by Scott Kelly
At around the same time, NASA was also looking to assign a new chief astronaut, because Peggy Whitson had stepped down in order to be eligible for the yearlong mission herself. I put my name in for the job of chief. In the interview, I was asked whether I would rather be chief of the Astronaut Office or fly in space for a year. Without hesitation, I said, “Chief of the Astronaut Office.” I thought there would be other opportunities to fly in space again, but maybe not another opportunity to serve as chief astronaut. My preference might have been considered, but the managers decided differently. A few weeks later, I learned I would be flying in space for a year.
Twenty-four hours after I was assigned, I was told that after further evaluation I had been medically disqualified and that Jeff would fly. On my previous mission I had experienced some damage to my eyes, and NASA didn’t want to take the risk of sending me up again. There could be some unexpected acceleration of the harmful effects after the six-month point, leaving me with permanent damage to my vision. I thought the danger was exaggerated, and I was disappointed, but I was resigned to the decision.
When I got home that night, I told Amiko about being medically disqualified. Rather than looking disappointed, as I expected, she looked puzzled.
“So they’re going to send someone who has been on two long flights and has not suffered vision damage?” she asked.
“Right,” I said.
“But if the point of this mission is to learn more about what happens to your body on a long mission,” she asked, “why would they send someone who is known to be immune to one of the things they intend to study?”
This was a good point.
“In all the time I’ve known you,” she said, “I have never seen you take no for an answer so easily.”
That night, after Amiko was asleep, I looked through my NASA medical records, an enormous pile of paper two feet high documenting years of data. I had experienced damage to my vision on my long-duration flight, but it had been mild and had returned to normal when I came back to Earth, though I still had some structural changes. Amiko was right: we could learn more about vision changes from someone like me than from someone who had demonstrated an immunity to the problem. I decided to present my case to management. They listened, and to my surprise they reversed their decision.
When I was preparing for the press conference to announce Misha and me as the one-year crew members, I asked what I thought was an innocent question about genetic research. I mentioned something we hadn’t previously discussed: Mark would be a perfect control to study throughout the year. It turns out my mentioning this had enormous ramifications. Because NASA was my employer, it would be illegal for them to ask me for my genetic information. But once I had suggested it, the possibilities of studying the genetic effects of spaceflight transformed the research. The Twins Study became an important aspect of the research being done on station. A lot of people have assumed that I was chosen for this mission because I have an identical twin, but that was just serendipitous.
The yearlong mission was announced in November 2012, with Misha and me as the crew.
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THE IDEA of leaving the Earth for a year didn’t feel especially vivid until a couple of months before I was to go. On January 20, 2015, I attended the State of the Union Address at the invitation of President Obama. He was planning to mention my yearlong mission in his speech. It was an honor to sit in the House Chamber with the gathered members of Congress, the Joint Chiefs, the cabinet, and the Supreme Court. I sat in the gallery wearing my bright blue NASA flight jacket over a shirt and tie. The president described the goals of the yearlong mission—to solve the problems of getting to Mars—and called me out personally.
“Good luck, Captain!” he said. “Make sure to Instagram it! We’re proud of you.”
The assembled Congress got to their feet and applauded. I stood and gave an awkward nod and a wave. To see the government come together, even if only in a physical sense, was touching, and it was great to experience in person the bipartisan support NASA often enjoys.
I was seated next to Alan Gross, who had been held in a Cuban prison for five years. He suggested that while I was in space I should count up—count the number of days I had been there—rather than counting down the number of days I had left. It will be easier that way, he said. And that’s exactly what I did.
17
November 6, 2015
Dreamed I was back on Earth and was allowed to return to the Navy to fly F-18s off the aircraft carrier. I was elated because I thought I would never get to fly like that again. I went back to my old squadron, the World Famous Pukin’ Dogs, and all the same guys were there, unchanged from when I left. It was great because I was allowed to be like a junior officer even though I have the rank of captain. Because I had so much flight experience, everything was easy for me, supernaturally easy, especially landing on the ship.
NOVEMBER MARKS the nine-year anniversary of my surgery, and I reflect on the fact that I have spent more than a year of my life in space after having been diagnosed with and treated for cancer. I don’t think of myself as a “cancer survivor”—more like a person whose prostate gland had cancer, which was removed and disposed of. But I’m happy if my story is meaningful to others, especially kids, as an example that they can still achieve great things.
Once again, Kjell and I have spent days preparing our suits and equipment, reviewing procedures, and conferencing with experts on the ground. This spacewalk will have two goals: one is to replumb a cooling system, bringing it back to its original configuration so a spare radiator can be saved for future use. The other is to top off that cooling system’s ammonia supply (the space station uses high-concentration ammonia to cool the electronics). These tasks might sound unexciting, and in many ways they are. Yet the story of how we have kept the space station cool—a huge chunk of metal flying through space getting roasted by the unfiltered sun for forty-five minutes out of every ninety while its enormous solar arrays generate electricity—is a story of an engineering triumph with important implications for future spaceflight. The work Kjell and I will do today to keep the cooling system working will be one small piece of that larger story, just as the work of the astronauts and cosmonauts who have performed the hundreds of spacewalks from the station over the years have each contributed something invaluable to its construction.
