How to Astronaut

by Terry Virts

  This was done using a torque wrench, a socket wrench that limits how much force can be applied to a bolt. I used it to slowly turn a bolt that moved the net until it had swept up all of the debris, while staring at the torque wrench very, very, very nervously. Because if the torque limit was reached before the net was finished sweeping the whole bucket, I would have to get in the toilet and do it manually. NASA didn’t want us putting too much stress on that fragile bolt, ergo the protection from the torque wrench. Several of my crewmates watched me as I performed this procedure, and when the net was fully compacted without reaching the torque limit we let out a big cheer. Especially me. On an earlier shuttle flight, one of my fellow astronauts wasn’t so lucky—the torque wrench had triggered, stopping the compaction. He then had to put on elbow-length gloves, the kind large-animal veterinarians use, grab the poop spatula (yes, it’s a real thing), and stick his arm down into the asteroid field, herding everything to one side so the net could be swept across the bucket. He finally had all of the asteroids compacted, with the toilet ready to accept more.

  Staring at the torque wrench during WHC compaction, sweat beading on my forehead, was one of the scariest moments of my time in space.

  The Russian system was different than the shuttle’s; it used a disposable KTO bucket that was the size of a small kitchen trash can. You just had to look inside and see when it was full. There was no net to compact, so when it started to get full you would take a gloved hand and push things to the bottom. The good news with this system is that each time you pooped you went in a small bag, so the asteroids in the KTO were just bags floating around, like Ziplocs of pudding, so it wasn’t too terrible to compact them. I was proud of a system I invented to indicate remaining capacity. When a new KTO was installed, I drew a smiley face on it with a Sharpie. A few days later, I drew a not-so-happy face next to the original. Around the ten-day point, I would draw a frowny face, and then on day eleven, twelve, or thirteen, it would get a face with Xs for eyes, showing it was dead, and it would be replaced with a fresh, empty KTO. We were supposed to go eleven days for our US segment crew of three, but it was a matter of pride to extend it to twelve, thirteen, or even fourteen days. Of course, this depended on the crew—three offensive linemen would probably not have been able to go that long. But, luckily, we were a little more average-size.

  This is definitely a humorous subject, but it’s also a very human one. Using the bathroom is something we all have in common, and in space it’s something that requires special equipment and procedures to perform successfully. The technology to recycle water on the ISS is truly remarkable, and it has even been used to make clean water available to remote communities around the world. When people eventually fly to Mars, something as simple as a broken toilet could end up killing the crew, so it’s a very important subject—even if it does lend itself to thirteen-year-old-boy humor. But that’s OK, I’m a fighter pilot. I was proud to boldly go where (few) had gone before. And I still stand by the assertion that my toilet—the STS-130 PLT—was the best ever.

  Saturday Cleaning

  An Astronaut’s Work Is Never Done

  Most of our daily routines have a few things in common, no matter what country you are from. We shower in the morning. We go grocery shopping after work. And we clean on Saturday mornings. Vacuuming, picking up, dusting, cleaning the kitchen, yardwork—it’s what Saturdays seem to be made for. And it’s not any different on board the ISS. Although most people think being an astronaut is a glamorous and nonstop life of launching, doing spacewalks, and being a hero for kids while wearing the blue jacket, the truth is that life in space can often be, well, life.

  Several types of messes happen in space, each requiring its own unique cleaning procedure. The first is general clutter, like what happens on your kitchen counter or bedroom nightstand. Stuff accumulates and needs to be put away. In space, things tend to accumulate on the handrails. These are metal bars strategically placed throughout the ISS on floors, ceilings, walls, and especially the junctions between modules. We move around by grabbing these things and pulling ourselves to the next location, and once we get there we stabilize ourselves by wedging our feet under them. Floating in weightlessness requires a lot of adaptation, and handrails are one of the best inventions of the space age to make astronaut lives more convenient.

