Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery

7

April 25, 2015

TODAY IS SATURDAY, almost two months into my mission, and Terry is euthanizing a mouse. Last night we got a call from the ground telling us that one of the mice was “in distress” and would need to be put down today. When we look into the cage first thing in the morning, we find the distressed mouse in a terrible state—missing a limb, apparently chewed off by the other mice or by herself. We work quickly to give her an injection. We are upset to know the mouse was suffering all night while we were sleeping. We tell mission control that in the future we want to know about a situation like this right away. They were trying to protect our time, but we would have liked to make that choice for ourselves. They seem surprised by how strongly we feel about it. I haven’t made the mistake of getting too attached to the mice, knowing what their fate will be. But it’s been hard not to take an interest in them, as their bodies go through the same changes ours have. They started off looking sick and disoriented, moving awkwardly, but as the days go on they look healthier and get better at negotiating the subtleties of moving around in zero g, just as we do.

When we got the call about the mouse last night, we were just finishing up with movie night—Gravity. We’d set up the big screen in Node 1 facing the lab and gathered to watch it—all of us but Samantha, who was finishing her workout. I’ve noticed a strange phenomenon when people watch movies in space: we instinctually move to a position that looks like lying down with relation to the screen. In weightlessness our positions make no difference in the way we feel physically, but the association between lying down and relaxing is so strong that I actually feel more relaxed when I get into this position. The film was great—we were impressed by how real the ISS looked, and the five of us were an unusually tough audience in that regard. It was a bit like watching a film of your own house burning while you’re inside it. When Sandra Bullock got out of her space suit and floated in her underwear, Samantha happened to come floating by the screen in her workout clothes—later I regretted failing to get a picture of them together.

After we finish up with the mouse and communicate with the ground about it, I have my first videoconference with Charlotte. Unlike phone calls, these conferences have to be planned in advance. I’m ready with my laptop and my headset on at the appointed time, and when Charlotte’s round face pops up on my screen she breaks out in a huge smile. The interface is similar to Skype or FaceTime—I can see Charlotte’s face and the room behind her in a large window on the right of my laptop screen, while on the left is a smaller window that shows me floating in my CQ. I haven’t seen her since Baikonur, a month ago. She is eleven and looks different every time I see her—she seems to have aged a year.

Charlotte is a quiet and thoughtful person by nature, and self-reliant for her age. We connect well in person, but it can be hard to have a phone conversation. During the time I’ve been here, I’ve struggled to connect with her. When I ask her, “How was school today?” I get “Fine.” When I ask her, “How’s your mom?” I get “Good.” “How’s the weather?” “Okay.” She also hasn’t been great about answering emails, even though she is a good writer. It’s disconcerting to reach out to her and never hear back. If she was hurt or unwell or depressed, would she or someone else tell me? In our videoconference she is much more responsive and engaging, true to form. I’ve never been to the apartment she shares with her mother in Virginia Beach, so this is my first glance inside. I can see a small living room, a sofa, a bookshelf. In the background, Leslie walks back and forth with a laundry basket.

I spend an hour showing Charlotte around the station. She saw it in videoconferences when I was here before, but she was just seven then. I float around with my laptop, pointing its camera around inside the modules where I’ve been working and living, introduce her to my crewmates as they happen to float by, and give her an overview of what I’ve been working on (leaving out the rodent we euthanized). She seems genuinely interested, leaning forward and smiling and asking questions. It’s great to see her animated and engaged. The Cupola is the last stop on our tour, and I time our arrival there to coincide with the station flying over the Bahamas. Charlotte is impressed. While we are talking I snap a few pictures with the camera to email her later. I know she’s seen many pictures of the Earth taken from space, but I hope she’ll enjoy receiving one taken especially for her.

After saying good-bye to Charlotte, I start getting ready for a birthday dinner for Samantha Cristoforetti. Birthdays are important in Russian culture too, and we make a point of celebrating them up here. This one is especially significant because soon Samantha, Terry, and Anton will be leaving us. As much as I will miss them all, I’m looking forward to breathing some good air (with half as many people exhaling, CO₂ levels will come down). I know the dropping CO₂ will likely cause the ground to act as though the problem has resolved itself, and I will be upset if that happens.

When I was packing the few personal belongings I could bring for this year, I included some wrapping paper because I knew I would be giving crewmates gifts on special days. Today I have some chocolate wrapped up nicely for Samantha’s thirty-eighth. As we often do at these dinners, we get to talking about language, specifically the nuances between curse words in English and Russian. Tonight we reach a point of confusion about the multiple ways of using the Russian word for “whore” and decide to call one of our Russian language instructors in Houston. Waslaw tries to explain to us in a combination of Russian and English the difference between blyad and blya. (He and I became friends on a St. Patrick’s Day years ago when a Moldovan drunk started a bar fight with the NASA folks in Star City, Russia.) Then he catches us up with what’s happening in Houston, and we fill him in on what life is like up here. By then it’s pretty late. For a little while, it almost felt like an earthbound Saturday night. It was nice to forget for a while that I will continue to be at work up here for weeks and months and seasons.

ESSENTIAL TO getting to Mars, or anywhere else in space, is a working toilet, and ours does more than just store waste—our urine processor distills our urine into drinking water. A system like this is necessary to interplanetary missions, since bringing thousands of gallons of drinking water to Mars simply wouldn’t be possible. On the International Space Station, our water system is nearly a closed loop with only occasional need for fresh water. Some of the water we purify to make oxygen.

We are sent fresh water on resupply rockets, but we don’t need it often. The Russians get fresh water from the ground, which they drink and turn into pee, which they give to us to process into water. Cosmonaut urine is one of the commodities in an ongoing barter system of goods and services between the Russians and the Americans. They give us their pee, we share the electricity our solar cells have generated. They use their engines to reboost the station into the proper orbit, we help them when they are short on supplies.