The day of our second spacewalk starts much like our first: up early, quick breakfast, prebreathe oxygen, get suited up. Today I’ve decided to wear my glasses, because I found the Fresnel lenses attached to my visor didn’t work as well as I’d hoped on our first venture outside the station. At one point, the tether for one of the tools I was working with became tangled, and I wasn’t able to see the knot clearly enough to undo it. Luckily, it magically untangled itself. There are risks involved in wearing glasses—if they slip off, there will be nothing I can do about it with my helmet on, but I prepare for that problem by taping them to my head. Being bald, I have the perfect haircut for this technique. I regret not getting comfortable with contact lenses.
I put my comm cap on and scratch any itchy spots one last time before my helmet is sealed. Kjell and I get into the airlock. This time, I know that neither of us will flip our water switches early, and I also know I won’t have to be the one to struggle to get the hatch open or closed—that’s the job of the lead spacewalker.
Our work site today will be all the way out at the end of the truss, 150 feet from the airlock—so far that we need to use the length of both our safety tethers together to reach it. As we start the journey, translating hand over hand along the rails, I notice again how much damage has been done to the outside of the station by micrometeoroids and orbital debris. It’s remarkable to see the pits in the metal handrails going all the way through like bullet holes. I’m shocked again to see them.
Our ground IV today is a veteran astronaut I’ve known for fifteen years, Megan McArthur. Despite being one of the youngest astronauts when she was selected, at twenty-ei
ght, she’s always been calm and sure of herself, even under pressure. She is talking us through our work today, and with her help, Kjell and I get ourselves and our tools out to the work site.
Our first task is a two-person job: removing a cover from a metal box and driving a bolt to open a valve that opens the flow of ammonia. Kjell and I get into an easy rhythm where it seems as though we can read each other’s minds, and it feels as if Megan is right there in lockstep with us. We work together with an uncanny level of efficiency. With our visors almost pressed against each other, Kjell and I can’t help but make occasional eye contact, and when we do, I get a sense he is thinking the same thing as me. Even though I’m not superstitious, I don’t want to jinx it, or us, by saying, “This is going great” or “This is turning out to be pretty easy.” We just need to keep it up until we are done.
When we get the cover back on the box, Kjell and I separate to work on different tasks for a while. He continues reconfiguring the ammonia lines, and I work on the vent lines on the back side of the space station’s truss. Both are difficult tasks, and we are each absorbed in them completely. This is not the ammonia you might have found under your grandmother’s sink, but something a hundred times stronger and much more lethal. If this ammonia were to get inside the station, we could all be dead within minutes. An ammonia leak is one of the emergencies we prepare for most. So working with the cooling system and the ammonia lines is especially important to get right the first time. We must make sure not to get any of the ammonia onto our suits.
As I had learned on my first spacewalk, I’m finding that the focus required to work outside is absolute. Every time I adjust my tethers, move a tool on my mini-workstation, or even just move, I have to concentrate with every bit of my attention, making sure I’m doing the right thing at the right time in the right way, double-checking that I’m not getting tangled up in my safety tether, floating away from structure, or losing my tools.
After a few hours, I head back toward the CETA cart (CETA stands for crew and equipment translation aid), which is sort of like one of those old manual handcars once used on railways. It’s designed to let us move large equipment up and down the truss. When we were planning this spacewalk, I had raised concerns about whether this task, tying down the brake handle so no one could accidentally lock the brake, really needed to be done. This is much less important than our primary objective of reconfiguring the ammonia system, and it takes me far away from Kjell—too far to help if he runs into any trouble, like in my skydiving dream. The lead flight director insisted that we would be able to do both.
I’m plodding through my task with the brake handle, using reminders written on a checklist on my wrist. I am working mostly on my own, as Megan is concentrating on talking Kjell through his much more complex task. As I continue working, I can hear Kjell struggling with the ammonia connections. These can require all your strength, even for a strong guy like him, and they are technically complex, requiring upward of twenty steps each to mate or demate a connection, all the while remaining alert for ammonia to come shooting out and contaminate your suit. Each time I hear him struggle to complete a step, I again question to myself why I am working on the cart when I should be there to help him.
I finish up and take one last look over my work site, making sure everything looks right, before heading back out to the end of the truss to help Kjell. Hand over hand, it takes me a few minutes to get to him. I look over his suit, inspecting it for yellow spots of ammonia. I see a few places that look suspicious, but when I look closer I can see the threads of the suit material below the discoloration, which rules out ammonia as the cause. I’m glad I decided to wear my glasses, which haven’t slipped or fogged up, or I might not have been able to tell the difference. We’re preparing to vent the ammonia system—Kjell opens a valve and quickly moves clear. High-pressure ammonia streams out the back of the space station like a giant cloud of snow. As we watch, the sun catches the huge plume, its particles glistening against the blackness of space. It’s a moment of unexpected beauty, and we float there for a minute, taking it all in.
