Endurance

by Scott Kelly

  If some other piece of equipment had been left in the wrong configuration, we could likely wait until the next scheduled spacewalk, even if it was months away, to fix it. But the mobile transporter is now stuck between work sites and isn’t secure enough to withstand the forces of Progress dockings. In addition to making it impossible for us to dock visiting vehicles, the stuck cart prevents us from moving the station in order to avoid debris, firing thrusters to reduce the momentum on our gyros, or using the robot arm for anything else. I start mentally preparing myself to go outside for the third time. I share the news with the Russian crew, and they say they will help in any way necessary. The next day, NASA makes the official decision that we will try to fix the transporter on an emergency spacewalk.

  It’s hard enough to prepare for a spacewalk under ideal circumstances; it’s much harder to do it on short notice and with colleagues who are still acclimating to this strange environment. Tim Kopra, though an experienced astronaut, has been here only a few days and is still adjusting to living in space. He will have to get into a spacesuit and venture outside with me. Tim Peake, who is still figuring out the most basic aspects of life up here, like eating and sleeping, will have to serve as IV. Both of them will have little margin for error in their demanding jobs.

  I email Amiko that I may have to go outside again next week, expressing my frustration with myself for being such a dumbass to have locked the brakes. She is sympathetic—she knows better than anyone but Kjell what the previous two spacewalks were like both physically and mentally. I also mention to her that Tim Kopra has a strange habit of repeating me. If I say, “I wonder if there’s any football on today,” Tim will say, as if I had never spoken, “I wonder if there’s any football on today.” I mentioned to Tim that my calf muscles have shrunk dramatically since I’ve been here, and he immediately responded, “My calves have shrunk dramatically too.”

  “But Tim,” I said, “you just got here.”

  “Yeah, but I have really small calves.”

  This is not something I ever noticed about Tim working with him on the ground, and it’s not like me to get annoyed by a crewmate—I’ve made it this long without being annoyed by anyone, which I think proves I’m pretty tolerant. Amiko suggests that maybe Tim is feeling insecure about joining me as a crewmate when I’ve been up here for so long. I agree and tell her I also wonder if it’s just me.

  The Russians spend the next few days packing trash into the Progress, which will be departing soon to burn up in the atmosphere. They have some extra room and ask if we want to put trash on board. Like many things in space—oxygen, water, food—trash removal capacity is a resource, and our two countries trade it like currency. I give them a couple of our large trash bags without telling Houston I did so. It would create a lot of work for people on the ground to ask permission, and we would likely not be granted permission anyway. I’ve been doing this all year, sneaking trash off the space station when the Russians have room for it, and we help them out too when we can. (This will cause a problem later when we pack the Cygnus and don’t have all the trash Houston thinks we should—ten bags. After a lot of questions, I eventually tell them, “The trash fairy must have come in the middle of the night.” No one mentions it again, which is a relief.) On December 19, I watch from the Russian service module as Sergey and Yuri monitor the departure of Progress on their displays as it inches away almost imperceptibly. As with the Soyuz, they can take over manually if there is a malfunction, but everything goes according to plan. Now that Progress is gone, we have room for the new Progress that will launch in a few days. I realize the next time something pushes away from the station, two and a half months from now, it will be me.

  —

  IN THE MORNING, I find an email from the ground asking me to submit a guest list for my landing. A limited number of people will be allowed to come to the control center in Houston to watch on the big screens as our Soyuz lands in Kazakhstan. I start making a list: Amiko, Samantha, and Charlotte. My dad, Mark, and Gabby. Gabby’s chief of staff, Pia. Amiko’s sons, Corbin and Tristan. My friends Tilman, Todd, Robert, Gerry, and Alan. Sarah Brightman. I picture the spectator area in mission control, canted seats behind glass, my friends and family gathered there and watching as our capsule falls through the atmosphere and lands—we hope—safely on the desert steppes of Kazakhstan.