Our urine processor, though, has been broken for about a week, so our urine is simply filling a holding tank. When it’s full—it takes only a few days—a light will come on. In my experience, the light tends to show itself in the middle of the night. Replacing the tank is a pain in the ass, especially for a half-asleep handyman, but it’s not an option to leave it for the morning. The first person to get up won’t be able to pee, which isn’t good space station etiquette. When you float in there in the middle of the night to find that light illuminated, it really sucks.

Now, in the light of day, I need to swap out the broken part, the distillation assembly. I’ve consulted with the ground, and they concur. If everything goes right, the repair will take half the day. I’ve removed the “kabin” (the walls and the door) from the toilet in Node 3 so I can get at the machinery underneath. (The spelling is attributed to a transliteration error between Russian and English that stuck.) The kabin gets pretty gross, even though we try to clean it regularly. I float the kabin to Node 1, where it will clog up this space for other people until I move it back again, another incentive to get the job done efficiently.

While I’m cleaning and then moving the kabin, the ground is taking care of “safing” the equipment, which means making sure everything I will be working on is powered down correctly so I don’t electrocute myself or cause an electrical short. (The risk of electrocution is ever present on the space station, especially on the U.S. side. We use 120-volt power, which is more dangerous than the 28 volts used on the Russian segment. We train for the possibility of electrocution and often practice advanced cardiac life support on board, using a defibrillator and heart medications meant to be injected into the shinbone.) Once I get word from the ground that I can go ahead, I remove the electrical connectors on the distillation assembly, put caps on the connectors to protect them, and undo all the bolts. The distillation assembly is a large silver drum that works like a still, evaporating water from the urine. This is our only backup, so I have to be careful not to damage it.

Another resupply rocket launched today from Baikonur, a Russian Progress. My Russian crewmates on station followed the launch closely, getting updates from Russian mission control, and Anton floated down to let us know when it had reached orbit successfully. But now, less than ten minutes later, mission control in Moscow reports that a major malfunction has occurred and that the spacecraft is in a wild out-of-control spin. None of the workarounds they try correct the problem.

Up here, we talk about what it will mean for us if Progress is lost. We go over the supplies we have on board—food, clean clothes, oxygen, water, and replacement parts. Another resupply rocket exploded on the launchpad last October, this one built by the American company Orbital ATK, which means we are already behind on supplies. The Russians will run low on food and clothing, which means we will share ours with them and eventually run low ourselves. Misha, Gennady, and Anton keep us updated throughout the day, each time looking more and more concerned. Each of the cosmonauts had some personal items on board Progress, and sometimes those packages contain jewelry and similar irreplaceable items. Misha confides in me about some of the items that are on board, his wide blue eyes showing his anxiety.

“Maybe they’ll regain control of it,” I tell him with a pat on the shoulder, though we both know this is becoming less likely by the minute. I would like to spend more time talking over the problem with my crewmates, but I have a half-assembled toilet to fix. I’m disconnecting and capping the connections where our urine flows into the assembly on one end and where the liquid by-products left over, brine and a kind of graywater, come out. Every few days we pump the brine out of the holding tank and into Russian tanks that will later be pumped into empty water tanks on Progress, which will eventually undock and burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere. The graywater will be processed into drinking water.

I pull out the broken distillation assembly, double-bag it, label it, then store it in the PMM (Permanent Multipurpose Module, sort of a storage closet off Node 3) until it can be returned to Earth on a SpaceX. Engineers on the ground will examine it and, if they can, repair it to be sent up again. The next step is to fit the new assembly in place and torque it to a specific value. I start hooking up the fluid lines again very carefully, making sure not to combine clean water and urine lines, then connect the electrical cables. I am taking pictures of all of my work so the ground can later verify I did everything properly.

As I’m working, the ground tells us Progress has officially been declared lost. With a sinking feeling, I float over to the Russian segment to confer. Misha meets me in the service module, and it’s clear he’s heard the bad news.

“We’ll give you guys anything you need,” I say.

“Thank you, Scott,” Misha says. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such despair on another man’s face. We don’t normally worry about shortages, but losing Progress suddenly makes us think about how much we depend on a steady stream of successful resupply missions. We can afford one or two failures, but then we will have to start rationing.

Even more than our concern about supplies, though, is concern for our colleagues who will be launching soon: the rocket that doomed Progress is the same rocket that launches the manned Soyuz. Our three new crewmates, due up in a little less than a month on May 26, are about to trust their lives to the same hardware and software. The Russian space agency must investigate what went wrong and make sure there won’t be a recurrence. That will interfere with our schedule up here, but no one wants to fly on a Soyuz that’s going to do the same thing this Progress did. It would make for a horrible death, spinning out of control in low Earth orbit knowing you will soon be dead from CO₂ asphyxiation or oxygen deprivation, after which our corpses would orbit the Earth until they burn up in the atmosphere months later.

I finish making all the connections on the urine processor. Some of the cargo that was lost on Progress was fresh water, and unless we can make our own, the six of us won’t last long. I double-check all the connections, then ask the ground to power it up. It works. The ground congratulates me, and I thank them for their help.

Because the next Soyuz launch is delayed, that means Terry, Samantha, and Anton will be delayed in their return as well. They have each assured their space agencies that they are willing to stay on station as long as necessary, which I think reflects well on them, even if it’s also true they have no choice. I know this must be stressful for them—we each know how long we’ll be here and pace ourselves accordingly. I can’t imagine having to call my family and tell them I’m not coming back when I’d said I would, and that I have no idea when I’ll return. I can only sympathize with my crewmates. Outwardly, they all appear professional and upbeat. Terry tells me he sees this as a positive thing: it’s a privilege to live in space, and now he gets to stay longer and complete more of the things he wanted to do, like taking pictures of specific places on Earth and filming an IMAX movie he had a particular fondness for. Samantha’s attitude is more casual. “What are you going to do?” she asks, then points out that she will likely exceed the world record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman, 195 days.