  Beyond helping astronauts move around, handrails are also a very convenient spot to leave things. Much of our equipment is held in place by brackets or Velcro or duct tape, and it is very easy to stick these things onto a handrail and forget about them, leaving them there. Camera brackets were a significant offender; they were often clamped to the middle of handrails, right where an astronaut flying by would reach out to grab. Imagine yourself floating down the center of a module when you get to the end. You need to reach out and grab the handrail to redirect your motion by 90 degrees to float into the adjacent module. But when you reach out, it’s covered with big metal camera brackets. You have to quickly reach down and grab a free spot to swing around before crashing into the end of the module. Disaster avoided, but it was annoying. My OCD was not a fan of handrail clutter, so I was always spending time cleaning them up. It was the space equivalent of Lego pieces left on the floor by the bed.

  Another type of mess is from food. At home, your food mess usually ends up on the floor, the kitchen counter, and the stove—all predictable locations. But in space, soup droplets or chicken parts literally become their own free-flying satellites, taking random paths to land on hard-to-find locations. Often airflow from the ISS fans captures the free-flyers and sucks them into a filter, where we find the most dirt. But in Node 1, the location of the American kitchen, there are food particles and stains everywhere. That module has been in space for more than twenty years now, and it’s, shall we say, a little ripe. So a big part of Saturday morning chores involves taking disinfectant wipes and floating around looking for stray food stains to wipe up. In the science modules, like the European and Japanese labs, there is almost no dirt. But in Node 1, where we eat, and in Node 3, where we have the bathroom and clean up, there are always spots that need to be wiped up.

  Vacuuming is a big part of Saturday morning chores. The first challenge is to find a free electrical outlet—almost all of the ISS electrical plugs are taken, and there is an official technical diagram, called the plug-in plan, designed by a team of NASA engineers that specifies which outlets are allowed for the vacuum and which aren’t. Once you find a free outlet, you plug in a very long extension cord to drag the vacuum between modules. Running a vacuum in space is something that every astronaut has played with at one time or another, because as the fan spins inside the vacuum, there is nothing to resist its angular momentum, so it wants to spin violently in the other direction. Kind of like a balloon that flies around randomly when you let it loose. I know the physicists are cringing about the scientific inaccuracy of this description, but it’s kinda like that. Whatever the technical reason for the propensity to flail around, we secure vacuum cleaners with a strong Velcro strap to a handrail. Then you get to work, floating around the ISS looking for vents and filters, where almost all of the dirt is.

  Most of these filters are pretty easy to get to, but some require coordinating with Houston to turn off the ISS fans while the filter is removed for vacuuming, because you don’t want them sucking down big pieces of debris with no filter to protect the fan. Then you vacuum dirt off the filter, which is a lot like taking dryer lint out of the filter on Earth. I honestly never wanted to know what was in the filters—I just cleaned them off and was done. One time during a training session, unfortunately, I asked my “crew systems” instructor and they told me. It’s part lint from clothes and fabric, part dust, part food particles, and part skin.

  That’s right, skin. Our epidermis is constantly renewing itself and therefore shedding, and in space it’s no different. Except on Earth it falls to the ground and just gets vacuumed up or eaten by the dog or whatever. In space it floats around, hopefully to be c
aptured by one of these filters. What’s worse, in space we don’t use our feet very much, so the calluses on the bottom of your feet begin to shed and disappear. A fellow astronaut once made a video of himself taking off his socks and scratching his feet while in space, and there was a giant cloud of foot skin flakes. Disgusting. Hopefully, the fans and filters suck it up to keep us from breathing it in.

  The vast majority of astronauts realize that their mother isn’t there and that everyone has to pitch in. During my time on the ISS, we had a system of rotating which modules you were assigned to clean, and everyone had two each Saturday. On weeks when you had Node 1 (eating) or Node 3 (exercise and bathroom), you knew you had some work to do. On Saturdays when it was your turn to clean Columbus and JEM (the European and Japanese science modules), you could high-five yourself because you’d be done quickly! The Russian cosmonauts cleaned up the Russian segment using the same techniques. This system of everyone pitching in and getting it done worked very well. It’s not the most glamorous part of the job, but keeping our home clean was probably one of the most important things we did.

