Endurance

by Scott Kelly

  He nailed the landing, the tires held under us, and we rolled to a stop. “Nice landing!” I told him, completing one of my most important responsibilities of the whole mission. Our mission was over.

  I was surprised by how dizzy I felt being back in Earth’s gravity. When I tried to unstrap myself from my seat and get up, I found I nearly couldn’t move. I felt like I weighed a thousand pounds. We climbed from the space shuttle to a converted motor home where we could change out of our launch-and-entry suits and get a brief medical examination. Trying to get out of the suit worsened my dizziness, and the world spun up like a carnival ride.

  Some of my crewmates were worse off than others, their faces pale and clammy. We were taken back to the crew quarters at Kennedy, where we were able to shower before meeting up with our families and friends. I went out that night to Fishlips, a seafood restaurant in Port Canaveral, with everyone who had come for my landing, and it was a bit surreal, sitting at a long table drinking beer and enjoying fish tacos, when just a few hours earlier I had been hurtling toward the Earth at a blistering speed in a 3,000-degree fireball. We threw a party for our Houston friends when we returned home the next night, and a couple of days later I was back in the office, a real astronaut.

  13

  September 4, 2015

  Dreamed the new people came up here, bringing our total to nine. We were so overcrowded we had to share our CQs. I was sharing mine with some guy I didn’t know, and he was cooking meth inside. I had to sleep with a respirator on. The other crew members were getting suspicious of the yellow cloud of smoke coming from under the door, and for some reason I worked to hide it. My roommate kept saying he was going to stop, but he wouldn’t. Eventually I tricked him into the airlock, closed the hatch, and spaced him.

  IT’S A RARE OCCASION for a Soyuz to dock without another one having left recently. The Soyuz that comes up today is the one that will be my ride back to Earth six months from now, and its crew will bring our total to nine. I’m looking forward to having some new faces up here, but I’m also concerned about how the Seedra will stand up to nine people exhaling rather than six, as well as the strain on the toilets and other crucial equipment. The overall activity level is going to take some getting used to.

  Our new crewmates will be Andreas Mogensen (Andy), Aidyn Aimbetov, and Sergey Volkov. Sergey will be here through the end of my mission and will command the Soyuz that he, Misha, and I will go home on in March, but Andy and Aidyn are here for only ten days, flying this short increment that had been meant for Sarah Brightman. When she withdrew from the flight very late in her preparations to go, her seat was taken by Aidyn, a Kazakh cosmonaut. The Russian space agency has been promising to send a Kazakh to ISS for a long time, as a gesture in exchange for the use of Baikonur as their launch operations center (in addition to $115 million a year). Aidyn is the third Kazakh to go to space but the first to fly under his country’s flag rather than the Russian flag.

  When the new guys arrive, Sergey Volkov floats through the hatch first. I know him well from being in the same era of space flyers—I was selected in NASA’s 1996 class, and he was selected in Roscosmos’s 1997 class, so we were peers. At one point, Sergey had been assigned to the STS-121 crew with my brother, and in preparation for that flight they went on a National Outdoor Leadership School trip. They spent a week in a tent in horrible weather in Wyoming, which cemented a lifelong friendship. I got to know Sergey more when we trained together for our Soyuz descent, but because that was so far in the future, we left most of the training for in flight. Sergey was Misha’s backup for the yearlong mission, so when we were in Baikonur preparing for launch, Sergey was there with us too. Sergey says to me regularly, “Please say hi to Mark for me.”

  Then Andy floats through the hatch. He’s an ESA astronaut from Denmark whom I’ve known for years, a friendly guy with blond hair and a perpetual smile. He grew up all over the world and went to high school and college in the United States. His wife jokes that his English is better than his Danish.