When I finally finish the huge job of changing out the urine processor, it is satisfying knowing that we will be able to process urine and make clean water. But it’s also strangely unsatisfying in that all I’ve done is put everything back the way it usually is. I reinstall the kabin, making sure all the tools are stowed properly, downlink the photos, then run on the treadmill for half an hour.

While I’m running, a smoke alarm annunciates loudly. The treadmill under my feet stops automatically. The emergency signals are designed to get our attention, and they do. Even as I’m unhooking my running harness and scrambling to respond to the alarm, I’m pretty sure I know what caused it—as I was running I probably liberated some dust from the treadmill or maybe caused the motor to smoke a bit by pushing against the treadmill in an effort to get my heart rate up. The fire alarm also automatically shuts down ventilation in Node 3, and that shuts down our Seedra. After we’re fully recovered from the alarm, the ground informs us that they can’t restart the Seedra and aren’t sure why. I’m less than thrilled by the prospects of rising CO₂ until we can get it running again.

I’ve been looking forward to my videoconference with Amiko all day. Once a week we get to see as well as hear each other, for a length of time varying from forty-five minutes to an hour and a half. We have developed a ritual at the end of each videoconference: Amiko picks up her iPad and carries it around the house so I can see inside each room. It makes me feel connected to home to see our sofa, our bed, the pool, the kitchen—all of it flooded with sunlight, each of the objects held down by gravity. Once, in the kitchen, I noticed a warning light on the fridge—the water filter needed to be changed. I pointed it out to Amiko so she could have clean water too.

Today, I can see Amiko sitting on our sofa with light streaming in the window to her right. We talk about how each of our days has gone so far, then she reminds me about next week’s videoconference: she has offered to have some of my friends over to our house so I can visit with them. She mentions that in the course of preparing for guests, she discovered that the speakers by our pool aren’t working, and she hasn’t been able to troubleshoot the problem on her own yet.

“I’ll figure it out before Saturday,” she says.

“Let’s just fix it now,” I suggest, and within minutes she’s pointing the iPad camera at the web of cords on the back of the stereo components in the closet while I squint at the fuzzy image on my screen, trying to figure out which connection isn’t working.

“Push that button on the left,” I suggest. She tries to comply. “No, not that one, the one next to it.”

“I’m pushing it,” she says. “It’s just not working.”

The videoconference ends abruptly when we lose comm coverage. The image on my screen is static—the larger window showing Amiko, her face drained and expressionless in the dark closet; the smaller window showing my own face, frozen around the words I was saying. We both look incredibly annoyed. What if this were to be the last time we saw each other? I stare at the two faces for a moment, then turn off my laptop. The CO₂ is climbing, and I can feel the accompanying headache coming on.

A couple of hours later, when we have coverage again, I call Amiko’s cell.

“I just wanted to tell you I’m so sorry I wasted our videoconference trying to fix the speakers,” I say. “I should have just left it for later.”

“I know you don’t like to leave things undone,” she says. The warmth is back in her voice. We talk for a bit longer, then say good night.

The next day I suggest to Amiko that she could download the stereo manuals from the manufacturer website, which made it easier to fix the problem. The following week, our videoconference party goes off without a hitch.

STILL NO WORD from the Russians on why the Progress malfunctioned. We don’t know whether they have a good theory and just haven’t confirmed it or if they actually have no clue whatsoever. Terry, Anton, and Samantha still don’t know what their landing date will be. Every afternoon Terry floats over to the Russian segment through the dark, angled corridor of PMA-1 and into the FGB, over the tons of cargo strapped to the floor. Arriving in the open space of the service module, Terry pauses to look out the three Earth-facing windows in the floor that make the module feel like a glass-bottom boat, then asks Anton, who is always hanging halfway out of his crew quarters working on his laptop with his headset on, whether he has heard anything new about the Soyuz return. According to Terry, Anton shrugs and says no. Gennady tells us Moscow has identified a possible culprit for the Progress failure. He also tells us that our Soyuz, the one we came up here in and that Gennady will take back down with two other people in September, might have the same issue—a sobering thought that we could have been hopelessly lost. Not good news.

Since the ground was never able to get the Node 3 Seedra working again after the fire alarm, today Terry and I are working together to repair it. The experience is kind of like doing a transmission overhaul—a complicated, absorbing, detailed job—but our lives just happen to depend on this one. The other Seedra has not been operating smoothly, which puts a lot of pressure on us to make sure this one is repaired.

Dismantling the beast with Terry’s help is much better than struggling with it on my own, but it’s still unbelievable how much of a pain in the ass this thing is. The valves are positioned in places where no human hand can reach them, and we have to use four different-size wrenches, each turning a bolt only ten or twenty degrees, multiple times. It takes half an hour just to remove one bolt, and Terry tears up the back of his hand so much in the process he has to bandage it—in space, blood wells up into spheres and, if liberated, floats everywhere. We are finally able to get the Seedra out of its rack and float it to the Japanese module, where there is more room to work. Moving such a large mass is a slow and deliberate process. After a break to eat lunch, we return to finish the job. The next day, once we think we have it fixed, we return Seedra to Node 3 to reinstall it into its rack. It doesn’t fit. We try different angles, different approaches, use more or less force, jiggle it, bang into it with our shoulders. Gennady comes down to add some extra muscle. Nothing works. Terry and I examine the beast and realize that there are some washers on the bottom of it that seem to serve no other purpose than to hold it in place once it’s seated correctly. (They were probably designed to protect the Seedra from the vibration of launch.) If we remove those, I think it could shift down a bit and settle properly into place.

I call down to the ground to describe my idea about the washers, expecting to get the typical NASA answer that this will require further study and consultation with experts—days of emails, phone calls, and meetings—before they reach the conclusion that it would be an acceptable solution. NASA’s tendency toward an abundance of caution and excessive analysis is both a good thing and a bad thing. We always err on the side of doing things the way they have always been done if those things haven’t killed any astronauts or destroyed any important hardware. Yet this attitude often keeps us from trying new things that would save everyone a good deal of time and trouble. I don’t think the control center always takes into account that our time and energy are resources that can be wasted.