  Suddenly it occurs to me that making this list is the first thing I am doing to prepare for my return to Earth. From now on I will do more and more—throwing things out, packing things up, making more lists, thinking about what my next steps will be in life. I have a lot more time in space to go, but as of today a small part of my mind is on my future on Earth.

  Tim, Tim, and Yuri will still be up here when I leave, less than three months from now. As the end is drawing nearer, my remaining time seems to stretch out longer, like taffy. I’m three-quarters of the way through—it should all be downhill from here. Yet when I allow myself to think about it, I remember the first three months, the way it felt when my first set of crewmates left, how long it felt like I’d already been here, how long ago that was. I can barely remember what Terry, Samantha, and Anton look like, what their mannerisms are, or what their voices sound like, the sound of Samantha humming. Like old friends who drifted away long ago, they are now a distant memory.

  Running through the rain, driving a car, sitting outside, smelling fresh-cut grass, relaxing with Amiko, hugging my kids, deciding what to wear—it is hard to remember such acts with any specificity. I no longer have any sensory reminders of what they feel like. I am a fully acclimated space creature, and my return doesn’t seem much closer than it was when I started. I will still be up here, in the same small spaces, for months.

  One day soon after, I’m answering some emails and come across an invitation to speak at a conference in April. When I open my calendar, I realize that I’m scheduling my first event for after I get back to Earth.

  —

  ON MONDAY, December 21, I wake up early, diaper up, and get into my liquid cooling garment for the third time. Tim Kopra and I start our prebreathe of pure oxygen, then an hour later Tim Peake helps us get into our spacesuits. This spacewalk will be shorter than the previous ones—we will get the CETA cart and the mobile transporter unstuck, then do a couple more tasks we know will need to be done at some point (called get-ahead tasks) so as to make the best use of the time and resources it takes just to get suited up and get out the door. Tim Peake does a great job as IV—as he moves through the checklist to get us ready (with the help of Sergey), any concern I might have had about whether he was prepared to take on this role after only being up here for six days dissolves. He works efficiently and confidently, and soon we are in the airlock and doing our leak checks.

  I’m wearing the spacesuit with red stripes again, EV1. When the airlock is fully depressurized, Tim Kopra and I switch our suits to battery power and the spacewalk has officially begun. This is Tim’s second spacewalk, but his first was in 2009, so it’s been a while. Once we are outside and have completed our buddy checks, I translate to the CETA cart. When I reach the cart, I try moving it along the truss and, sure enough, it’s stuck. I release the brake handle, then move it freely in both directions. The ground is satisfied.

  It feels odd to have accomplished our main objective only forty-five minutes in. We finish up some of the tasks that Kjell and I had to leave undone the last time we were out here, mostly routing cables to locations where they can later be connected with future hardware. We come back inside after three hours and fifteen minutes, and while I’m far from the exhaustion I felt at the end of my earlier spacewalks, I’m still tired and sore. My fatigue level is more like what I used to feel after the training runs we did in the pool in Houston. Much easier, but still not easy.

  After I come back in, I speak with Amiko and then check my email. There is one from Kjell, telling me he had watched the spacewalk on NASA TV. It’s strange to imagine him in Houston, watching in the predawn early morning, si
tting in a chair of some kind, gravity holding him there. “You guys crushed it!” his email reads. He asks about what we did and what the experience was like with the specificity and enthusiasm of someone who had just been there. In my response I tell him it was less than half as long as our shorter spacewalk but required only about a fifth the effort. I tell him either the time versus perceived effort is exponential or else those were just exceptionally tough spacewalks he and I did.

  “How’s Earth?” I type to end my message. “Starting to forget what space is like yet? Merry Christmas!”

  For the rest of my mission, I occasionally look out the window and catch sight of the area at the end of the truss where Kjell and I worked on that second spacewalk. It looks far away, farther than home, and it gives me a strange feeling of nostalgia, like the feeling I get when I visit my old neighborhood in New Jersey. Not just a place I’ve spent time, but a place imbued with strong emotions, a place familiar yet at the same time distant, now unreachable.

