Endurance

by Scott Kelly

  This task is taking so long I know I won’t get to complete some of our other scheduled activities. Kjell is running long as well; the cables he is routing to enable future visiting vehicles to dock are proving to be as difficult to wrangle as my grease gun. We are well past the six-and-a-half-hour mark when we start getting organized to call it a day and head back to the airlock. Despite having consumables that would last another few hours, we have to leave enough time to deal with any unexpected problems.

  We still have the toughest part of the spacewalk in front of us: Kjell and I must maneuver ourselves back into the airlock. Kjell goes first and guides his bulky suit through the opening without getting hung up on anything. Once inside, he attaches his waist tether. Then I release his safety tether, which is still connected to the outside of the station, and attach it to myself, then release my own. I swing my legs over my head and flip upside down into the airlock, so I will be facing the hatch to close it.

  By the time we are both inside we are breathing hard. Closing the hatch, absolutely mandatory, will be much harder than opening it, with the fatigue from the spacewalk taking its toll. My hands are completely spent.

  The first step is to close the thermal cover of the outside hatch, which has been severely damaged by the sun, like most of the equipment exposed to its harsh rays. The cover doesn’t fit right anymore—it’s assumed the shape of a potato chip—and it takes a lot of finesse to get it secured properly. With the thermal cover closed, it’s time to get hooked back up to the umbilical that provides oxygen, water, and power to the suits via the station’s systems rather than the suit itself. This isn’t an easy task either, but after a few minutes we manage to get them connected properly.

  Despite my fatigue, I manage to get the hatch securely closed and locked. As the air hisses in around us, Kjell and I are still breathing hard from the work of getting back inside. We will have a wait of about fifteen minutes, punctuated by a few leak checks, to make sure the hatch is properly closed while the airlock returns to the pressure of the station. As we wait, I struggle to equalize my ears by pressing my nose against a pad built into my helmet and blowing (this Valsalva device is designed to replicate the effect of holding our noses). This requires much more force than I thought it would, and later I will discover I have burst some blood vessels in my eyes in the process.

  We have been in these suits for eleven hours now.

  At some point during the repressurization process, we lose comm with the ground. We know it means that for at least a while we aren’t being broadcast on NASA TV and can say what we like.

  “That was fucking insane!” I say.

  “Yeah,” agrees Kjell. “I’m beat.”

  We both know we will have to do another spacewalk in nine days.

  When the hatch opens and we see Kimiya’s smiling face, we know we are nearly done. Kimiya and Oleg do a close inspection of our gloves and take many pictures of them to send to the ground. The gloves are the most vulnerable parts of our suits, prone to cuts and abrasions, and the glove experts on the ground want to know as much as possible about how our gloves have fared today. Any holes will be easier to see while our suits are still pressurized.

  When we are ready to get out of the suits, Kimiya helps us remove our helmets first, which is a relief in one way. But we will miss the cleaner air: the CO2 scrubbers in the suits do a much better job than Seedra. Getting out of the suits was hard on Earth, but there we had the advantage of gravity, which helped by pulling our bodies down toward the floor. Here in space, my suit and I are floating together, so I need Kimiya to hold on to the arms of the suit and pull hard while he pushes down on the pants in the other direction with his legs. Extruding from the hard upper torso reminds me of a birthing horse.

  Once I’m out of the spacesuit, it hits me all at once how draining it’s been just being in the suit, never mind the full day of grueling work I did while wearing it. Kjell and I head to the PMM, where we remove our long underwear and dispose of our used diapers and biomedical sensors. We take a quick “shower” (move the dried sweat around on our bodies with wipes, then towel off to dry) and eat some food for the first time in fourteen hours. I call Amiko and tell her how it went—she watched the whole thing from mission control, but I know she’s waiting to hear what it was actually like for me. She worried about this spacewalk more than she worried about any other part of this mission.

  “Hey,” I say as soon as she picks up the phone, “that was something. I don’t know exactly how to describe it. It was fucking crazy.”

  “I’m so proud of you,” she says. “It was intense to watch.”

  “It was intense for you?” I joke, though I understand what she means. She’d been in mission control since three in the morning Houston time and didn’t eat or even go to the bathroom until I was back inside safely.

  “It was more intense than seeing you launch,” she says. “At least when you launched I had the chance to say good-bye to you right before. Today, I knew if something went wrong I would have to deal with not having seen you for seven months.”

  She tells me she was so excited for me that I was able to do a spacewalk after all these years of being an astronaut, and she says that everyone at NASA felt that enthusiasm.

  “I’m beat,” I say. “I’m not sure I want to do that again.” I tell her that this was definitely the “type two” kind of fun—fun when it’s done—but I know that by the time of our next spacewalk, I will be ready to go again. I tell her I love her before hanging up.