After a short interlude of consultations, the ground tells us to try removing the washers. Terry and I exchange a surprised look. Maybe the culture in the control center is changing; maybe the flight controllers are getting better at trusting astronauts’ judgment.

Having been given the go-ahead, I happily pry off the washers using a crowbar and a good deal of effort. Terry has to steady the Seedra in place while I pry, since in weightlessness the mass of the machine doesn’t hold it down against the force I’m applying. Terry and I now can slide the Seedra into its rack perfectly, and the thunk it makes as it slides into position is deeply satisfying. We’ll wait until tomorrow to try powering it up.

As we are putting our tools away, Terry shouts something with a childlike excitement in his voice: “Hey! Candy!”

A little piece of something edible looking is floating by. It often happens that bits of food get away from us and provide an unexpected snack for someone days later.

“Remember the mice,” I warn him, “It might not be chocolate.”

He takes a closer look at it. “Shit, it’s a used Band-Aid,” he says. He catches it and puts it in the trash. Later that night, we tell Samantha the story and she tells us that last week she ate something she thought was candy and realized only too late that it was garbage.

That night, floating in my sleeping bag with my eyes closed, I have one of those little convulsions people sometimes get when they are just about to fall asleep, when it feels like you’re falling and you try to catch yourself. In space, these are more dramatic because without gravity holding me to the bed, my body undulates wildly back and forth. And this one was especially dramatic because it coincided with a bright cosmic ray flash. As I try to fall asleep again, I wonder whether the cosmic ray somehow triggered my reflex response or if it’s strictly a coincidence.

In the daily planning conference, we learn that Terry, Samantha, and Anton will leave on June 11, more than a month late, and the new crew will come up on July 22. Their Soyuz has been docked here since November, and it’s only safe for the spacecraft to sit idle for a certain period of time. It’s not clear how much of this decision hinges on that time constraint, and how much on the determination that their Soyuz is free of the issues that doomed Progress. Either way, the Russian space agency has weighed the risks and decided it will soon be time for them to go.

After the daily planning conference, I immediately go through the steps of preparing the Seedra to be powered up. When I tell the ground we are ready, there is a dramatic pause.

“Powering up,” capcom says. “Stand by.”

We stand by.

It doesn’t work.

“Son of a…bitch!” I say, being sure not to key the microphone since we’re on an open channel.

“We’ll take a look at this and get back to you,” says the capcom.

“Copy,” I reply, dejected.

Because it’s Friday, we will have to live with high CO₂ levels all weekend; when one Seedra fails, it takes a while for the other to come up to speed, and flight controllers won’t even start trying to figure out what’s wrong until Monday. I’m going to feel like crap all weekend, and it will be even worse because that will be a constant reminder of what a clusterfuck this CO₂ situation is, how little the ISS program managers seem to care about our symptoms.

I knew this year was going to test my psychological endurance more than physical, and I think I was as prepared as anyone could be. Having flown a long-duration mission before, I understand how important it is to manage my energy from day to day and week to week, which includes choosing what to get upset about. But this is incredibly depressing. I float into my CQ to take a few minutes for myself and be pissed.

I click through some emails, aware that I’m using a bit more force on the laptop than is necessary. There’s one from Amiko wishing me a happy Friday, and I decide to call her before heading over to the Russian segment for dinner. She picks up on the second ring and sounds happy to hear from me. She’s still in the middle of her workday but is looking forward to the weekend. I try to keep the annoyance out of my voice, but she sees right through me.

“What’s wrong? You don’t sound good,” she says. Even before I can draw breath to answer, she asks, “The CO₂ is high, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I say. I tell her the whole saga with the Seedra and what we face for the weekend. I tell her I’m impressed that she could tell the CO₂ was high just from my voice.

“Not just your voice, but your mood,” she clarifies. “When you sound like you’re letting things get to you, I know the CO₂ is high.”

She is the only person on planet Earth who seems to care.

At Friday night dinner, we talk about the new landing date for Terry, Samantha, and Anton. I will be alone for six weeks on the U.S. segment before their replacements arrive. It’s a long time to be floating around by myself, but being alone doesn’t seem like a bad thing. I like having crewmates, and I’ve especially enjoyed working with Terry and Samantha, but being alone won’t be an unwelcome change. Besides, each time people leave or arrive marks another milestone of my mission that I’ve successfully put behind me.

As we eat, I say, “I guess I’ll be able to float around naked in the U.S. segment.”

“You can float around naked now, if you want to,” Samantha says with an offhanded shrug, digging in the bottom of a bag of ravioli.

“Guys, do you think the Soyuz landing will definitely be in June?” Anton asks Terry and me.

Terry and I look at each other, then at him.

“Anton, aren’t you the Soyuz commander?” Terry asks rhetorically.

“Da,” says Anton. He shakes his head and smiles, acknowledging the strangeness of the situation. We should be asking him for information, not the other way around. “I thought you might have heard something I didn’t.” At times, it seems the Russian space agency deliberately keeps their cosmonauts in the dark.

“We’ll let you know if we hear anything,” Terry promises.

It seems as though we could use some better communication all around.

ALONG WITH Saturday morning science, we sometimes have other activities scheduled on weekends that weren’t high enough priority to make it into the regular schedule. Today is one of those. Samantha is going to set up and test out a new piece of equipment designed by the European Space Agency: an espresso machine. Apparently when you have Europeans in space, you also have to have good coffee—the instant stuff just isn’t the same. After working through the procedures to brew a small bag of espresso, including multiple troubleshooting calls to the payload operations center in Huntsville, the historic first espresso shot in space is brewed. I take a picture of Samantha holding the espresso in a special cup designed to allow sipping in zero g. As she takes the first drink, I say, “That’s one small step for woman, one giant leap for coffee,” over the space-to-ground channel. I’m pretty pleased with my line. The machine cost more than a million dollars to build, certify for flight, and launch; there are only ten espresso packets on board, making Samantha’s drink a very expensive cup of coffee—worthy of a historic quote.

