Endurance

by Scott Kelly

  I called Mark. He was hurriedly packing his bags in Houston as we talked and had arranged to fly to Tucson as quickly as possible. He told me he’d received a call from Pia Carusone, Gabby’s chief of staff, telling him about the shooting. Pia told him that Gabby had been shot at a public event, that an unknown number of people had been hurt or killed, that Gabby’s status was uncertain, and that he needed to get to Tucson right away. Mark said okay and hung up—then immediately called Pia back and asked her to repeat everything she had just said. The idea of his wife being shot was so shocking, it simply hadn’t sunk in. He needed to hear Pia say it all over again to be sure that it was real.

  Mark and I agreed we would connect again as soon as he landed in Tucson. Not long after, mission control called to tell me that the Associated Press was reporting that Gabby had died.

  I immediately tried to call Mark again, but he was already in the air on the way to Tucson with our mother and his two daughters. Our good friend Tilman Fertitta had lent them his private jet so they could get to Tucson as quickly as possible. This is the kind of thing Tilman does for his friends, and I’ve always been grateful for the way he stepped up that day. I called Tilman to find out what he had heard.

  “Gabby’s not dead,” he said. “I don’t believe it.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked. “All the news media are saying it.”

  “I don’t know for sure, but it just doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “She went into surgery, and she should still be in the operating room.”

  One of the things I like about Tilman is that he immediately sees through bullshit. Even with a subject completely outside his expertise, like brain surgery, he questions everything, and most of the time he’s right. I took hope in his words.

  The next several hours were some of the longest in my life. My mind kept traveling to my brother—what he must be feeling, not knowing whether he would ever see his wife alive again. I called Amiko and my daughters and repeated to them what Tilman had told me: regardless of what they were saying on TV, it didn’t make sense that Gabby was dead. Soon after Mark landed in Arizona, I got him on the phone.

  “What’s happening?” I asked the moment he picked up. “They’re saying Gabby died.”

  “I know,” he said. “I got the news on the plane. But I just spoke to the hospital, and it was a mistake. She’s still alive.”

  There is no way to describe the relief you feel when you’ve been told someone you care about is alive after spending hours thinking she was dead. We knew Gabby would still have a long and hard road ahead of her, but knowing she was still drawing breath was the best news we could have hoped for.

  I made dozens more calls that day and the next—to my brother, to Amiko, to my mother and father, to my daughters, to friends. Sometimes I wondered whether I was calling too much, whether in my effort to be there for them I was becoming intrusive. That first day, I learned that thirteen other people had been injured in the shooting and six had been killed, including a nine-year-old girl named Christina-Taylor Green, who was interested in politics and wanted to meet Gabby. I talked to Mark and Amiko a dozen times that day.

  The next day, we had a videoconference with Vladimir Putin that had been planned long before. I was surprised by how much of the time he took speaking directly to me. He told me that the Russian people were behind my family and that he would do anything he could to help. He seemed sincere, which I appreciated.

  On Monday, President Obama announced a national day of mourning. The same day, I was to lead a moment of silence from space. I don’t get nervous easily, but this responsibility weighed heavily on me. This would be the first public statement from my family. As the time grew near, I called Amiko at work in mission control in Houston. I confided to her that I was uneasy—I didn’t know exactly how long a moment of silence should be, and for some reason I had focused on that seemingly insignificant question.

  “It should be as long as you want,” she assured me. “As long as feels right.”

  Her assurance helped. At the appointed time, I floated in front of the camera. I’d put a great deal of thought into the brief remarks I’d written, but I wanted to sound as if I was speaking from the gut rather than reading from a prepared statement—because I was.

  “I’d like to take some time this morning to recognize a moment of silence in honor of the victims of the Tucson shooting tragedy,” I said. “First, I’d like to say a few words. We have a unique vantage point here aboard the International Space Station. As I look out the window, I see a very beautiful planet that seems inviting and peaceful. Unfortunately, it is not.

  “These days, we are constantly reminded of the unspeakable acts of violence and damage we can inflict upon one another. Not just with our actions, but with our irresponsible words. We are better than this. We must do better. The crew of ISS Expedition Twenty-six and the flight control centers around the world would like to observe a moment of silence in honor of all the victims, which include my sister-in-law, Gabrielle Giffords, a caring and dedicated public servant. Please join me and the rest of the ISS Expedition Twenty-six crew in a moment of silence.”

  Those of us who have had the privilege to look down on the Earth from space get the chance to take a larger perspective on the planet and the people who share it. I feel more strongly than ever that we must do better.

  I bowed my head and thought of Gabby and the other victims of the shooting. Just as Amiko had assured me, it wasn’t hard to sense when the moment was complete. I thanked Houston, and we went back to work for the day. On the space station, we followed our normal routine. But I knew that on Earth some things would never be the same.

  —

  MY BROTHER had been assigned to the second-to-last flight of the space shuttle program, a mission to deliver components to the International Space Station. He was scheduled to fly on April 1, less than three months after the shooting. Gabby’s condition was stable, but she had a long road of surgeries and therapy ahead of her. He knew that if he was going to step aside and let someone else command that mission, he should do it as soon as possible so the new commander would have time to get up to speed.