  That evening, we go down to the Russian segment for a little celebration. Successful spacewalks are one of the events, like holidays, birthdays, and crew arrivals and departures, that warrant special dinners. This will be a short one, though, because Kjell and I are tired. While we eat, we talk about the day, what went well, what surprised us, what we might do differently next time. I tell Kjell what a great job he did, knowing he is still trying to put that errant switch throw behind him. He knows I don’t give unearned praise, so I hope he can finish this day feeling that he did well. I tell Kimiya again what a great job he did as IV, and I thank the Russians again for their help. On days like this it’s clear that this crew can truly pull together as a team, and that is one of the rewards of the hardest day I’ve ever had.

  After we say our good nights, I slide into my bag, turn off the light, and try to fall asleep. As of tomorrow, Kjell, Kimiya, and Oleg will have spent one hundred days in space. Kjell and I will have some time to recover before preparing for our second spacewalk. That one will be even more complicated and physically demanding. But for now, I can rest. One of the biggest hurdles of this year is now behind me.

  —

  I CALL my father one evening to see how he’s doing, and he tells me that my uncle Dan, my mother’s brother, has died. He had suffered from a debilitating skeletal condition for most of his life, so his death was not a huge surprise, but because he was only ten years older than me he still seems too young to be gone. When Mark and I were about ten, Uncle Dan had moved into my family’s basement for a while, and because he was closer to our age than to my mother’s, I remember him being more like a big brother than an uncle. I remark to my father that death doesn’t wait while I’m in space, any more than life does. The fact that I never said good-bye and won’t be back until long after the funeral is a reminder that I’m missing things that can never be made up.

  A few days later, I stop Kjell when he is floating through the U.S. lab and ask him if he could spare a minute. I put on a serious face and tell him I need to talk with him.

  “Sure, what’s up?” Kjell responds with his characteristic upbeat tone. People who are this sunny and positive can come across as fake, but I’ve learned from working with Kjell all this time in close quarters and under challenging circumstances that his attitude is completely real. He actually is that positive. I imagine this trait served him well as an emergency room doctor, and it’s equally valuable in long-duration spaceflight.

  “It’s a
bout the next spacewalk,” I say, with a serious tone. I pause as if I’m searching for the right words.

  “Yeah?” Kjell says, now with a hint of apprehension.

  “I’m afraid I have to tell you—you’re not going to be EV Two.” EV2 was the role Kjell had played on our first spacewalk—I was the leader (EV1) as the more experienced astronaut, though it was the first time outside for both of us.

  A look of concern crosses Kjell’s face, followed quickly by sincere disappointment.

  “Okay,” he answers, waiting to hear more.

  I decide I’ve fucked with him enough. “Kjell, you’re going to be EV One.”

  It was a mean trick, but it’s worth it to see the relief and excitement on his face when he realizes that he has been promoted. Kjell will fly more future missions and likely will conduct more future spacewalks, so it will be invaluable for him to get experience as the leader. I have full confidence in his ability to carry out this role, and I tell him so. We have a lot of preparation to do.

  —

  NOVEMBER 3 IS a midterm election day on Earth, so I call the voting commission in my home county—Harris County, Texas—and get a password that I can use to open a PDF they emailed to me earlier; I fill out my ballot and email it back to them. There are no political candidates on the ballot, just referendums. Still, I take pride in exercising my constitutional rights from space, and I hope it sends a message that voting is important (and that inconvenience is never a good excuse for failing to vote).

  I follow the news from space, especially political news, and it seems like the presidential election next year is going to be like no other. Like the hurricanes I watch from above, a storm seems to be gathering on the horizon that will shape our political landscape for years to come. I pay close attention to the primaries of both parties, and though I don’t tend to be a worrier, I start to worry. Sometimes before going to sleep I look out the windows of the Cupola at the planet below. What the hell is going on down there? I mutter to myself. But I have to concentrate on the things I can control, and those are up here.

  16

  THE RUSSIANS HAVE a very different system for medically certifying people to fly, and when we travel in their Soyuz we must abide by their rules. So it was a problem when my new flight surgeon Steve Gilmore presented me as a crew member to fly on the Soyuz to the International Space Station after having recently been treated for cancer.

  Russian surgical procedures and treatment options for prostate cancer are not as advanced as those in the United States, and as a result, their statistics on survival and recovery are very different. Russian doctors overestimated the chances that I would experience debilitating negative effects from the surgery or have an early recurrence of the cancer. They were especially concerned that I would suddenly find myself unable to urinate in flight, which would require a costly and dramatic early departure. They didn’t want to take that risk.

  Steve worked hard to convince the Russian doctors that my surgery had been a success and that I was going to be able to pee just fine in space. We called Steve “Doogie,” because of his youthful appearance, or “Happy,” for his cheerful disposition. He worked on this issue for more than a year. It would have been easier for NASA to simply replace me with someone else, and I’m grateful they stood by me. In the end, the Russians agreed to let me fly, recognizing that our expertise and experience in this area were superior to theirs. They still made me fly with a catheterization kit in the Soyuz.