A USEFUL WAY to think of an orbiting object like the International Space Station is that it is going fast enough that the force of gravity keeps it curving around the Earth. We think of objects in orbit as being stable, staying at the same distance above the planet, but in reality the small amount of atmospheric drag that exists at 250 miles above the Earth’s surface pulls on us even when we are whizzing along at 17,500 miles per hour. Without intervention our orbit would tighten until we eventually crashed into the Earth’s surface. This will be allowed to happen some day when NASA and our international partners decide that the station has finished its useful life. It will be deorbited in a controlled manner to make sure that when it hits the planet, it will be in a safe area in the Pacific Ocean, and I hope to be there to watch. This is how the Russian space station Mir ended its life.

We keep ISS in orbit using a Progress that is docked here. Mission control calculates how long to fire its engine, and that force boosts us back into the proper orbit. Sometimes we wake up in the morning to learn that a successful reboost has taken place while we slept.

This morning, though, an attempted reboost failed. The Progress engine burned for just one second, not the several-minute burn we usually do. Once again, a Progress has failed to function properly, and, once again, we must worry about what that will mean for us.

We are not in any immediate danger of crashing into the Earth—it would take many months for our orbit to decay to a dangerous degree—but we also use the Progress engines to move the station out of the way of space junk, so the failure could have frightening consequences. This is another strike against a piece of hardware everyone had thought of as rock solid, challenging our confidence in the Soyuz spacecraft, which are made with identical or similar components and by the same manufacturer—including the one that is meant to be my ride home.

Now that we have lost the supplies that were supposed to reach us on the Progress, we have to be more vigilant about the trash we pack into the empty visiting vehicles, making sure we aren’t disposing of anything usable. Terry and I spend some time going through bags of stuff that other crew members have discarded, looking for uneaten food, clean clothes, or other consumable supplies. While we work, we talk about whether or not Terry’s Soyuz will leave anywhere near on time. As I’m sorting out food packets and talking, I find myself holding something made of fabric. It’s some dude’s used underwear. I stuff it into the trash and excuse myself to wash my hands a hundred times, an unsatisfying process without running water.

The good news is that the Node 3 Seedra is working again. It had failed because the fan that pushes air through the system wasn’t starting. After some investigation and discussion, the ground devised a solution to fix it by replacing just the fan motor without pulling the whole unit out of the rack. That worked, miraculously, and now we are breathing clean air again. It’s remarkable how good this is for morale.

That Friday night, we are having dinner on the Russian segment, and we know it will be one of our last with Terry, Anton, and Samantha. Terry floats to the U.S. segment to retrieve the last of the ice cream that came up on SpaceX, and when he comes back he has a troubled look on his face.

“Scott, the ground is trying to get in touch with you,” he says. “You need to call your daughter Samantha right away. They said it’s an emergency.”

“Why didn’t they call me here?” I ask. There is another space-to-ground channel in the Russian segment.

My crewmates all look at me with concern. They know that I got a similar call on the space station five years ago, when my sister-in-law was shot.

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” I say, for their benefit more than mine. I go to my CQ, where I can talk privately. Only then do I realize that we don’t have communication coverage, and I won’t be able to make a call for twenty minutes. I spend that time thinking about Samantha, about what she was like as a spirited toddler, as a bright-eyed school-age kid, as a moody teenager. I still blame myself for the problems Samantha and I have had in our relationship since her mother and I split up. The teenage and young adult years are a stormy time for a lot of kids, and I know that Samantha has had to deal with fallout from the divorce, caring for her mother and her younger sister in ways that I don’t even know about. It’s been an ongoing struggle to get to a place where we can be comfortable with each other without fear of blowups.

When the satellites are finally aligned, I put on my headset and click on the icon to place a call to Samantha’s cell. She answers on the second ring.

“Hi, Dad.” She knows it’s me because calls from the space station are all routed through the Johnson Space Center.

“Are you okay? What’s going on?” I ask, trying to sound calm.

“Not much,” she says. “I’m at Uncle Mark and Gabby’s. Everyone has left, and I’m lonely.” I can tell from her tone that nothing is wrong. She sounds bored.

“That’s it? There’s no emergency?” I ask, feeling my concern subside and give way to irritation. It felt like the times I’d lost track of one of the girls at a shopping center and looked for them long enough to start fearing the worst.

Samantha explains that she had flown to Tucson for the high school graduation of her cousin Claire, Mark’s younger daughter. Samantha had chosen to go to the graduation because she has been going through a hard time and was feeling cut off from our family while I am away. She thought it might make her feel better to be at a gathering of Kellys. But the night after the graduation Mark and Gabby had left town, and shortly after that, Claudia, Mark’s older daughter, left as well, leaving Samantha by herself in an empty house. She had felt abandoned and wanted to get home, and when she didn’t get a response to a number of emails, she had called Spanky. When he conveyed her request to mission control, her request had been misinterpreted as an emergency.

The absurdity is not lost on me that I’m in space for a year, and she’s lonely. But I’m also reminded just how much my family is sacrificing for this mission.

She apologizes for scaring me and promises to leave a clearer message next time. I go back over to the Russian segment to rejoin the festivities, my mood somewhat dampened.

That night, I have one of those twilight falling-asleep dreams. For some reason, I’m focused on the death of Beau Biden, the vice president’s son, who passed away from brain cancer yesterday at forty-six. I never met him, but I heard great things about him. His death bothers me more than I would have expected. In my half-awake state it occurs to me that one day we’re all going to be dead, that we will all be dead much longer than we were alive. In a sense I feel I know what it will be like, because we were all “dead” once, before we were born. For each of us, there was a moment when we became self-aware, realized that we were alive, and the nothingness before that wasn’t particularly objectionable. This thought, strange as it may be, is reassuring. I wake up long enough to type an email to Amiko about it.