  18

  December 24, 2015

  Dreamed I met with General David Petraeus and he was trying to warn me of something. Some kind of trouble I would experience on this flight. Then I was on a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean off of Oman. We heard there was a hurricane coming with two-hundred-mile-per-hour winds, and soon after it came out of nowhere and capsized the aircraft carrier. Then the crew rebelled against the officers.

  TODAY IS Christmas Eve, my third in space. This isn’t a number anyone would envy, especially a parent with kids: a holiday that celebrates family togetherness can be the toughest time to be away. On top of that, the last two weeks have overextended us. The previous crew leaving, the new guys arriving, helping them get acclimated, preparing for and executing the emergency spacewalk—these have all been demanding, and they have come one right after the other. I have worked nearly two weeks without a day off, so my mood going into Christmas is less than festive.

  Holiday or not, today is just another workday on the schedule, one that becomes more difficult when the resistive exercise device breaks down. This is more urgent than it might seem, because exercise is nearly as important to our well-being as oxygen and food. When we skip even one exercise session, we can feel it physically, as if our muscles are atrophying, and it’s not a good feeling. Tim Kopra and I take nearly half the day to fix the machine—a broken damper, like a shock absorber, is the culprit. Because of this, we don’t wrap up our workday until eight p.m., by which time I’ve missed both my exercise sessions, which only adds to my crappy mood.

  I call Amiko before heading over to the Russian segment for dinner. I’ve felt like something has been bothering her for the past few days, and I’m starting to get the sense that I’ve done something to upset her. Maybe it has taken me longer than it should have to figure this out, since it doesn’t seem like there is much I can do to annoy her from space.

  I reach her on a checkout line at the grocery store. Not ideal for an emotionally honest conversation, but we don’t have much time left on this comm pass, so we have no choice.

  “I get the sense that something has maybe been bothering you,” I say. “Have I done something to upset you?”

  She thinks for a moment, then gives a long sigh. She sounds exhausted.

  “I feel like when you get back we will have to reconnect,” she says.

  Of course we will have to reconnect, I think—I will have been away for a year. “What does that mean?” I ask. “You feel—disconnected?”

  Amiko explains that the holidays are tough because she is missing not only me but my daughters. She is carrying a heavy load watching over my father and her own sons, taking care of our house and the many things I can’t be there to help her with. Her already demanding job has become more stressful—she is being edged out of her social media management position, and her supervisors have made clear that she cannot help me with my social media on work time—a counterproductive policy when I have over a million Twitter followers and similar numbers on other social media platforms. She is forced to use her own time or take annual leave to conduct interviews about my mission or even just to walk over to the astronaut office to drop off items to be included in my care packages. All of her hard work and sacrifice go completely unrecognized by her management. (By contrast, my colleagues in the astronaut office have been unfailingly supportive of Amiko as my partner, for which I’ve been grateful.)

  The strain of all these pressures has been taking a toll, and Amiko has hidden it from me. She enjoys working with me on my social media campaign and takes pride in how successful it’s been, but lately many of our conversations revolve around things I need her to do to the exclusion of everything else. At times she can feel like my coworker rather than my partner. Worse, she tells me it’s starting to bother her that she no longer remembers how I feel or smell, what it’s actually like to be with me face-to-face. She says she is craving real human touch. Then the satellite drops out and I lose her in midsentence.

  I float by myself in my crew quarters for a few minutes, knowing I won’t be able to get her back on the phone for a long while. I have full confidence in our relationship, and Amiko has been nothing but loyal and honest in the six years we’ve been together. But hearing the words “reconnect” and “real human touch” feels simply awful. Amiko is attractive, and she would have no problem fulfilling any cravings for human contact she might have on Earth. I’m not the type of person to get jealous, and jealousy isn’t exactly what I’m feeling. It’s more like I’m letting my imagination run wild while orbiting the planet, as physically far away from Amiko as I can be, and letting the reality of the situation sink in. She wants something very simple, and I can’t give it to her.