  It wasn’t clear whether NASA management would make the decision or if Mark would be allowed to decide for himself, and the uncertainty added to Mark’s stress. And in the early days after the shooting, he wasn’t sure what he would choose if it were up to him. He wanted to be there for Gabby as she started the long process of recovering from her catastrophic injury, but he also felt a duty to see his mission through. He and his crewmates had been training together for months, and a new commander would not know the mission or the crew as well as Mark did. We talked on the phone about it many times, but in the end, it was Gabby who made the decision. She would have been devastated if the shooting had robbed him of his last chance to fly in space. She urged him to go.

  Because astronauts always have to prepare for the possibility we won’t survive a mission, Mark now had to consider his responsibilities to Gabby in a new way. On his previous flight, Mark had straightened out his affairs and written a letter to be delivered to Gabby in the eventuality he didn’t come back. But now he wasn’t just Gabby’s husband, he was also her main caretaker and her main support. If he were suddenly gone, that would be disastrous in a very different way.

  In all our discussions about Mark’s mission and the possibility he could die, we couldn’t help but note the irony. As astronauts, Mark and I had been confronted with the risks of flying in space. None of us could have imagined that it would be Gabby, not Mark, whose work nearly cost her her life.

  —

  IN FEBRUARY, Discovery came up and docked with the station on its last flight. It was funny seeing a shuttle crew come on board, as I had done myself not that long before, flying around in the Superman orientation—floating horizontally—rather than the more upright position of seasoned long-term space travelers. The new guys were bumping into everything and kicking equipment off the walls everywhere they wen
t. The day after they arrived, I floated over to visit Discovery, the orbiter I had flown on my first flight. I remembered the last time I had been on board, December 28, 1999, climbing out that evening at the end of the flight. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

  Looking around the mid-deck, I felt a wave of nostalgia for the time I’d spent there. The three remaining orbiters were remarkably similar, especially Discovery and Endeavour, which both had similar upgrades made after Columbia had been assembled. But there were differences between them that we who flew on them found unmistakable. When I had flown on Endeavour several years earlier, it still had a new-car look to it, even though it had been in service for sixteen years. At twenty-seven, Discovery was the oldest orbiter, the workhorse of the fleet on its thirty-ninth and last mission. But rather than seeming past its prime, it seemed to me like a well-loved classic with the refinement of a vintage car.

  I floated up to the flight deck where the pilot, Eric Boe, was strapped into his seat running through some checklists. He greeted me and continued with his work.

  “Hey, Eric, do you mind if I jump up into your seat for a minute? I just want to see how it feels.”

  Eric is a sharp guy. “Your first flight was on Discovery, wasn’t it?” he asked. With a smile, he got out of the way.

  I floated into the seat and strapped myself in, surveying my former office. I looked over the mass of switches, buttons, and circuit breakers that controlled the many complex systems I had been responsible for so many years ago. I knew I could fly her right now if I had the chance. I remembered sitting in this seat, and my former self seemed so young and inexperienced compared to where I was now, having spent so much more time in space. Little did I know what the future still had in store for me.

  The crew of the Discovery mission did a few spacewalks, and one of them involved a Japanese payload called “Message in a Bottle.” It wasn’t an experiment but simply a glass bottle that Al Drew opened at a certain point in the spacewalk to “let space in.” Once the glass bottle returned to Earth, it would be displayed in museums throughout Japan in order to raise children’s interest in spaceflight (personally, I was skeptical about how excited children would get about an empty glass bottle). After the spacewalk was over and the bottle was back in the station, the Japanese control center wanted to know whether I had “safed” the bottle (I was supposed to tape the lid closed to make sure it wasn’t accidentally opened). I was busy doing a number of things, but they kept pestering me about it, until I finally got on the Space to Ground channel and said, “Message in a Bottle is on Discovery, and I opened it to make sure there was nothing inside.” There was a long pause. Then I said, “Just kidding.”

  Shortly after Discovery and its crew returned to Earth, it would have its engines removed and would be sent to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., to become a permanent display. Discovery had left Earth more times than any spacecraft in history, a record of distinction that I expect it to keep for a long time to come.

  Sasha, Oleg, and I were scheduled to return to Earth on March 16, 2011. Never having experienced reentry on the Soyuz, I was curious what it would be like. For some strange reason that I still haven’t quite figured out, people didn’t talk about the experience of landing in the Soyuz as much as we did with the space shuttle. It might partly be because, until recently, the astronauts who flew on Soyuz were not former test pilots and so maybe lacked the curiosity bordering on obsessive interest in the performance of spacecraft that shuttle pilots had. I had been given a range of different impressions by different people—that it would be terrifying, that it would be fine, and that it would actually be fun, like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disney World.