People often ask me whether I had any epiphanies in space, whether seeing the Earth from space made me feel closer to God or more at one with the universe. Some astronauts have come back with a new view of humanity’s role in the cosmos, which has inspired new spiritual beliefs or caused them to rededicate themselves to the faiths they grew up with. I would never question anyone else’s experience, but this vantage point has never created any particular spiritual insight for me.

I am a scientifically minded person, curious to understand everything I can about the universe. We know there are trillions of stars, more than the number of grains of sand on planet Earth. Those stars make up less than 5 percent of the matter in the universe. The rest is dark matter and dark energy. The universe is so complex. Is it all an accident? I don’t know.

I was raised Catholic, and as is the case in many families, my parents were more dedicated to their children’s religious development than they were to their own. Mark and I attended catechism classes until one day in the ninth grade, when my mother got tired of driving us. She gave us the choice of whether to keep going or not, and, as many teenagers would, we chose to opt out. Since that day, organized religion has not been part of my life. When Samantha was ten years old, she asked me at dinner one evening what religion we were.

“Our religion is ‘Be nice to other people and eat all your vegetables,’ ” I said. I was pleased with myself for describing my religious beliefs so concisely and that she was satisfied with it. I respect people of faith, including an aunt who is a nun, but I’ve never felt that faith myself.

WE WILL be spending a lot of time this week working on an experiment called “Fluid Shifts Before, During, and After Prolonged Space Flight and Their Association with Intracranial Pressure and Visual Impairment”—“Fluid Shifts” for short. Misha and I are the subjects of the experiment, and it promises some of the most important results for the future of spaceflight.

Maybe the most troubling negative effect of long-duration missions in space has been damage to astronauts’ vision, including mine on my previous mission. At first, these changes were assumed to be temporary. Once astronauts started flying longer and longer missions, though, we showed more severe symptoms. For most, the changes gradually disappeared once the mission was over; for some, the symptoms seemed to be permanent. When I flew my first mission on the space shuttle, in 1999, I didn’t need corrective lenses, but while on the mission I realized things were getting blurry in the middle range, ten or twelve feet—across the flight deck of the space shuttle. Back on Earth, my symptoms quickly resolved. My second flight was eight years later, by which time I had started using reading glasses. After about three days in space, I no longer needed them. The improvement lasted for about three months after I returned to Earth.

Three years later, for my first long-duration flight, 159 days, I was wearing bifocals all the time. After a short period in orbit, my vision got worse, and I wore stronger lenses to correct for the change. When I returned to Earth, within a few months my vision returned to what it had been when I left. But I had other troubling signs: swelling of the optic nerve and what seemed to be permanent choroidal folds. (The choroid is a blood-filled layer in the eyeball between the retina and the sclera—the white part—that provides oxygen and nourishment to the outer layers of the retina. These folds in the choroid could damage the retina and cause blind spots.) My vision symptoms so far this year seem to be similar to the last time, though we are monitoring them closely to see whether they will get worse.

If long-term spaceflight could do serious damage to astronauts’ vision, this is one of the problems that must be solved before we can get to Mars. You can’t have a crew attempting to land on a faraway planet—piloting the spacecraft, operating complex hardware, and exploring the surface—if they can’t see well.

The leading hypothesis is that increased pressure in the cerebral fluid surrounding our brains is causing the vision changes. In space, we don’t have gravity to pull blood, cerebral fluid, lymphatic fluid, mucus, water in our cells, and other fluids to the lower half of our bodies like we are used to. So the cerebral fluid does not drain properly and tends to increase the pressure in our heads. We adjust over the first few weeks in space and pee away a lot of the excess, but the full-head sensation never completely goes away. It feels a little like standing on your head twenty-four hours a day—mild pressure in your ears, congestion, round face, flushed skin. As with so many other aspects of human anatomy, the delicate structures of our heads evolved under Earth’s gravity and don’t always respond well to having it taken away.

The increased fluid pressure may squish our eyeballs out of shape and cause swelling in the blood vessels of our eyes and optic nerves. This is all still a theory, as it’s hard to measure the pressure inside our skulls in space (the best way to measure intracranial pressure is a spinal tap, which I’d very much prefer not to have to undergo, or to perform on a crewmate, in space). It’s possible, too, that high CO₂ is causing or contributing to changes in our vision, since it is known to dilate blood vessels. High sodium in our space diets could also be a factor, and NASA has been working to reduce that in order to test whether this makes a difference. Only male astronauts have suffered damage to their eyes while in space, so looking at the slight differences in the head and neck veins of male and female astronauts might also help scientists start to nail down the causes. If we can’t, we just might have to send an all-women crew to Mars.

Since it’s impossible to re-create the effects of zero gravity in a lab for sustained periods of time, scientists have conducted experiments on people with pressure sensors already installed in their skulls for other medical conditions. These people were taken up on an airplane that can create weightlessness for short periods in order to measure what happens inside their heads when they reach zero gravity. Their intracranial pressure dropped when they got to microgravity, rather than increasing as had been expected. Maybe it takes a while for the fluids to shift, or maybe the leading hypothesis is wrong. Before leaving for this mission, I volunteered to have a pressure sensor installed in my skull, but NASA declined my offer. The risks of drilling a hole in my head before sending me to space for a year were too great.

In the Fluid Shifts study, Misha and I will be subjects in an experiment that uses a device for relieving the intracranial pressure of spaceflight—pants that suck. This is not a metaphor. We will take turns donning a device, roughly the shape of a pair of pants, called Chibis (Russian for “lapwing,” a type of bird), that reduces the pressure on the lower half of our bodies. The pants look a lot like the bottom half of the robot from Lost in Space, or like Wallace and Gromit’s “wrong trousers.” Reducing the pressure on our lower bodies also reduces the amount of fluid in our heads. By studying the effects of Chibis on our bodies, we hope to understand more about this problem.