  I began training for my mission to the space station in late 2007, with the launch scheduled for October 2010. Missions to ISS were divided into expeditions of six crew members, and my time on station would cover both Expeditions 25 and 26. In 2008, I began working with Sasha Kaleri, the Soyuz commander, and Oleg Skripochka, who would fly in the left seat as the flight engineer. Sasha is a quiet and serious guy with a full head of dark hair speckled gray. He was one of the most experienced cosmonauts, having flown three long-duration missions on Mir and one on the ISS—608 days altogether. He also brought a lot of old-school attitude and tradition, including some small Soviet flags, as part of his kit of personal items we get to launch in the Soyuz. He seems to be nostalgic for the Communist system, which of course was odd to me, but I liked him nonetheless. Oleg was on his first spaceflight. Studious and well prepared, he tried to model himself after Sasha in every way, and in turn Sasha treated Oleg like a son or a little brother.

  This wasn’t my first time training with the Russians, of course; I had trained to fly as the backup for Expedition 5 in 2001 and again as part of the backup crew for the flight prior to this one. By now, I was intimately familiar with the way the Russian space agency handles training similarly to NASA, such as an emphasis on simulator training, and the way they don’t, like their emphasis on the theoretical versus the practical—to an extreme. If NASA were to train an astronaut how to mail a package, they would take a box, put an object in the box, show you the route to the post office, and send you on your way with postage. The Russians would start in the forest with a discussion on the species of tree used to create the pulp that will make up the box, then go into excruciating detail on the history of box making. Eventually you would get to the relevant information about how the package is actually mailed, if you didn’t fall asleep first. It seems to me this is part of their system of culpability—everyone involved in training needs to certify that the crew was taught everything they could possibly need to know. If anything should go wrong, it must then be the crew’s fault.

  Before we can fly on the Soyuz, we must pass oral exams, graded on a scale of one through five, just like the exams given throughout the entire Russian educational system. We took our final exams before a large commission, nearly twenty people in all, who were grading us. We also had a larger audience of spectators. Privately, I referred to the oral exams as a “public stoning.” Part of the process is a postexam debrief in which crew members argue for the grade they believe they have earned, minimizing and avoiding responsibility for any mistakes. This arguing over grades is something like a sport, and it seems we were being graded partly on how we pled our cases. I never wanted to argue—I was willing to take whatever grade the instructors wanted to give me, because I knew that in the end I would soon fly in space regardless.

  Some of our training took place at other sites, as we learned to do everything from repairing the equipment on the space station to conducting experiments across many scientific disciplines. One day at the Johnson Space Center, I was in a session with a materials scientist who was teaching a group of astronauts how to use a new piece of equipment on the space station, a furnace for heating materials in zero gravity. While he was explaining the properties of the furnace, he showed us a golf-ball-sized sample of a material that had been “forged” in the furnace and said repeatedly that it was “harder than a diamond.” I found that difficult to believe and asked whether I could hold it. He smiled and handed it to me.

  “Is this really harder than a diamond?” I asked.

  He assured me that it was.

  I put the sample on the floor and raised my heel over it, looking at the scientist questioningly.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  I brought down my heel hard and the sample shattered, pieces flying all over the room. Apparently, it wasn’t harder than a diamond. This incident became part of a narrative about me in some people’s minds at NASA—that I didn’t have enough respect for the scientific work being done on the space station. It’s true that I’m not a scientist and that research was never my main motivation for going to space. But even if the science wasn’t what drove me to become an astronaut, I have a profound respect for the pursuit of scientific knowledge and I take my part in that seriously. After all, I would argue, testing that sample from the furnace was an example of using the scientific method to gain knowledge.

  Another uniquely Russian spaceflight practice was the creation of custom-molded seat liners for each crew member. The first time I served as a backup crew m
ember, I went to Zvezda, the company that makes the Soyuz seats and Sokol suits, as well as the spacesuits the cosmonauts wear on spacewalks and ejection seats for Russian military aircraft. With a NASA flight surgeon and an interpreter who specializes in medical translation, I traveled to the other side of Moscow from Star City, through many miles of Moscow suburbs. Once inside the guarded and gated Zvezda facility, I was helped into a container like a small bathtub, then had warm plaster poured in all around me. After the plaster hardened, I was helped out, then got to watch while an old weathered technician with a beard like Tolstoy’s—he was really more like an artisan—went to work. I watched his huge, callused hands, with long sensitive fingers like a sculptor’s, carve out the excess plaster to create a perfect mold of my back and butt.

  A few weeks later, I came back to Zvezda for a fit check of the newly made seat liner, followed by the dreaded pressure check—an hour and a half on my back in my custom-made spacesuit in my custom-made seat liner with the suit pressurized. The circulation in my lower legs got cut off, and the position became a distinctly painful form of torture. All the cosmonauts and astronauts dread this procedure, but if anyone complains, they are met with a curt answer: “If you can’t deal with this pain now, how can you deal with it in space?” I never bothered arguing about it, but this was a flawed argument; in space you can deal with discomfort that you know is keeping you alive. A few weeks later, I came back for the pressure check again, this time in a vacuum chamber, a ritual meant to give us confidence in the suits. These activities can feel more like ceremonial rites of passage than engineering necessities, as with so many of the traditions in the Russian space program. In the coming years, I would carry out this painful ritual two more times.