by Scott Kelly
I head into Node 3 and make my way to the treadmill. On the ceiling is a strap that holds a pair of shoes, a harness, and a heart monitor for each of us. I grab my running shoes and put them on, then I step onto the treadmill, which is mounted on the “wall” with respect to most of the other equipment.
I put my harness on, buckle it at the waist and chest, and clip into the bungee system that’s attached to the treadmill. This holds me in place as I run—without the harness, I would go flying off the treadmill with my first step. We can adjust the tension to control the perceived weight at which we’re running, though we can’t run at our normal body weight, as the pressure on our hips and shoulders would be too painful. I set up the laptop in front of me and start an episode of Game of Thrones. I deliberately avoided watching the series when it first aired and people were talking about it because I knew I would need some good escapist entertainment this year. Now I’m watching the whole series for the second time.
In some ways our treadmill is like the one you might find in a gym on Earth, but it’s mounted into its own unique vibration isolation system. The forces created by the runner pounding away could be surprisingly dangerous—an oscillation at the wrong frequency could tear the space station apart. On Mir, Russian mission control once had to ask American astronaut Shannon Lucid to run at a different pace or risk damaging the space station. On his first flight, cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, who will join us up here soon along with Kjell and Kimiya, created a potentially dangerous oscillation just by absentmindedly floating up and down a few inches, his feet gently pushing against the floor and a bungee cord.
I control the treadmill using software on the laptop, starting off slowly then gradually ramping up. I enjoy the daily exercise, but it’s hard on my joints. Some days the pain in my knees and feet is almost unbearable, though today it’s not too bad. I ramp up to my maximum speed. When I sweat, the liquid builds up on my bare head like water on a newly waxed car. I wipe it away with my two-week-old sweat towel. Once in a while other people come floating through, positioned perpendicular to me. It’s hard to sneak by the person on the treadmill without distracting them or, worse, hitting or kicking them, especially for people who are new on station. It takes some getting used to, seeing someone running on the wall.
While I’m running, Gennady comes by to check on something. There are some shit cans temporarily stored in a big bag on the floor of Node 1, waiting to go out on the outgoing Progress with the rest of the garbage, and Gennady had noticed they were smelling a bit. He checks one of the lids to make sure it’s sealed properly, only to accidentally liberate a cloud of toxic gas that nearly knocks me off the treadmill. It makes me think of the Monty Python sketch where everyone triggers one another to throw up. The entire U.S. segment smells wretched for a while, but I’m impressed by how quickly the system filters the air.
“As soon as I get back to Earth,” Gennady mutters in Russian, “I am going on a vacation.”
Soon after he leaves, I hear the voice of mission control.
“Station, Houston on Space to Ground Two. We are privatizing the space-to-ground channel. The flight director needs to speak to you.”
We are privatizing. These are words that make any astronaut’s blood freeze. They mean something bad has happened. I bring the treadmill to a stop, unhook myself, and grab the mic to talk to Houston.
The last time I heard “we are privatizing” was when SpaceX blew up. The time before that, my daughter Samantha was having a personal crisis. And of course on my last mission, the news that we were privatizing came when my sister-in-law was shot. I wait anxiously to find out what has gone wrong.
I hear the capcom on duty, Jay Marschke, refer to the trajectory operations officer (TOPO). For a moment, I’m relieved; at least it has nothing to do with my family.
“This is a red late-notice conjunction,” Jay says, “with a closest point of approach within a sphere of uncertainty.”
“Roger,” I say into the microphone. Then I make sure the microphone is off before I say what I really think about this, which is, “Fuck.”
A “conjunction” is a potential collision—a piece of space junk is headed our way, in this case an old Russian satellite. “Late notice” means we didn’t see it coming or that we miscalculated its trajectory, and “red” means it’s going to get dangerously close—we just don’t know how close. The “sphere of uncertainty” refers to the area it could pass through, a sphere with a radius of one mile. Because the impact could depressurize the station, letting our air out and killing us all, we will have to head to the Soyuz and use it as a possible lifeboat. If the debris streaking toward us collides with us, we will likely all be dead in two hours.
