by Scott Kelly
I look around the junk on the walls in the U.S. lab, which suddenly feels much larger. I have the strange feeling I meant to say something more to Terry or Samantha, that I wanted to remind them about something, but I can’t think what.
Then I hear Terry’s voice, breaking in midsentence, as if he were here with me: “…pills for the fluid loading protocol, Anton? Or did you leave them on station?”
“I’ve got them,” Anton answers, then rattles off a series of numbers in rapid-fire Russian to their control center. Now that the communications on the Soyuz are set up, I can hear through our intercom system every word my former crewmates say as if I were in there with them. I join the space-to-ground channel to warn Terry that his mic is hot and that everyone with an internet connection or tuned to NASA TV can hear every word he says. I wouldn’t want one of them to inadvertently drop an F-bomb and then have to hear about it when he or she gets back to Earth. (Since inadvertently dropping the F-bomb to Earth myself, I am sensitive to the nuances of our comm system. On my second shuttle flight, I said “Fuck” while struggling with a piece of hardware in the airlock. My crewmate Tracy Caldwell called out, “Hot mic!” from the flight deck to let me know I could be heard on NASA TV. “Shit!” I said in response, making two FCC violations in ten seconds.)
I go through the rest of the afternoon listening to Terry, Anton, and Samantha’s voices. As I work on a physics experiment, I can hear Samantha humming absentmindedly. A couple of times I turn around to say something to her, then remember where she is.
When the Soyuz is ready to detach and push away from station, three hours after we closed the hatch, I watch its departure on a laptop screen on NASA TV, just as many people on Earth are doing. I grab a mic.
“Fair winds and following seas, guys,” I say. “It was a real pleasure spending time up here with you, and good luck on your landing.”
Terry answers, “Thanks, Scott, we miss you guys already.”
Gennady adds from the Russian segment, “Samantha, I think you forgot your sweater.”
I hear them talking to one another this way, trading idle work chat and calling out numbers to the control center, almost all the way to the ground. If I didn’t know what they were doing—falling like a meteor at supersonic speed toward the planet’s surface—I could never have guessed.
Several hours later, they are on the ground safely in Kazakhstan. They had been here with me twenty-four hours a day for months, and now they are as far and unreachable as everyone else on Earth, as Amiko and my daughters and the 7 billion other humans.
That night, when I turn out the lights and climb into my sleeping bag, I’m aware of the quiet. There is no rustling in the other crew quarters or quiet talking as crewmates communicate with the ground or say good night to their families on the phone. If this were a normal six-month flight I would already be halfway done, but instead I feel I have as long as I did when I first got up here. Nine months. I don’t often let these kinds of thoughts into my head, but when they do it’s hard to get them out again. What have I gotten myself into?
—
SUNDAY RARELY FEELS like a Sunday on the space station, but today might be an exception. Yesterday I did both my weekly cleaning and my exercise, so today I actually have the entire day off. When I wake, I read the daily summary that was sent to us overnight and see that today Gennady sets the world record for the most days in space: 803. By the time he leaves, he will have 879, a record I expect to stand for a long time. I sleep late, eat breakfast, read a bit, then decide to clean out my email inbox. But when I open my laptop, there is no internet connection. This has been an ongoing problem: on Saturday nights the ground reboots the laptops remotely, and no one notices that the internet connection has been dropped. When I call down to ask for it to be fixed on Sunday morning, I’m told that the only person who knows how to do it doesn’t come in until later in the day.
There is a SpaceX launch scheduled today for 2:20 p.m. our time (10:20 a.m. in Florida), and I had looked forward to watching it live, but my internet connection won’t be fixed by then. SpaceX is carrying a lot of things we are looking forward to getting, most important being an International Docking Adapter, a $100 million mechanism that will convert docking ports built for the space shuttle to a new international docking standard, agreed to in 2010 by NASA, ESA, Roscosmos, the Japanese space agency, and the Canadians. (Ultimately it could even be used by China or other nations.) Without these adapters in place, we wouldn’t be able to bring people up on SpaceX or the Boeing spacecraft still under development.