  When Aidyn comes floating through last, I’m watching with interest. He pauses in the hatch to give a heroic Superman pose to the camera, Gennady and Oleg holding his sides to steady him. He looks a lot like the people I’ve known in Kazakhstan, more Asian than European. He is younger than me, forty-three, but seems older (maybe it’s the zero g). He started his career as a military pilot, rising to the role of flying the Soviet Su-27 Flanker. Then he was selected as part of the first official Kazakh cosmonaut class in 2002. For all these years he’s been waiting to fly, sometimes assigned to missions that fell through, sometimes on hiatus when Kazakhstan could not fund his training and flight. I imagine everyone who has flown in space has felt it was a long journey to get here—it’s not unusual for American astronauts to wait many years to fly even after completing astronaut training—but Aidyn truly waited a long time.

  From the start, Aidyn seems disoriented up here. He gets lost trying to find his way to the Soyuz and ends up in the U.S. lab module; the next day, he can’t locate the Japanese module. I find him looking for the 3-D printer in the U.S. segment, and we try to talk about it. But he has no English, and Russian is a second language for both of us, so our discussion is pretty rudimentary.

  —

  TODAY WE HOLD the change-of-command ceremony, so I am now officially the commander of the International Space Station. The capcom on the ground congratulates me on taking over for the next six months, and her words hit me—six months is a long time. I try not to dwell on how long I have to go. I’ve been up here for so long, and I’m only halfway through.

  This morning, I showed Andy the view of the Bahamas from the Cupola. Later in the day, he comes to ask me whether the window shutters need to stay closed. At first I’m confused by his question, because I thought the shutters were open. We go to the Cupola, and it’s dark outside, a deep, deep black. I explain to him that we happen to be passing over the Pacific during orbital night with no moon and the lights outside the space station turned off for some reason.

  In the morning, Gennady greets me, “Good morning, Comrade Commander,” with great affection in his voice. I’m going to miss him next week when he’s gone—he has been a great commander, and I have learned a lot from him.

  Today is Friday, and because there are so many of us we eat Friday dinner in Node 1 rather than trying to cram into the snug Russian service module. Andy has brought us some corned beef and cabbage, which hits the spot; I’ve been craving a corned beef sandwich from the Carnegie Deli in New York for a long time. After we’re done eating, Andy hands each of us a Danish chocolate, an unexpected treat. When we start opening the chocolates, we find that each of them contains a message from someone we know—my chocolate has a poem from Amiko. It was a great idea of Andy’s and a really thoughtful gesture.

  Football days wet grass cold skinny dips

  Foot massages sweet and sour dirty lips

  Soft towels home cooking little strings

  Burgers and buns no more pipe dreams

  Thunder rolls blind folds and fast cars

  Palm scratches loamy smells distant stars

  Road trips minute beers breezy nights

  Real slow dances in pin-striped tights

  Sunset warm sand and callipygian

  Hot sauce—a lot or just a smidgen

  Early morning dew and fireside chats

  Enjoy your secret chocolate snack

  I’ll give you something sweeter

  When you come back

  On Sunday we have a traditional Kazakh meal, irradiated and packaged into space-food servings: horse meat soup, cheese made of horse milk, and horse milk to drink. The horse meat is a little gamey, but I eat all of it. The cheese is really salty, which is actually a nice change from the low-sodium food we generally have. I comment that the horse milk is really sweet—as commander, I feel like as a gesture of goodwill I should try everything—and Aidyn tells me that it’s closest in taste to human breast milk. That does it for me. Now my c
oncern is what to do with a nearly full bag of unpasteurized horse milk. I tell Aidyn I’m going to put it in the small fridge along with the condiments and some science experiments and drink it in the morning with my breakfast. When he isn’t looking, I triple-bag it and dispose of it in a spot reserved for the smelliest items.

  The next day, I’m floating down to the service module to talk to the cosmonauts when I find Aidyn in the passageway between the Russian and U.S. segments, wedged into a crevice between some hardware stowed on the floor, reading a Russian car magazine. I grab him and say, “Come with me.”

  I lead him down to the Cupola and show him how to open and close the window shutters.