“How about relative velocity?” I ask. “Any idea?”
“Closing velocity of fourteen kilometers per second,” comes the answer.
“Copy,” I say into my headset. (“Fuck,” I say, again, to myself.) This is the worst possible answer to my question. If the satellite were in an orbit similar to ours, the closing speed might be as low as a few hundred miles per hour—a devastating speed for a car crash, but a best-case scenario for a space crash. Instead, the space station is traveling in one direction at 17,500 miles per hour, and the space junk is traveling at the same speed in the exact opposite direction; a 35,000-mile-per-hour closing rate—twenty times faster than a bullet from a gun. If the satellite hits, the resulting destruction would be much worse than what happens in the movie Gravity.
With six hours’ notice, the space station can move itself out of the way of oncoming orbital debris. The Air Force tracks the position and trajectory of thousands of objects in orbit—mostly old satellites, whole or in chunks. As with everything else, NASA has an abbreviation for these adjustments: PDAM, or predetermined debris avoidance maneuvers, which means firing the station’s engines to adjust its orbit. We’ve had two of this type since I’ve been up here. Today, however, is different. With only two hours’ notice, a PDAM will not be possible.
Mission control directs me to close and check all the hatches on the U.S. segment of the space station. I trained to do this in my preparations for this mission, and I run through the procedure in my mind in order to complete the steps properly and—most important—quickly. Even the hatches that were already closed need to be checked, like the unused berthing ports for visiting vehicles. With the hatches closed, if one module is hit, the others might survive—or at least their contents won’t be sucked out into the vacuum of space. There are eighteen hatches on the U.S. segment that must be closed or checked. While I’m working through the hatches as efficiently as I can, I get a call from mission control.
“Scott, Misha, it’s time to get ready for your event with WDRB in Louisville, Kentucky.”
“What?” I ask, incredulous. “Is there really time to be doing this?”
Misha shows up in the U.S. lab for our joint public affairs event, as he always does, with no time to spare but right on time.
“Public affairs events can’t be canceled,” comes the answer. The anchors want to ask us about watching the Kentucky Derby, which was almost two months ago. This is insane.
“Are they fucking kidding?” I say to Misha. He shakes his head in response. This is a bad decision, but it’s also not a great time to get into an argument with the ground.
Misha and I get into position in front of the camera with the handheld microphone.
“Station, Houston, are you ready for the event?” Jay asks.
“We are ready for the event,” I answer, struggling to keep the annoyance out of my voice. We spend the next five minutes answering questions about what we think of the probe that just reached Pluto, what landmark we may be passing over, and whether we got to watch the Kentucky Derby back in May. This kind of interview is part of our job, but today we can’t help but grit our teeth.
When we are asked about maneuvering in weightlessness, we turn somersaults for the Louisville viewers before signing off, still feeling pissed off that we h
ad to waste our time this way, given the magnitude of the situation we are in. There is danger in becoming too complacent about the reality of life on an orbiting space station, and the decision to go ahead with this interview is, to me, clearly a symptom of that.
As soon as the cameras are off, I get back to checking that the hatches are closed. Luckily there are no serious issues with any of them—I don’t have the time to fix any problems. I collect the items from the U.S. segment that we will need most if a collision destroys that part of the station: the defibrillator, the advanced life support medical kit, my iPad with important procedures on it, my iPod, and a bag of personal items. I also make sure I have my thumb drive of images and videos from Amiko that I wouldn’t want to lose track of. By the time I have gathered all my important items, we have about twenty minutes to spare before potential impact.
I go to the Russian segment, where I see that the cosmonauts have not bothered with closing their hatches. They think closing the hatches is a waste of time, and they have a point. The two most likely scenarios are that the satellite will miss us, in which case closing the hatches will have been pointless, or it will hit us, in which case the station will be vaporized in an instant, and it won’t make a bit of difference if the hatches are open or closed. It is incredibly unlikely that one module could be hit and the others survive intact, but just in case, mission control has me spend more than two hours preparing for that eventuality; the Russian approach is to say fuck it and spend what might be their last twenty minutes having lunch. I reach my crewmates in time to join them for a small can of Appetizing Appetizer.