Also on board SpaceX: food (the Russians are still running low); water; clothing for American astronaut Kjell (pronounced “Chell”) Lindgren and Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui, who will both arrive next month; spacewalk equipment for Kjell, who will be my spacewalking partner in the fall; filtration beds for removing contaminants from our water (which is close to undrinkable with increasing levels of organic compounds, since the last set of beds, which we badly needed, blew up on Orbital); experiments designed by schoolchildren (some of the kids who saw their experiments blow up on Orbital are being given a second chance to see their work go to space today).
Personally, I’m looking forward to an extra set of running shoes, another harness for the treadmill, clean clothes, medications, and crew care packages that my friends and family chose for me.
Launch time comes and goes. Shortly after, my laptop’s internet starts working again. I look up the video for the SpaceX launch, but the connection isn’t strong enough to stream the video. I get a jerky, frozen image. Then my eye stops on a headline: “SpaceX Rocket Explodes During Cargo Launch to Space Station.”
You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.
The flight director gets on a privatized space-to-ground channel and tells us the rocket has been lost.
“Station copies,” I say.
I take a moment to think over all the stuff that has been lost. Kimiya’s underwear, my pills, NASA’s $100 million adapter. Schoolchildren’s science experiments. All blown to bits. I joke to Mark that the thing I’m saddest about is the gorilla suit. After having to be talked into it, I had started thinking about all the fun Space Gorilla could have up here. Now he is a burned cinder and raining into the Atlantic Ocean, like everything else on the spacecraft. As stunned as I am by the loss, as overwhelmed as I am by what this will mean for the rest of my year in space and beyond, I’m almost as annoyed that I didn’t get to watch the launch—and the explosion—live. I feel oddly left out of something that is having a huge impact on my life.
I call Amiko and she fills me in on what it looked like: two minutes after launch, the rocket reached maximum aerodynamic pressure, as it was supposed to, then it suddenly blew up in the clear Florida sky. As we talk, it starts to sink in that we have lost three resupply vehicles in the last nine months, the last two in a row. Our consumables are now down to about three months’ worth, and the Russians are much worse off than that.
It occurs to me that maybe we should delay the next crew’s launch until after the increment in September when, for a brief period, we will have nine people up here, with limited supplies and sky-high CO2. It also occurs to me that the ground should have listened to me when I suggested Terry leave his spacesuit gloves for Gennady to use if we have to do an emergency spacewalk. New gloves are coming up on SpaceX, I was told dismissively. Now those gloves are flaming bits off the coast of Florida.
I think about the schoolchildren who saw their experiments blow up on Orbital, rebuilt them, and saw them blow up on SpaceX. I hope they will get a third chance. There is a lesson here, I guess, about risk and resilience, about endurance and trying again.
8
IN THE SPRING of 1988, I moved to Beeville, Texas, a small dusty town of blowing tumbleweeds halfway between Corpus Christi and San Antonio. Beeville is one of a few centers of the universe for young Navy pilots who want to fly jets, and I was thrilled to be there. I moved into a small ranch-style house on a dirt road across the str
eet from a cattle ranch with two college classmates who were also in flight school, ready to start my training.
I began flying the T-2 Buckeye, a twin-engine jet. The first time I dressed in a G suit and oxygen mask to climb into the cockpit, I felt like I had arrived in the big leagues. The T-2 is a forgiving jet, which is why we trained on it first, but it’s a jet just the same, which is to say challenging and dangerous to fly. I had a lot to learn. A jet has a lot more power than a propeller-driven airplane. It can go faster, it can accelerate quicker, and it is more responsive to the pilot’s touch—all of which make it much easier to “get behind” the airplane (when it feels like the airplane is in control rather than the pilot) and get into trouble.