  “You’re more than welcome to come down and hang out in here anytime,” I tell him. This is a view he would only have a very limited chance to enjoy.

  Unlike Aidyn, Andy is very busy. The European Space Agency has sent many science experiments with him. I feel bad for him, because he is spending most of his time on his own in the European Columbus module, which is windowless. I check in with him often to see if he needs any help, and he always seems to be doing well. When Andy isn’t working, he can often be found hanging out with us, watching TV or chatting. I encourage him to spend time looking out the window, but I get the sense he wants to be part of the crew just as much as he wants to enjoy the view. I want to say that he’s only up here for ten days, so he should be spending all of his free time with his face pressed to the window, but I don’t want to tell him what to do. On a ten-day shuttle mission, everyone would be hanging by the windows as much as possible, oohing and aahing.

  As much as I enjoy having new faces up here, we definitely feel the strain of having such a full house. With NASA’s permission, Sergey sleeps in the U.S. airlock. Without asking permission from the Japanese space agency, I let Andy sleep in their module, since I don’t want him to have to spend all his time in the windowless Columbus module. Aidyn sleeps in the habitation module of the Soyuz they will be going home on.

  Near the end of Andy’s ten-day stay, he remarks, “Boy, do I need a vacation.”

  “You know what?” I say. “You’re complaining to the wrong guy.”

  He gets it and laughs at himself.

  A few days later, I give myself a flu shot, the first one administered in space. We are safe from infectious illness up here, so the shot isn’t to protect me; instead it’s part of the Twins Study comparing Mark and me. He will be injected with the same serum at the same time—in fact, he insists on injecting himself as well—and then our immunological responses will be compared. When we both tweet about our flu shots, the response is surprising. I even get retweeted by the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. Just the fact that I injected myself seems to be the subject of fascination. I’m learning that sometimes it’s the more mundane aspects of life in space that capture the public’s attention the most.

  On September 12, we gather to see off the short-duration crew. As always, I find it strange to say good-bye to people leaving space. The bond we form up here, a bond of shared hardship, risk, and extraordinary experiences, is powerful. Gennady has prepared the Soyuz, and the crew is suited up in the underwear that go with their Sokol suits. We set up the cameras for the ground to watch as we gather in the service module, then make conversation as we wait awkwardly for the clock to tick down. When it’s finally time for them to float through the hatch into the Soyuz, I hug each of them good-bye, especially Gennady. I tell him how much I’m going to miss him. When they are all in the Soyuz, I float in after them and joke that I’m going to stow away. “I’m done, guys. I’ve decided I’m going back with you!” Everyone laughs as I float back into the station.

  We close the hatch, and a couple of hours later they are gone.

  Three days later, I hit the halfway point of my mission.

  14

  AS MY LIFE was returning to normal following my first spaceflight, in early 2000, I also had a moment to take stock of where I was in my career. What would come next? I had been working for most of my life to become one of the few people who get to travel in space, and now I had done it. I had performed well, our mission had been a success, we had come back safely, and I couldn’t wait to go up again. But I didn’t know when that would be.

  One of my crewmates on the mission I had just finished, Mike Foale, had flown a mission on Mir, so he spoke Russian and was well connected within the Russian space agency. He was also an associate administrator of the Johnson Space Center and was close with the center’s director, George Abbey, so he had influence with him. Soon after we came back from our mission, NASA was looking for a new director of operations (DOR)—an astronaut who lived in Star City, just outside Moscow, and served as a liaison between the two space agencies. The DOR dealt with the details of training American astronauts to fly on Russian spacecraft and served as the on-site leader for the U.S. astronauts training there. The International Space Station was still in the early stages of construction, and we were ramping up to train international crews in Houston and Star City, as well as in Europe and Japan. Mike said that Mr. Abbey wanted me to serve as DOR. I was flattered, but I was reluctant to take the job. I thought of myself as a shuttle astronaut, a pilot, not a space station guy. I remarked to my brother in private that I didn’t want to get that space station stink on me, thinking it would be hard to get off, resulting in fewer shuttle flights.