  I make my way to the Russian segment and put a fake smile on my face. The Russians don’t celebrate Christmas at the same time we do—the Orthodox calendar has Christmas on January 7—but they are happy to host a festive meal for the rest of us nonetheless. I discover that the nutritionists in charge of our food have not bothered to create a special holiday meal, so I eat turkey cold cuts doused in a salty brine as Christmas Eve dinner. We do, however, have some hard salami that came up on Cygnus and some of that black, tarry caviar from the Russians, as well as some fresh onions and apples that came up on Progress yesterday. Many toasts are made by all. We listen to Christmas music and the new Coldplay album I was recently uplinked, which everyone enjoys. We toast our privileged spot in space, how lucky we are to be here and how much it means to us. We toast our family and friends back on Earth. We toast one another, our crewmates, the only six people off the planet for Christmas.

  An hour and a half later, I get my scheduled videoconference with my kids. Samantha has traveled from Houston to Virginia Beach to be with her mother and sister for the holiday, and I’m pleased to see my girls together. They seem happy to see me, though they also seem uncomfortable. From what I can tell, the apartment doesn’t seem very Christmassy, and I hope the girls are having a better holiday than I am.

  Later I’m able to get Amiko on the phone again, and she tells me something she has never told me before—that because I continue to make an effort to make this year in space look easy, it can seem as though I don’t miss her and don’t need her. We both take pride in being strong and making difficult things seem easy. But by keeping the strain to myself, I shut her out. I tell her that making it look easy is the only way I can convince myself I can do this, but in reality it isn’t easy at all. I have figured something out recently: Amiko has only me to miss, and all the other aspects of her life are more or less unchanged. I have her to miss, but also my daughters, my brother and father, my friends, my home, showers, food, weather—literally everything on Earth. Sometimes my missing her can be obscured by how much I miss everything, and I can see how this would make her feel that she is somehow more alone in this than I am. And she is right.

  I don’t get much sleep, and in the morning I float awake in my sleeping bag, putting off starting my day. Christmas mornin
gs when I was growing up in New Jersey, my brother and I used to leap up even before it was fully light and run to the living room in our underwear to find our presents. When they were little, my daughters did the same. Later today I will do some public affairs events, and I will be asked what it’s like to spend Christmas in space. I will answer that being here at this special time gives me a chance to reflect on the holiday and how lucky we are to be able to see this view of our planet. I will say that I miss being away from the people I love. For now, I’m just floating here while my crewmates are still asleep, a glowing computer in front of me and the fan humming loudly beside my head.

  —

  AS WE GET toward the end of long-duration missions, our trainers at the Johnson Space Center start to slowly ramp up our resistance exercise in order to acclimate our bodies to the stresses of being back in gravity. I remember this from my previous mission—and I remember not enjoying it—and though I understand the necessity I’m also concerned about injuring myself. If I had a serious injury and couldn’t exercise, it would make life far more difficult when I get back to Earth’s gravity. The next afternoon, I’m doing squats with a heavy load when I feel a searing pain in the back of my leg. It doesn’t take me long to realize what’s happened: I’ve torn a muscle in my hamstring. The pain doesn’t go away, and now I can’t work out.

  My flight surgeon, Steve, prescribes the muscle relaxant Ativan. We have a stash of drugs—including Ativan and many others—secured in a bag on the floor of the lab module with our other medical hardware. The bag contains medications of all types: painkillers, antibiotics, antipsychotics, just about anything you would be able to find in a hospital emergency room. The controlled substances have warning labels from the DEA authorizing access only under doctors’ orders. NASA plans for everything—we even have an early pregnancy test and a body bag.