I had to get used to the feeling of wearing an oxygen mask and G suit and flying while strapped into an ejection seat. The equipment is physically restrictive, and wearing it made me more aware of potential danger. It was more intimidating than I had anticipated. At the same time, in that G suit I tended to hold my head higher, shoulders back, and walk with a spring in my step. I was becoming a tactical jet aviator and I was proud of it. There would be times in the near future, though, when my cockiness would be dealt a blow.
After I had flown that airplane for about a hundred hours, it was time to try landing on an aircraft carrier—a Navy ship with a flight deck to launch and recover airplanes. Because an aircraft carrier’s flight deck is so short, it is equipped with catapults to help the aircraft take off and arresting cables to help them stop. The landings are difficult and dangerous, even under the best of circumstances.
This is the point in training when a lot of pilots wash out. I’d known this from the start, thanks to The Right Stuff. Carrier qualifications would be flown out of Pensacola, so I flew there the day before and met my brother and some of his squadron mates at McGuire’s, the bar with the dollar bills all over the place. Mark was a year ahead of me, since I had repeated my freshman year of college. He had gone to Corpus Christi for flight training and was now finishing up qualifying to land the A-6 Intruder on the carrier. When I met him and his squadron mates at the bar, they were all celebrating because Mark and a few other guys had just qualified for both day and night landings on the ship. Now that he had qualified, Mark would soon be moving on to his fleet squadron, stationed in Japan.
The flight deck of an aircraft carrier is an incredibly dangerous place. It’s not uncommon for people to be killed or seriously injured there, despite the high level of training. People have died walking into spinning propeller blades, getting sucked down a jet intake, or blown over the side by a plane’s exhaust. Much of the operation is done by a bunch of teenagers, and to avoid accidents everyone must know exactly what his or her job is and perform it well. Mine was to land the plane.
The weather was not great, and because of my experience level I wasn’t yet allowed to fly in cloudy conditions. As I got closer to the ship while keeping an eye on the weather, I noticed my roommate in another T-2 close by. I told him that to avoid running into each other as we dodged the clouds, I would join up on his right wing and we would fly formation. This was against the rules—neither of us had sufficient experience flying formation—but it seemed like the safest thing to do. Once we were clear of the bad weather, I backed off and fell in behind him as we approached the ship.
Looking down at the USS Lexington in the water, I couldn’t believe I was going to have to land my jet on that tiny dot. When you land an airplane at an airport, the runway is generally at least 7,000 feet long and 150 feet wide. More important, though, it holds still. The runway on an aircraft carrier is less than 1,000 feet in length and much narrower—and it also pitches, yaws, rolls, and heaves along with the ocean’s swells. The ship is also moving forward in the water, and because the landing area is angled with respect to the ship’s bow, it is constantly moving away from and to the right of the jet trying to land on it.
The sight of the ship was intimidating. As I flew overhead and turned downwind, I didn’t pull back on the stick hard enough, which drove me wide. This made it much more difficult to get lined up properly behind the ship. As I approached for my first landing, the deck actually seemed big compared to my T-2, which was deceiving, because my landings still weren’t very precise. I tried to look at the optical landing system at the left side of the flight deck, a visual aid that lets pilots know how accurate their approach is. I hit the deck and added full power, heading back off into the air. My first attempt hadn’t gone badly, and now I was slightly more confident. I was to do six touch-and-goes—landing and taking off again immediately—before extending the plane’s tailhook to grab the arresting cable on the flight deck. I’d have to make four actual landings in order to qualify, and I hoped to make them all that day. As soon as I made my first arrested landing, I would officially be a carrier aviator, or “tailhooker,” part of a unique fraternity.