  Still, when I was offered the job, I accepted it. My approach to an unwanted assignment had always been to express my misgivings and my preferences, but then if I was still asked to take the hard job, I did my best to make it a success. I was to start just a few months later.

  Mike flew with me to Russia the first time to help me get acclimated. We were met at the airport by a Russian driver named Ephim, a squat, gruff bull of a man. I would later learn that Ephim would do anything to protect us and our families, even physically if required, and he cooked a great shashlik, Russian barbecue. Ephim loaded us into a Chevy Astro van, one of the few Western vehicles in Russia at the time, and I watched Moscow go by as we passed through the city. The snow was piled high, and the car exhaust and other pollutants had stained it dark. As we traveled northeast from Moscow, past old Russian cottage-style houses with their ornate trim and elaborately shingled roofs, the snow gradually turned white. Soon we were passing through the gates of Star City.

  Down a narrow path lined with thick birch trees, past old Soviet-style cinder-block apartment buildings and the giant statue of Gagarin holding flowers behind his back and leaning forward welcomingly, we arrived at the awkward row of Western-style town houses built for NASA we called “the cottages.” It was Friday night, so after dropping our bags we went straight to Shep’s Bar, actually just the remodeled basement of Cottage 3. The place was named for Bill Shepherd, a NASA veteran of three space shuttle flights who was now in Star City training to become the first commander of the International Space Station. He was also a former Navy SEAL who was legendary for saying in his astronaut interview, when asked what he could do better than anyone else in the room, “Kill people with my knife.” Bill had a penchant for putting people under the table in a drinking game called liar’s dice, and my first night in Russia I was expected to participate. I wasn’t one to argue, and I even had a slight advantage over the others in that I had played the game in my fighter pilot days. Shep had no mercy on us newcomers, though, and I watched as some scientist astronauts who were in Russia for the first time fell out one by one. Shep didn’t need a knife to kill; he could also kill with dice.

  Even though I held my own, the next morning was rough when I had to get up very early for a four-hour ride on a bumpy road in a bus smelling of burning engine oil. I lay down on the backseat and tried to sleep as we headed to Russa, the remote village where space flyers trained in case the Soyuz landed in cold weather. The plan was for me to first observe, then to participate in, the Russian winter survival training.

  During the reign of Ivan the Terrible, Russa ha
d been a thriving city, but now, having been largely destroyed in World War II, there wasn’t much there aside from a “sanatorium,” a quintessentially Russian combination of hospital and hotel that to Americans looked more like an old spa. The area is famous for spring-fed lakes that were supposed to have healing powers.

  Unbeknownst to me, and against NASA’s objections, I was to go through the same psychological evaluations the cosmonauts did, and this was the first order of business on my first day. NASA had its own psychological evaluation process, of course, but the Russians’ was a bit different. The first test I did involved sitting across from a psychologist under a bare bulb, both of us sitting on hard wooden kitchen chairs. I felt as though I were going to be interrogated like Francis Gary Powers during the Cold War.

  The psychologist, who looked like a well-fed version of Sigmund Freud, explained the test: I was to estimate various lengths of time by stopping a stopwatch without looking at it after what I thought was ten seconds, then thirty seconds, then one minute. I took the stopwatch from him and held it down by my side to begin the first test. I soon realized that I could see the doctor’s watch from where I was sitting, including the second hand. I “estimated” each of the intervals of time perfectly. The psychologist reacted with shock and congratulated me profusely on my time-estimation prowess.

  Once the test was over, his watch was no longer visible to me, and I wondered whether that had actually been a test of my honesty, or perhaps a test of my ability to adapt. I decided not to worry about it much—to me, using any available tool I had to excel on the test was at least as important as following the rules blindly. I don’t condone cheating, but I’ve learned it’s important to be creative in solving problems. Now that I’ve gotten to know the Russian culture, I think my approach was the right one.