  Where Over the World Are We?

  Recognizing Places on Your Planet

  On my first spaceflight, STS-130, we installed the Cupola. As I’ve mentioned, this seven-windowed module is an amazing place, giving astronauts the best imaginable view of our planet and the universe—it is truly spectacular. I had the privilege of opening the window cover for the first time and taking in the intensely beautiful light from our planet; it was a scene that took my breath away.

  After taking a few moments to enjoy the spectacular view, we continued the task at hand, making sure each window cover would open and close, verifying that the equipment inside the module worked, plugging in electrical cables, removing brackets, assembling vacuum fittings and cooling lines, etc. A few hours later, when the initial rush of work was complete, someone had the idea, “Hey, why don’t we open up all of the window covers and give ourselves a nice view while we work?” So we did, and it was absolutely awesome, seeing our planet floating by below while we worked diligently in Node 3, adjacent to the Cupola.

  About an hour later, I was busy removing launch bolts (designed to hold equipment firmly in place during the shaking and vibrating of launch) when all of a sudden the entire module was bathed in a pink-red glow. It was disconcerting, to say the least. I quickly floated down to the Cupola and looked outside—and down below was the Australian Outback, drifting by slowly in the window. Spectacular! The bright and intense colors of western Australia, red from the iron in the soil, had completely lit up and changed the vibe inside our little spaceship. I was blown away. And would have that experience repeated many more times as I orbited our planet another 3,000 times.

  I never expected to know countries and regions by color, but that’s exactly what happened. Instead of knowing France by the Eiffel Tower or by its food, I began to know it as a green and often cloudy place. Instead of knowing East Asia by its food and bustling cities, I began to know it as a place covered in bright lights at night and smog during the day. Instead of knowing the Middle East as a land of exotic culture and scorching heat, I knew it as a vast sea of beige, pink, and red deserts, stretching from one edge of the planet to the other. Instead of imagining central Africa as a place of tribal villages and wild creatures, I came to know it as the deepest green, a vast, dark jungle usually covered by thunderstorms.

  Flooding. A one-word description of light as it pours into the spaceship and into your eyes and brain and soul. From the planet, from the sun, from the moon and the stars, there is a never-ending flood of light out there—all you have to do is take the time to look and notice. There was always something interesting, even spectacular, every time you looked out a window. Though some of my colleagues confided that after a while looking at the planet got repetitious or boring, and that they would prefer to do work inside the station than look outside, I treasured every glance I stole out those precious Cupola windows.

  Oceans. If you were randomly deposited in orbit, the odds are that you would be over an ocean. They are almost everywhere, and even if you’re not directly over one, you can usually look in the distance and see one. But they are not all the same. I found their blue colors to be different. The Atlantic looked like a cold blue to me. The Caribbean was full of large swaths of warm turquoise and aqua blue—some of the most beautiful colors and views I’ve ever seen. Intense and stunning, words just can’t describe them. The Pacific is, well, huge. Gigantic, actually. We would be flying along for thirty minutes, 17,500 mph, 8 kilometers every second, and be over the Pacific the whole time. In the South Pacific, there is some of that Caribbean aqua blue color in the many atolls that dot the ocean, especially in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, though it’s honestly nothing compared to the Bahamas and Cuba. There are always thunderstorms in this part of the Pacific, and puffy cumulus clouds floating below. In the far North Pacific, there were usually extreme cloud formations, scalloped low-altitude clouds that went on for hundreds of miles. And when there was a low-pressure formation, you could see massive hurricane-like storms, with the swirling patterns resembling galaxies whose arms stretched out for hundreds of miles. These storms were not solid cloud formations the way actual hurricanes were, but I imagined that the weather was pretty bad down there. And I now understood why Deadliest Catch always seemed to feature huge waves and bad weather near Alaska.