I got through all my touch-and-goes with no problem. But when I put the hook down while approaching the ship, the danger of the situation became more real to me and I felt my adrenaline rising—not a good thing. I approached, touched down, and went to full power as we had been trained to do, in case the hook missed the wires—I’d need to be ready to leap back up into the sky to prevent my airplane from sliding off the front end of the aircraft carrier into the water. The feeling when the hook caught the wires and confirmed that I had done everything right would have been fantastic—if I hadn’t forgotten to lock my harness properly. As my airplane was caught on the arresting cable, I was thrown forward and smashed into the instrument panel. The effect of getting into what felt like a car crash at the same time I had made my first heart-stopping carrier landing combined to slow down my reflexes. I was now supposed to reduce the power once I came to a stop, but I was having trouble doing it quickly. One of the aircraft handlers ran out in front of the jet, wildly giving me the “power back” signal.
I did a second arrested landing, then another one. One more and I would have the required four. But then it started getting dark, and we were sent back to the airfield. I expected to go out the next day and do the last required landing for my qualification, but when I saw I wasn’t scheduled to fly, I had to assume I had disqualified. I was upset for a few hours, thinking that I had failed. But it wasn’t long until I learned that I had done well enough on the three landings I completed that I was qualified without the fourth. I was a tailhooker.
—
SOON, I started flying the A-4 Skyhawk, an attack jet from the Vietnam era that let us learn more of the capabilities we would need for flying in combat: dropping bombs, flying at low altitude in order to evade detection, and air combat maneuvering. Just as in the T-34 and T-2, the pace of the training was aggressive. We were expected to learn quickly and move on to the next challenge. At around this point in the training, the pilots who had previous flight experience started to lose their advantage as the rest of us caught up. To learn how to drop bombs, we flew from Beeville to the Naval Air Facility El Centro in Southern California, two hours from San Diego, which is set up with targets for pilots to practice on. I wasn’t especially gifted at dropping bombs, and nothing I tried to improve my accuracy seemed to work. I got used to taking ribbing from my classmates about it, but I wasn’t the worst; occasionally someone else would drop a practice bomb so far off target it would get close to the spotter sitting in a shack at the edge of the bombing range.
The targets had been given strange names, probably so we could differentiate them from one another on the radio. Some of them I still remember: Shade Tree, Loom Lobby, Inkey Barley, Kitty Baggage. The targets were set up with different run-in lines to let us practice different approaches over different terrain. Each target consisted of concentric rings with a clearly marked center point that we would try to hit with our Mark 76 practice bombs. The A-4 bombsight was a fixed reticle, a light projected onto the windscreen, and using it required that I not only hold that dot on the target but also visually compensate for wind. I released the bomb by pushing a small
button on the stick, and I had to account for the time it took the bomb to fall from my altitude. The temptation was to fly lower, decreasing the variables of the fall, but I couldn’t drop so low I would be in danger of crashing.
I took much more naturally to air combat maneuvering, otherwise known as dogfighting. We started off with the basics, flying behind the instructor’s aircraft in a position to be able to fire the gun, then trying to stay there as the instructor’s airplane started moving around unpredictably. This was humbling at first, as the instructor was somehow able to go from being in the defensive position (in front of me) to an offensive position (behind me). I quickly got the hang of it, though, and as the engagements got more complicated, I gained in confidence. Thinking in three dimensions, as you must when dogfighting, came naturally to me. I soon learned the validity of the naval aviator motto: “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying hard enough.” I learned that if I showed up at the point where our engagement started with more air speed than I was supposed to have, I had a slight advantage.
This was one of my favorite phases of training, not only because I did well at it, but because it was fun. I experienced a freedom and creativity in air-to-air “combat” that I hadn’t found anywhere else. I loved getting into long rollers, maneuvering the aircraft up and down amidst the large billowing cumulus clouds of the early Texas summertime, trying to “kill” my opponent. The last flight in this phase of my training I gave one of the instructors an epic beat-down—at least that’s how it felt to me.
After I successfully carrier qualified in the A-4, I got my aircraft assignment. I was to fly the greatest Navy fighter plane ever, the F-14 Tomcat.