Endurance

by Scott Kelly

  Pouring plaster for my Soyuz seat liner Credit 8

  We traveled to Baikonur two weeks before the scheduled launch date. The last morning, we went through the process of getting suited up, doing our leak checks, and speaking to our loved ones through the pane of glass. We rode the bus out to Gagarin’s launchpad, peed on the tire, and climbed into the capsule. Among the things we had to do to get the vehicle ready was configure the oxygen system, a task that was the responsibility of the flight engineer 2—in this case, me. Toward the end of the launch countdown, I was manipulating one of the O2 valves when we heard a loud squeal. We guessed it was compressed oxygen leaking into the cabin, and we were right. I immediately closed the valve, but we had a massive oxygen leak anytime the valve was taken out of the closed position, which was a requirement during the flight.

  At the direction of the ground, Sasha tried to get the situation under control by venting the O2 through the hatch valve into the habitation module above us, then overboard through a valve that led to the outside. He unstrapped himself from his seat so he could sit up to reach the valve directly over his head. I looked at the readings on our LCD screens, paying close attention to the partial pressure of oxygen compared to our total pressure. I did some mental math and calculated that there was close to 40 percent oxygen in the capsule, the oxygen concentration threshold at which many materials become easily flammable with an ignition source, like a small spark.

  All astronauts knew that the crew of Apollo 1 had been killed by a fire in their capsule because it had been pumped full of pure oxygen and that a tiny spark caused a conflagration of the Velcro-lined capsule. NASA didn’t use high-pressure oxygen anymore in this way, and they also redesigned the hatch on the Apollo capsule to open outward—and so have all hatches on NASA human-rated launch vehicles since. Not the Russians. The hatch on our Soyuz opened inward, so if there was a fire, the expanding hot gases would put outward pressure on the hatch and trap us, just like the crew of Apollo 1. As Sasha struggled to reach the valves, flailing in his seat, the metal buckles on his straps struck exposed metal on the capsule’s interior. I thought distinctly to myself, This is not a good place to be right now.

  Once Sasha was back in his seat and it seemed clear we weren’t going to catch fire, we talked about our predicament. I decided not to voice my concern about the flammability risk.

  “It’s too bad we won’t launch today,” I said.

  “Da,” Sasha agreed. “We will be first crew to scrub after strapping in since 1969.” This is an incredible statistic, considering how often the space shuttle used to scrub, right up to the seconds before launch, even after the main engines had lit.

  A voice from the control center interrupted us. “Guys, start your Sokol suit leak checks.”

  What? Sasha and I looked at each other with identical What-the-fuck? expressions. We were now inside five minutes to launch. Sasha raced to get strapped back into his seat properly. The emergency escape system had been activated, and if something had set it off, the rocket would have launched us away from the pad without warning. Sasha would have likely been killed if it had activated while he was not strapped in. We closed our visors and rushed through the leak check procedures. With less than two minutes to spare, we were ready to go. We settled into our seats for our last minutes on Earth.

  The launch experience was different from the shuttle—the Soyuz capsule was much smaller than the shuttle’s cockpit, and less advanced, so there was less for the crew to do. Still, it was much more automated than the space shuttle was. Nothing could match the acceleration of the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters pushing us away from the Earth with an instantaneous 7 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, but anytime you rocket off the planet, it’s serious business.

  Once we reached orbit, we were stuck in this cold tin can with very little to do for two whole days until we were to dock to the space station. As the spacecraft moved in and out of communication coverage, the sun rising and setting every ninety minutes, we quickly lost track of any normal sense of time and drifted in and out of sleep. The habitation module was cramped and spartan, lined in a dull yellow Velcro with an occasional exposed metal frame or structure, which quickly became covered in condensation. We didn’t even have a good view of the Earth because the Soyuz constantly spun to keep the solar arrays pointing at the sun in order to charge its batteries. I had brought my iPod, but the battery soon died. I spent most of the time floating in the middle of the habitation module, feeling like I did when I was a kid in after-school detention, staring at the clock, waiting for the day to be over. When docking day came, I was excited, but when I looked at my watch and realized the moment we were to float through the hatch was still eighteen hours away, I thought to myself, Oh, shit. What the fuck am I going to do for the next eighteen hours? The answer is: nothing. I just floated there. I’ve said that any day in space is a good day, and I believe it, but two days in a Soyuz is not that good.