One of the times these pants were used, however, the Russian cosmonaut wearing them experienced a sudden drop in heart rate and lost consciousness. His crewmates thought he was in cardiac arrest and immediately ended the experiment without ill effect. Anytime a piece of equipment has put a person at risk, NASA has been reluctant to use it again. But because the Chibis is still the best possibility we have for understanding this problem, they are making an exception.

Preparing to don the pants is actually a days-long process. We have to take baseline samples of blood, saliva, and urine, and we also have to take images of blood vessels in our heads, necks, and eyes using ultrasound. So much of the equipment we need to do these tests is only on the U.S. segment, so we spend a few hours packing it up and ferrying it over to the Russian service module. This is going to be the most complicated human experiment that’s ever been done on the International Space Station.

When it’s time to put on the device, I take off my pants and clamber into the Chibis pants, making sure the seal around my waist is secure. Misha is working the controls, slowly decreasing the pressure on my lower body, and with each incremental change I can feel the blood being pulled out of my head—in a good way. For the first time in months, I don’t feel like I’m standing on my head.

But then the feeling starts to change. It’s like I’m in an F-14 again, pulling too many g’s. I can feel myself starting to gray out, my peripheral vision closing in, where you are at risk of losing consciousness. The pants are malfunctioning, and I feel like I could have my intestines pulled out in the most unpleasant way possible.

“Hey, something’s not right with this,” I announce to Misha and Gennady. “I’m gonna have to—” I reach for the seal at my waist, prepared to break it, canceling the experiment. At the same instant, I hear Gennady yelling.

“Misha, shto ty delayesh?” What are you doing? Gennady doesn’t yell much, so when he raises his voice you can be sure you have likely screwed up. In this case, I look over at the pressure gauge, which is not supposed to go past 55. Misha has it down to 80, the maximum negative pressure.

Fortunately neither I nor the equipment sustains any permanent damage, and we are able to go on with the experiment. I stay in the pants for a couple of hours, doing various medical tests like measuring blood pressure and taking ultrasound images of my heart, neck, eyeball, and a blood vessel just behind my temple. This is where my space tattoos come in handy. Shortly before my launch, I visited a Houston tattoo parlor and had some black dots placed on the most-used ultrasound sites (on my neck, biceps, thigh, and calf) so I wouldn’t have to locate the exact spot each time. It’s saved me a huge amount of trouble already. We measure my cochlear fluid pressure (by sticking an instrument in my ear) and my intraocular pressure (by tapping a pressure sensor on my anesthetized eyeball). We scan my eyeball with a laser, which can register changes like choroidal folds and optic nerve swelling.

During the time we’re doing this, I feel as good as I’ve felt in space. The constant pressure in my head clears, and I’m sorry when it’s time to shed the pants and shut the experiment down.

Later in the day, I’m sitting in the Waste and Hygiene Compartment. I’ve been sitting for a while, in fact—sometimes this process takes a while in the absence of gravity. Samantha is brushing her teeth just outside the kabin, which is like a stall in a public restroom—and I can hear her humming to herself, as she often does while she works. I can see her socked feet under the wall, hooked under a handrail to keep her steady. Her toes are close enough that I could reach out and tickle them, but I decide against it.

This scene probably sounds a bit odd to those who haven’t experienced the loss of privacy on a space station, but we get used to it. I’ve just been reading about how the men on the Shackleton expedition had to hunker down behind snow drifts and had only chunks of ice to clean themselves with, so I count myself lucky. Because I have nothing else to do while I sit, I watch Samantha’s feet hooked under the handrail, keeping her body perfectly still, and I think about the complexity of that simple task. If you showed me nothing but a foot hooked under a handrail in zero gravity, I could estimate how long that person has been in space with a high degree of accuracy. When Samantha was new up here, she would have hooked her feet too hard, used too much force, and tired out her ankles and big toe joints unnecessarily. Now she knows exactly how little pressure she needs to apply. Her toes move with the elegance and precision of a pianist’s fingers on a keyboard.

Last night we enjoyed our final Friday dinner with Terry, Samantha, and Anton. Since the loss of the Progress, the Russians are running low on food and other supplies, and though we’ve made it clear we will share food, things won’t be the same for a while. I bring over a salami my brother sent up on the last SpaceX, and I eat some of the last of the Russian meals, a “Can of White” (chicken with white sauce), and some American “Bags of Brown” (some sort of irradiated beef thing). The Russians also have something called “the Appetizing Appetizer,” which it is not.

A few of us say we have been craving fruit recently, which is no surprise given that there has been no fresh food in our diets since shortly after Dragon arrived. Our dried, bagged, and canned fruits are not the same as the real deal. I share the fact that I recently had a craving for a cheap domestic beer in a small bar glass with warm, bitter foam like my dad used to drink. This craving is weird, because I haven’t had that kind of beer since college and would never choose to drink it on Earth. I’m more of a hoppy India pale ale kind of guy. Maybe there’s some nutrient in cheap beer I’m missing. We talk about whether we are going to get scurvy, and what it is exactly, what the symptoms are. I scratch my balls to get a laugh. Just the word “scurvy” sounds horrible, we agree. I wonder whether the members of the Shackleton expedition got scurvy; I will look at the book again tonight before I go to sleep. When the next SpaceX resupply gets here at the end of June, it will bring fresh fruits and vegetables as well as desperately needed supplies, chief among them the shit cans that are so vital to life in space. My brother has also announced he is sending me a gorilla suit on SpaceX. I asked why I needed a gorilla suit on the space station.

“Of course you need a gorilla suit,” he responded. “There’s never been a gorilla suit in space before. You’re getting a gorilla suit. There’s no stopping me.”

I’m concerned about devoting cargo space to something that seems frivolous. There are those who look for reasons to criticize NASA and any expense that appears to be excessive, and I know those people would get out their calculators to figure the cost for sending a gorilla suit into orbit. Mark tells me that after being vacuum-packed for flight in space, the gorilla suit is no bigger or heavier than a sweatshirt we might send up as a shout-out to an alma mater or an organization.