  Speaking of bad weather, there is nowhere on Earth like the Southern Ocean, a newly named body of water that is to the south of Australia, South America, and Africa. The clouds there did not look like clouds anywhere else on Earth; they were often angry-looking, swirling storms, similar to those in the North Pacific, though they swirled clockwise instead of counterclockwise. Actually, there were almost always clouds there—it was an ocean that did not look fun to cross on a boat. I was happy to be in space when over that part of Earth. The Indian Ocean seemed to me to be a little more intense in its blue color, and I remember seeing that turquoise/aqua color in the Maldives at night, lit by moonlight, dotted by a few sparse city lights.

  There were three locations on Earth that always seemed to have thunderstorms—the Amazon, central Africa, and the South Pacific. If we were passing over these regions at night and I had thirty spare minutes, I would go down to the Cupola, turn off all the interior lights, let my eyes adjust, and float there while watching the most spectacular light show. I still remember seeing lightning while over South America at dusk; I could see lightning bolts flashing while still seeing the details of the clouds in the remaining daylight. Words can’t do that justice. The first lightning that I saw from space was actually over the American Southwest, near New Mexico. There were red flashes, which was bizarre, the only time I saw that color associated with lightning. I’m still not sure why that was—perhaps it was a dust storm being illuminated. Whatever the cause, it was beautiful.

  Hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons, and tropical storms are part of life on our planet, and, if you spend a few months in space, that fact will really sink in. I saw twenty-three different tropical systems during my 200-day mission, and they were all unique, spectacular, and frightening. Though they were amazing to see, I always kept in my mind the fact that those monsters were potentially dangerous and deadly and would be causing misery down on my planet. The most powerful one I saw was Maysak, a Pacific typhoon. It was, in fact, the strongest storm ever in the month of April. Our whole crew gasped when we saw it for the first time because the eye was so huge, well defined, dark, and ominous. It looked like a Hollywood special effect, except it was real. Most hurricanes had ill-defined eyes, spread out or partially broken, but Maysak was spinning and churning, as perfectly defined as if it had been going to the gym. I felt for the people in the Philippines who had to endure its wrath.

  Earth’s landmasses are pretty spectacular as well. While the red Australian Outback left a first and lasting impression, flooding the interior of the ISS with its color, it is not the only colorful desert.
The Sahara and northern Africa are also vast, a little more pink and less red than Australia, but equally colorful. I took hundreds if not thousands of pictures when flying over this part of the world. The combination of deep blue sky, ocean, and endless red/pink/orange sand was mesmerizing. The northwestern part of the Sahara, Earth’s largest desert, around Algeria, is a dark orange with black mountains. Just spectacular. Across the Red Sea we flew over the Saudi peninsula, where there are equally spectacular and colorful deserts. In the southern part of Africa there was the Namib desert, and one day when flying over it, I really noticed how big the sand dunes were. Those were visible in many places, especially Saudi Arabia, but the dunes in Namibia looked big. It turns out that they’re the biggest on Earth—some are more than 2,000 feet tall. It impressed me that I could see them that clearly from space.

  One of the strangest places on Earth was the Gobi desert and the area in the western part of China and Mongolia, stretching down to the Himalayas. What struck me most was how cold it looked. You can’t see temperature by looking out a window, but if you could, that place would register as freezing. Another thing that stood out were the man-made structures. There were roads that were perfectly straight for hundreds of miles, and others that made intricate patterns and different geometric shapes—either way, it was clear that people had been busy down there. I’m not sure if they were for agriculture, science, or most likely military purposes, but they sure were visible from space. As that desert crept southward into the Himalayas, there were a lot of small blue lakes, and I always thought how strange it would be to have a lake in the middle of a desert. In reality it probably wasn’t true desert but more of a rocky country, but I wondered what people did there. Fish? Vacation? Or were there even any people there at all? Another thing stood out to me—the Himalayas aren’t that big. Not from the vantage point of orbit. You go from cold desert in the north to a snow-covered line of mountains to the green jungles of India pretty quickly.