  This was also Amiko’s first time seeing me launch into space. She had witnessed three previous shuttle launches, including one of my brother’s, before I knew her well. (She remembered seeing me at a prelaunch party in Cocoa Beach, Florida, carrying around a sleeping baby Charlotte with her head of curly blond hair.) So she wasn’t new to the launch experience, but it was different traveling to Baikonur and seeing the Russian way of doing things. And of course it was very different seeing a launch with someone she cared about on board. My brother told me later, once I was safely in orbit, that she cried while watching my launch. I was surprised to hear that because, despite the fact that we had been together for more than a year, I had never seen her cry. When I asked Amiko about it, she said she hadn’t been expecting to be so emotional, but she was moved by the beauty and awe of the launch and by her happiness for me. She knew what it meant to me to get to fly in space, and she knew how hard I had worked to get there.

  Years later, I learned more about what went on that day in the launch center in Baikonur. Someone in launch control had said that they understood this anomaly, and that there was a workaround: cycling the oxygen valve partially open, then closing it before opening it fully to reseat a sticky valve. In the minutes before launch, officials were passing around a piece of paper they needed to sign indicating that they were go for launch in spite of the oxygen leak and Sasha’s struggle to equalize the pressure as time ticked away. As a crew member getting ready to ride the rocket to space, I found this to be troubling.

  —

  WHEN I FLOATED through the hatch to officially join the crew of Expedition 25 on the ISS, I was elated to be starting a long-duration mission. It had been a long road from DOR, backup on Expedition 5, the Columbia accident, my STS-118 mission, prostate cancer, my second backup training flow, and now my prime assignment—ten years all told.

  On board were two Americans and one Russian: Doug Wheelock was serving as the commander for this expedition and would be turning over ISS to me when he left. Doug was a great first ISS commander to serve under. He took a hands-off approach to leadership, letting everyone find his or her own strengths.

  My other American crewmate was Shannon Walker. I didn’t know Shannon very well before this mission, but I was surprised by how different she looked when we met in space: her hair had grown out gray over the months she’d been in space without access to hair dye. Shannon had trained to fly in the left seat of the Soyuz, which meant she needed to know the systems well enough to take over in an emergency that might incapacitate the Russian Soyuz commander, and as a result she spent much more time training in Russia than I did. When I got on board ISS, I was impressed with her abilities as a crew member. This was her first flight, so when I arrived I was at first thinking of her as a rookie, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that she had almost ten times as much time in space as I did, and that in fact I could use her help. At NASA, we talk about “expeditionary behavior,” which is a loose term for being able to take care of yourself, take care of others, help out when it’s needed, st
ay out of the way when necessary—a combination of soft skills that’s difficult to define, hard to teach, and a significant challenge when they are lacking. Shannon was a master at this.

  The Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin, a short, stocky guy with a broad smile, was already on board. Fyodor was one of only two people I’ve been in space with more than once (the other being Al Drew). Fyodor was born in the country of Georgia to Greek parents, which is unusual in a cosmonaut corps made up largely of ethnic Russians. He had a real enthusiasm for photography, and loved taking pictures of the Earth. Even more, he loved showing his pictures to his crewmates regardless of what they were trying to do at the time. The cosmonauts aboard ISS generally don’t have as hectic a schedule as the Americans do, and sometimes that difference can show when they are free to socialize during the day, floating around the dining room table sharing coffee or a snack, while we rush from one thing to the next.