Ten minutes before potential impact we make our way to the Soyuz, which Gennady has prepared for flight in case we have to detach from the station. It’s orbital night now and dark in the Soyuz as we each slide into our seats. It’s cramped and cold and loud.
“You know,” Gennady says, “it will really suck if we get hit by this satellite.”
“Da,” Misha agrees. “Will suck.”
Only four other times in fifteen years have crews had to shelter in place as we are now. I can hear our breathing over the sounds of the fans stirring the air inside the Soyuz. I don’t think any one of us is actually fearful. We’ve all been in risky situations before. We do talk, though, about the size and velocity of the piece of space junk coming toward us. We all agree that it’s a potentially disastrous scenario.
Misha stares out the window. I remind him that he won’t be able to see the satellite coming toward us—it will be going way too fast for the human eye to perceive, and besides, it’s dark outside. He keeps looking anyway, and soon I’m looking out my window too. The clock counts down. Once the time gets down to seconds, I feel myself tensing, starting to grimace. We wait. Then…nothing. Thirty seconds go by. We look at one another with a last heartbeat of anticipation of disaster. Then our grimaces slowly turn into expressions of relief.
“Moscow, are we still waiting?” Gennady asks.
“Gennady Ivanovich, that’s it,” Moscow mission control responds. “The moment has passed. It is safe; you can go back to work now.”
We float out of the Soyuz one by one, Gennady and Misha finish lunch, and then I spend most of the day opening all the hatches.
Later, as I reflect on the situation, I realize that if the satellite had in fact hit us, we probably wouldn’t even have known it. When an aircraft flies into a mountain in bad weather, at five hundred miles per hour, there is little left to tell the story of what went wrong: this crash would have taken place at a speed seventy times that. When I used to work on investigations of aircraft mishaps as a Navy test pilot, I would sometimes reflect that a crew might never have known that anything had gone wrong. Misha, Gennady, and I would have gone from grumbling to one another in our cold Soyuz to being blasted in a million directions as diffused atoms, all in the space of a millisecond. Our neurological systems would not even have had time to process the incoming data into conscious thought. The energy involved in a collision between two large objects at 35,000 miles per hour would be similar to that of a nuclear bomb. I think of that time I almost flew an F-14 into the water and would have disappeared without a trace.
I don’t know whether this comforts me or disturbs me.
—
IN ELEVEN DAYS, a new crew will arrive. I try not to think about how much more time I will have up here, since I know that will only make it harder. But my year in space will divide itself neatly into four expeditions of three months each, and when Kjell, Kimiya, and Oleg arrive, that will mark the passage of only one-quarter of my time here.
10
July 24, 2015
Dreamed I was on Earth, visiting New York with Amiko. We got into a taxi, and I noticed Amiko was carrying a cage with some huge spiders in it, big ones like the goliath bird-eating tarantula named Skittles that I bought Samantha for her birthday a few years ago. Our taxi driver was named Jenny, and she told us she was a postal worker moonlighting by driving a cab—in fact, she had some of the mail she was supposed to be delivering in the trunk. I got into an argument with Jenny about something, and she kicked us out of the car and drove off, with Amiko’s spiders still in the backseat. I ran after the car and got the spiders back for Amiko, then laughed when I noticed Jenny now had a flat tire.
TODAY the Expedition 44 crew arrived. Their launch was a relief after the recent Progress failures, and docking went off without a hitch. When we opened the hatch and the new guys came floating through, looking dazed as baby birds right out of the shell, I was reminded of the day I passed through the same hatch in my Captain America suit, Misha and me fitting through the opening together like a set of conjoined twins. It feels like that was years ago. The days are going by quickly, but the weeks crawl.