When the venting seems to be complete, Megan instructs us to separate—Kjell will stay here and work on cleaning up the ammonia vent tool while I venture back to the solar array joint to remove and stow an ammonia jumper I installed earlier. The solar array joint continually rotates in the same direction to keep the solar arrays pointed at the sun, 360 degrees every ninety minutes, while passing electricity downstream. Megan talks me through the process. I struggle with one of the connections.
“Hey Megan. With the bale all the way aft, the white band should be visible or not?” I ask.
“Yes,” Megan replies, “the forward white band should be visible.”
I work with it for a few more minutes before getting it configured the way it’s supposed to be.
“Okay,” I report. “Forward white band visible.”
“Okay, Scott, I copy the forward white band is visible—check the detent button is up.”
“It’s up.”
When I hear Megan’s voice again, there is a subtly different tone.
“I’m going to ask you to pause right here, and I’m going to tell you guys what we’ve got going on.”
She doesn’t say what this pause is about, but Kjell and I know: Megan has just been given some news within mission control, something the flight directors have to make a quick decision about. It may be something that puts us in danger. She doesn’t leave us hanging for long.
“Okay. Currently, guys, from a momentum management perspective, we’re getting close to a LOAC [loss of attitude control] condition,” she says. She means the control moment gyroscopes, which control the station’s attitude—our orientation in the sky—have become saturated by the venting ammonia. Soon we will lose control of our attitude, and when that happens, we will soon lose communication with the ground. This is a dangerous situation, just as we anticipated.
Megan continues. “So what we need Kjell to do is to pull out of your current activity and head over toward the radiator. We’re going to have you redeploy it.”
If we can’t cinch down this radiator properly, we will have to put it back out in its extended position.
“Copy,” Kjell answers crisply.
“You’ve probably gathered from a timeline perspective where we’re going,” Megan says. “We’re going to have you clean up the vent tool eventually, Kjell. And Scott, you’re going to continue with the jumper, but we are not going after cinching and shrouding the radiator today. It will take too long.”
We both acknowledge her. This situation with the gyroscopes is serious enough to alter our plans. Even under the best of circumstances, when we hear we are close to saturating the gyros, it’s one of those “Oh, shit” moments. The station won’t start spinning out of control like a carnival ride, but losing communication with Megan and all the experts on the ground is never a good thing. And with the two of us outside, a communication blackout would add a new danger to an already risky situation. In all the preparation we’ve done for this spacewalk, we had never discussed the possibility of losing attitude control due to ammonia venting.
Houston is discussing handing over attitude control to the Russian segment. The Russian thrusters can control our attitude, less elegantly, with the use of propellant. The handover process isn’t instantaneous, and we could lose communication with the ground in the meantime anyway. On top of that, the Russian thrusters use hypergolic fuel, which is incredibly toxic and a known carcinogen. If any of the hydrazine or dinitrogen tetroxide got onto our spacesuits, we could bring those chemicals back into the station with us.
But attitude control is important. If we can’t talk to the ground, we lose the expertise of the thousands of people in Houston, Moscow, and other sites all over the world who understand every aspect of the systems keeping us alive up here. Our spacesuits, the life support systems within the station, the Soyuz meant to get us back safely to Earth, the science experiments that are the
reason for us being here in the first place—our comm system is our only connection to the experts on all of these. Our only connection to Earth. We have no choice but to take the risk.
I think about just how alone Kjell and I are out here. The ground wants to help us, but we may not be able to hear them. Our crewmates inside the station would do anything to ensure our safety, but they can’t reach us. Kjell and I have only each other. Our lives are in our own hands.
As instructed, we re-extend the spare radiator rather than taking the time to cinch it down and install a thermal cover. It will be safe in this configuration until a future spacewalk can retract it. We are nearing the seven-hour mark, the point where we were planning to head back to the airlock, but we are still far away with much left to do before we can get inside. We start the process of cleaning up our work site and inventorying our tool bags and mini-workstations to make sure we aren’t leaving anything behind. Once everything is packed up and checked, we start the laborious process of traveling hand over hand back to where we started.
We are about halfway to the airlock when I hear Megan’s voice again in my headset.
“Scott, if you’re okay with it, we need you to go back to the vent valves and make sure they are in the right configuration. The specialists are seeing some data they aren’t happy with.”
This is a simple request, but Megan’s tone communicates a lot—she wants me to know this action is not required and that I can say no without causing any problems. It’s a task that could easily be left for the next astronauts, who will be launching next month. She knows that we have been outside a long time and are exhausted. My body is aching, my feet are cold, my knuckles are rubbed raw (some astronauts even lose fingernails from the intense pressure spacewalks put on our hands). I’ve been sweating and am dehydrated. There is still so much we have to do before we can get safely back inside, especially if anything unexpected happens between now and then.