seeing the hatch close behind them gives me a strange sense of isolation, even abandonment. If I have to work on the Seedra again, I’ll have to do it without Terry’s help. If I get into a discussion with the Russians about literature, I’ll have to do it without Samantha’s help. I’m looking forward to having the U.S. segment to myself, though, and I try to focus on that.

  I float off toward the U.S. lab, and the Russians float off to their segment, and then all is silent. It’s just me and the fan noise. No talk from Terry, whose upbeat commentary has punctuated everything I’ve done since I’ve been up here. No quiet humming from Samantha. For the moment, I don’t even hear any voices from the ground.