  On this mission I learned the differences between visiting space and living there. On a long-duration flight, you work at a different pace, you get more comfortable moving around, sleep better, digest better. As my first long-duration mission went on, what surprised me most was how little force it actually took to move around and to hold myself still. With just a slight push of a finger or a toe, I could travel across a module and wind up exactly where I wanted to be.

  One of the first tasks I tackled when I got on board was repairing a device called Sabatier, which combines oxygen from the CO2 the Seedra collects and leftover hydrogen from the oxygen-generating assembly to create water. Sabatier is an important part of the nearly closed-loop environmental system of the station. My job was to tune the system, a tedious multiday task, using flow meters and other diagnostic tools. At the time I thought I handled it well, but looking back at it years later with much more experience doing this kind of repair, I realize how much Shannon helped me by getting all the tools and parts together for me in advance, checking on me when I seemed to be struggling, and encouraging me when I got frustrated. Without her help, the task would have been nearly impossible to carry out so early in the mission.

  I celebrated my first Thanksgiving on the space station shortly before taking over as commander of ISS for the first time. The next day, Shannon, Doug, and Fyodor departed for Earth, leaving behind Sasha, Oleg, and me.

  A few weeks later, the new crew arrived. American astronaut Cady Coleman was a retired colonel in the U.S. Air Force and held a Ph.D. in chemistry, and, I came to learn, played the flute. Some people who knew Cady and me thought that we might not click as crewmates, or that I might kill her, because we came from such different backgrounds—the fighter pilot (me) and the scientist (Cady). In fact, Cady and I became great friends and she was a great crew member, even though I was never able to get her to go to bed on time. Sometimes I would get up to use the bathroom at three a.m. on a work night and find her playing her flute in the Cupola. Cady taught me how to be more in touch with my feelings and those of the people we worked with on the ground. She also helped me see the value of reaching out more to the public, letting people share the excitement of what we were doing in space. This would turn out to be enormously helpful on my yearlong mission.

  The Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli, a talented engineer with a great sense of humor, was the third member of the new crew. Paolo is really tall—too tall to fit into the Soyuz, in fact, and the European Space Agency had to pay the Russians to modify the seat, setting it at a steeper angle, in order to fit him into the capsule.

  The Soyuz commander was Dima, who had been on the Expedition 5 backup crew with me and with whom I had done survival training a decade ago. This was his first spaceflight. Back when Dima and I were assigned to the same backup crew, he had argued that he should be commander of ISS because he was the commander of the Soyuz and a military officer. Sasha Kaleri, with his extensive experience in space, was much better qualified to command but was not a military officer. Dima was so convinced that he had been wronged that he wrote two strongly worded letters to his management saying that Sasha wasn’t performing up to par and should be removed from the crew. This incredible breach of protocol meant that Dima was not assigned to a flight for many years, despite his superior technical skills.

  I had heard about crew members not getting along during spaceflights, but I had never personally experienced it myself—until now. I floated down to the Russian segment one day to ask about something, and while I was there Dima asked for my help with a piece of Russian hardware he was struggling to fix—the Russian Elektron, their device for producing oxygen from water. That wouldn’t have seemed unusual, but he asked me with Sasha floating in the vicinity. Sasha offered to help, to his credit, but Dima pretended not to hear him. I couldn’t imagine what it was like working, eating, and sleeping on top of each other for four months with that much tension between them. Their lack of communication made their work harder and could have cost them their lives—and, potentially, ours too—in an emergency.

  After I had been in space for a few months, the press was reporting that Sasha Kaleri had brought with him a Quran that had been given to him by Iran. The rumor was that the Quran was a symbolic response to a recent desecration of Qurans in the United States on the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The ISS program manager wanted to know if it was true. When the chief astronaut asked me about it, I said I didn’t care what books crew members brought on board with them, and I was surprised that NASA would take an interest in such details. I said I wasn’t going to ask anyone about his or her private belongings, and I thought that would be the end of it. But soon after, I heard directly from the space station program manager: I was told in no uncertain terms that I was expected to find out whether Sasha had brought a Quran on board.