  That day everyone was concerned about the weather, because there were blizzard conditions at the landing site. Our capsule smacked into the hard frozen surface of the desert steppes of Kazakhstan, bounced around, tipped over, then was dragged a hundred yards by the parachute. I’ve never been in a car accident that ended in multiple rollovers, but I imagine that landing in the Soyuz that day felt a lot like that—violently jarring. But I found it exhilarating.

  Eventually, the rescue forces corralled the parachute and knocked it down before it could drag us any farther. Not long after, the hatch opened and the blizzard blew into the capsule—the first fresh air I had smelled in six months, incredibly refreshing. It was a sensation I’ll never forget.

  —

  A FEW DAYS AFTER I returned to Earth, Amiko and I went to visit Gabby at TIRR Memorial Hermann, where she was being treated. I was shocked at first by how different she looked. She was in a wheelchair and was wearing a helmet to protect her head where a piece of her skull had been removed to allow her brain to swell. Her hair was short—it had been shaved for brain surgery—and her face looked different. It took me a moment to process the enormity of what had happened to her. When I heard she had been shot, I had understood intellectually what that meant. But it was another thing entirely to see my vivacious sister-in-law in such a different state—not only physically changed but unable to speak as she once had. Sometimes Gabby would get a look on her face as if she had something to say, and when we all looked at her and paused, she would say, simply, “Chicken.” Then she’d roll her eyes at herself—that wasn’t what she wanted to say!—and try again.

  “Chicken.”

  I could see how frustrating it was for Gabby, who used to make speeches to thousands of people that inspired them and won their votes. Mark explained that she had aphasia, a communication disorder that made it hard for her to speak, though her ability to comprehend language, her intelligence, and, most important, her personality remained unaffected. She understood everything we said to her, but putting her own thoughts into words was extremely challenging.

  We had dinner together at the hospital, and as the visit went on I could see Gabby’s warmth and her sense of humor. Later, Amiko and I talked about how Gabby was doing, and Amiko said she thought Gabby looked great considering how recent her injury was. Amiko reminded me how long it had taken her own sister to walk, to speak, to regain aspects of her personality after sustaining a traumatic brain injury in a car accident. Amiko didn’t want to be overoptimistic, but she knew from experience that people could make huge strides after being in terrible shape. Gabby was still very much herself, and that was a promising indication for her recovery.

  “I can see Gabby in Gabby” is how Amiko put it, and she was right.

  Less than two months later, I was standing next to Gabby on the roof of the Launch Control Center at Kennedy, watching Endeavour prepare to launch for its last mission, with Mark as its commander. Gabby had been to a space shuttle launch before, and of course I had been to many. It’s an experience that never gets old. The ground shakes, the air crackles with the power of the engines, and the rockets’ flames burn a searing orange in the sky. Seeing an object the size of a tall building lift itself straight up into the sky at supersonic speed is always moving, and when someone you know and care about is on board, it’s that much more so. There was a low cloud cover that day, and Endeavour punched up through it, lighting them up orange for a moment, then disappeared. Eight minutes later, it was in orbit around the Earth.

  When Mark had decided he would see this mission through, Gabby had set the goal of being well enough to fly to Florida and see him off. That had been extremely ambitious, and she had done it. For Gabby, just being here was an accomplishment on par with a shuttle launch. She seemed to thrive on the challenge to do hard things.

  —

  SOON AFTER, the space shuttle was retired, fulfilling the terms of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. I was sad to see it go. The shuttle was unique in its range of capabilities—heavy-lift cargo vehicle, science laboratory, orbiting service station for busted satellites. It was the spacecraft I’d learned to fly and learned to love, and I doubt we’ll see anything like it again in my lifetime.

  In 2012, NASA learned the Russians were going to send a cosmonau
t to the space station for a year. Their reasons were logistical rather than scientific, but once this had been decided, it put NASA in the position of having to either explain why an American astronaut was not up to the same challenge or announcing a yearlong mission themselves. To their credit, they chose the latter.

  Once the Year in Space mission had been announced, NASA still had to choose the astronaut to do it. At first, I wasn’t sure I wanted it to be me. I remembered exactly how long 159 days on the space station had felt. I had spent six months at sea on an aircraft carrier and that was long; six months in space is longer. Spending twice as long up there wouldn’t just feel twice as long, I thought—it could be exponential. I knew I would miss Amiko and my daughters and my life on Earth. And I knew how it would feel if something bad happened to someone I loved while I was gone, because I had already experienced it. My father was getting up there in age and wasn’t in the greatest health.

  But I had decided a long time before always to say yes to whatever challenge came my way. This yearlong mission was the hardest thing I’d ever have the opportunity to do, and after some reflection I decided I wanted to be the one to do it.

  Many other astronauts also expressed interest. After all, spaceflight opportunities don’t come around every day. The requirements to be considered were many: we had to have previously flown a long-duration flight, we had to be certified to do spacewalks, we had to be capable of being assigned as commander, we had to be medically qualified, and we had to be available to be off the Earth for that year. With such a fine filter put on the requirements, in the end only two people qualified: Jeff Williams, one of my astronaut classmates, and me.