The three new guys will need a lot of help acclimating to the environment, getting settled, and learning to do the work. For experienced astronauts serving on ISS for the first time, the adjustment period is longer than for those who have lived here before; for first-time space travelers, like Kjell Lindgren and Kimiya Yui, it’s longer still. (This is Oleg Kononenko’s third time in space.) I trained a year for each of my flights on the space shuttle, preparing in detail for each day’s activities on a two-week mission. In the ISS era, with such a large spacecraft and much longer missions, our training is more generic. We don’t know exactly what we’re going to be doing from day to day. It’s much more challenging, and the biggest challenge is at the start of the mission.
More than two-thirds of space travelers suffer from some degree of space motion sickness, sometimes debilitating, and there isn’t much to be done but wait it out. Kjell and Kimiya both feel pretty bad on day one, and they will be nauseous and only marginally functional until their bodies adjust to the disorientation of zero g. Until they fully adapt, they will be as clumsy and tentative as babies just learning to walk. They will need help with the simplest things; even moving from one module to another without knocking shit off the walls is a challenge. They will need help talking to the ground, preparing food, using the bathroom. Even the process of throwing up requires help initially. It will take them four to six weeks to feel fully normal.
Soon after the new guys come floating through the hatch, we have a quick videoconference with the ground so they can greet their families, still in Baikonur. Most of the questions from the ground can be answered by just saying, “I’m fine. It was the ride of my life.” Misha helpfully floats an apple and an orange behind Kimiya as a visual aid while he talks.
I know Kjell and Kimiya won’t sleep well their first night here. In the middle of the night, I get up to use the bathroom and find Kjell going through bags of stuff in one of the storage modules.
“Hey, what are you looking for?” I ask him. It’s close to impossible to find anything even with the lights on, and out of courtesy Kjell has left them off.
“To tell you the truth, I’m looking for more puke bags,” Kjell says. “I’m out.”
“There’s got to be some more here som
ewhere,” I say. I look in the few places that seem most likely, then search in the computer inventory management system. I ask Houston where I should be looking. After a minute, they say we don’t have a stash of puke bags on board. We don’t include them among supplies sent up to the station because the Russians used to bring them on the Soyuz.
“We’ll improvise something,” I assure Kjell. As with everything else up here, vomit has a tendency to go everywhere, so there has to be a way for the bag to absorb it and hold it in place. It’s also nice to be able to wipe off your face, since surface tension holds liquids on your skin when they can’t drip off due to gravity.
Rooting through our supplies, I invent a new puke bag for Kjell made out of a ziplock bag lined with maxi pads. It works.
For much of what Kjell and Kimiya do on their second day, they need me floating at their elbows, talking them through the procedures, offering help in learning to maneuver in zero g. Kjell’s first task is to inventory the contents of a bag of spare parts that came up with them on their Soyuz and then stow them on ISS. On Earth, it would be a simple task—you could put the bag down on the floor, take everything out, and check off each item on a list as you put it back in. In space, as Kjell quickly learns, the moment you open the bag, objects jump out at you and start drifting away. Just getting everything back under control can take up all of the time that was allotted for the job.
Working through this together is time-consuming, but it will be worth it in the long run. I’m teaching Kjell general techniques he can use throughout his time here—for instance, the importance of putting things away in the right places. I tell Kjell he can keep the contents of a container from leaping out at him when he opens it by slowly spinning in place while holding the bag. Centrifugal force pushes the contents toward the bottom of the bag and holds them there as long as you keep spinning. Organizing the parts being inventoried is a bit trickier, but I show Kjell how to use a mesh bag to hold the objects that would otherwise be floating all over the lab and perhaps hiding themselves. Then he can move each item from the mesh bag back into the original bag as he accounts for it. For small or delicate objects, I show him how to lay out long pieces of duct tape faceup on the wall, bisected by shorter pieces facedown to hold the long one in place. Then he can stick items on the tape, keeping them from wandering off. There are patches of Velcro strategically placed on the walls, and new items often come up with Velcro dots affixed. It’s hard to express how much easier this makes life; when a certain number of new items arrive without Velcro dots, I express annoyance that probably seems out of proportion to those on the ground. But every object that arrives without Velcro on it threatens to rob me of time, patience, and ingenuity, all of which are sometimes in short supply.