  Usually I would push back against a request from the ground only once, and if they persisted, I would do it their way unless it was a safety issue. This was easier than having a showdown over every small disagreement and would preserve my sanity and energy for when it was really needed. But in this case, I still felt strongly that I shouldn’t acquiesce.

  The next day, I floated over to the Russian segment and found Sasha in the confined space of the Russian airlock, working on one of their spacesuits.

  “Hey, Sasha,” I said. “I’m supposed to ask you something, but I don’t personally care what the answer is.”

  “Okay,” Sasha said.

  “I’m supposed to ask you whether there’s an Iranian Quran on board the station.”

  Sasha thought for a moment. “That’s none of your business,” he said agreeably.

  “Got it,” I responded. “Take it easy.” I floated back to the U.S. segment and passed his answer on to my management. That was the last I heard of it.

  —

  JANUARY 8, 2011, WAS a bright sunny day in Tucson, Arizona, but on the space station, the weather was the same as always, and I was fixing the toilet. I had taken it apart and organized the pieces around me so they wouldn’t float away, and now I would not do anything else until I finished the job. We can use the toilet in the Russian segment if necessary, but it’s far away, especially in the middle of the night, and puts unnecessary stress on their resources. The toilet is one of the pieces of equipment that gets a great deal of our attention—if both toilets break we could use the Soyuz toilet, but it wouldn’t last long. Then we would have to abandon ship. If we were on our way to Mars and the toilet broke and we couldn’t fix it, we would be dead.

  I was so involved in the work that I didn’t notice the TV feed being cut. We lost our signal pretty routinely, whenever the space station went out of the line of sight between our antennas and the communication satellites, so I didn’t think it was a big deal. Then a call came from the ground.

  Mission control told me that the chief of the Astronaut Office, Peggy Whitson, needed to talk to me and would be calling on a private line in five minutes. I had no idea why, but I knew the reason wouldn’t be anything good.

  Five minutes is a long
time to think about what emergency might have occurred on the ground. Maybe my grandmother had died. Maybe one of my daughters had been hurt. I didn’t make any connection between the blank TV screen and the phone call—NASA had deliberately cut the feed to spare me learning bad news.

  Before leaving for this mission, I had decided that Mark should act as my proxy in cases of emergency. He knew me better than anyone, and I trusted him to decide what I should hear and when, whether it should come through him or someone else, like a flight surgeon or another astronaut. He knew that in a crisis I would likely want to have all the information up front as soon as possible.

  Peggy came on the line. “I don’t know how to tell you this,” she said, “so I’m just going to tell you. Your sister-in-law, Gabby, was shot.”

  I was stunned. This was such a shocking thing to hear, it seemed surreal. Peggy said she didn’t have any more information, and I told her I wanted to know any news as it came in, that she shouldn’t keep secrets to spare me. Even if the information was unconfirmed or incomplete, I still wanted to know.

  When I got off the line, I told Cady and Paolo what had happened, and then I told the cosmonauts. I tried to assure everyone I was going to be okay, but I also told them I was going to need some time and that I was going to spend most of it on the phone. They were shocked and upset as well and of course gave me the room I needed. Though I was hesitant to turn over this crucial job of fixing the toilet to Cady and Paolo, I had no choice but to trust them.

  I liked Gabby from the first time I met her, and I’ve only gotten to like her more over the years. She treats everyone the same—she is interested in everyone she meets, no matter who they are, where they are from, or what political party they vote for. She wants to help everyone she comes across, and she was completely dedicated to her work as a congresswoman on behalf of the people of Arizona. That was why it was so hard to fathom what had occurred. This sort of random violence should never happen to anyone, but it seemed especially awful that this should happen to her.