As we finish dinner, we talk about all we have accomplished on this expedition: the visiting vehicles (including the ones that didn’t make it), difficult and risky maintenance on the spacesuits, important life-science experiments, and the rodent research, which we will finish up the day after tomorrow. We also talk about our evolving relationships with the various control centers—Houston, Moscow, Europe, Japan—and how much the mutual adoration society, as I call it, has gotten out of control. It seems that no one can do anything, either in space or on the ground, without receiving a short speech of appreciation: “Thank you for all your hard work and your time on this, awesome job, we appreciate it.” Then the speech has to be repeated back: “No, thank you, you guys have been just awesome, we appreciate all your hard work,” ad nauseam. It all comes from a well-meaning place, but I think it’s a waste of time. I’ve often had the experience of finishing up some task and then moving on to the next thing, when a “thank you” speech comes back at me. This requires that I stop what I’m doing to float back to the mic, acknowledge those thanks, and return them in roughly equal proportions—multiple times a day. If you consider the cost of constructing and maintaining the space station, the mutual adoration society probably costs taxpayers millions of dollars a year. I’m already thinking about putting a stop to it when Terry, Samantha, and Anton leave.

On Wednesday, the day before the Soyuz is to leave, Terry must hand over command of the station to Gennady. There’s a little ceremony, a military tradition drawn from the Navy change-of-command ceremony, that lets everyone know clearly when responsibility for the station transfers from one person to another. The six of us float somewhat awkwardly in the U.S. lab while Terry makes a speech. He thanks the ground teams in Houston, Moscow, Japan, Europe, and Canada, as well as the science support teams in Huntsville and other places. He thanks our families for supporting us on our missions.

“I’d like to say a few words about the crew I launched with,” Terry says, “Anton and Samantha, my brother and sister.” This might sound a bit exaggerated, but I know from experience how flying in space as a crew brings people together. Terry would do anything for them, and they for him. “We got to spend two hundred days in space together, including a few bonus days, and I couldn’t have asked for a better crew.

“So now Expedition Forty-three is in the history books, and we turn it over to a new chapter and Expedition Forty-four.” With that, he hands the microphone to Gennady, who checks to see if it is still on.

“No matter how many flights you have,” Gennady says, “it’s always like a new station, always like first flight.”

This makes everyone smile, because Gennady has more spaceflights than any of us (this is his fifth), and he will soon set a record for most days in space of any human. Gennady wishes Terry, Anton, and Samantha a “soft, safe landing and the best return home.” Terry tells the control center that this concludes the handover ceremony, and another milestone of my mission is crossed off. The next handover ceremony will be in September when Gennady leaves and I become commander.

Later that night, Terry asks me what landing is like in the Soyuz. He’s trained for this, of course, and he has been told what to expect by Anton and by the training team at Star City; still, he is curious to hear my experience. I think of how to set him up for what to expect without scaring him too much.

We call Samantha over so she can hear it too, and I describe what my experience had been last time: As we slammed into the atmosphere, the capsule was engulfed in a bright orange plasma, which is a little disconcerting, sort of like having your face a few inches away from a window while on the other side someone is trying to get at you with a blowtorch. Then, when the parachute deployed, the capsule spun and twisted and turned violently in every direction. If you can get in the right frame of mind, if you can experience it like an adventure ride, this can be great fun. On the other hand, some astronauts and cosmonauts, after their first Soyuz landing, have said that they were being thrown around so violently they became convinced something had gone wrong and they were going to die. There can be a fine line between terror and fun, and I want to give Terry and Samantha the right mind-set.

Terry has experienced the ride back to Earth on the space shuttle, and I tell him the Soyuz reentry is much steeper. “The shuttle reentry feels like cruising down Park Avenue in a Rolls-Royce,” I tell him. “Riding the Soyuz is more like riding a Soviet beater car down an unpaved street that leads off a cliff.”

They both think this analogy is funny, but they also appear a little worried.

“As soon as you realize you aren’t going to die, it’s the most fun you’ll ever have,” I tell them. “I’ll tell you the truth—the ride is so much fun, I would sign up for another long-duration mission just to get to take that ride again.” Terry and Samantha look skeptical, but it’s true.

OUR CREWMATES ARE leaving today. There is a ceremony for the hatch closing, seen live on NASA TV, as they depart. It starts out a bit awkwardly, since all six of us are crammed into the narrow Russian module where their Soyuz is docked. I snap some pictures of Anton, Samantha, and Terry posing in the open hatch. Then those who are staying wish them good luck and a soft landing. Anton hugs Gennady, whom he looks up to so much. Then he hugs Misha. Then he hugs me. Samantha hugs Gennady, then Misha, then me. It seems to me that Samantha gives me an extra-big hug, and after she has disappeared I realize that I won’t be in the physical presence of a woman again for nine months. The three of them float into the Soyuz and give one last wave while we take their pictures.

Anton and Gennady wipe down the hatch seal in the vestibule, to make sure that no foreign objects keep the hatch from sealing properly. Gennady closes the hatch on our side while Anton is closing it from their side. And that’s it. It reminds me of seeing off Charlotte at the airport at the end of a visit—after spending so much time together, I give her a hug, watch her walk down the jetway, and after a final wave, she disappears. It’s a weird thing: I’ve spent so much time with these people, but with a few good-byes and hugs, our shared experience is over in an instant.

I’m not scared for my departing crewmates, any more than I’m scared for myself, but seeing the hatch close behind them gives me a strange sense of isolation, even abandonment. If I have to work on the Seedra again, I’ll have to do it without Terry’s help. If I get into a discussion with the Russians about literature, I’ll have to do it without Samantha’s help. I’m looking forward to having the U.S. segment to myself, though, and I try to focus on that.

I float off toward the U.S. lab, and the Russians float off to their segment, and then all is silent. It’s just me and the fan noise. No talk from Terry, whose upbeat commentary has punctuated everything I’ve done since I’ve been up here. No quiet humming from Samantha. For the moment, I don’t even hear any voices from the ground.

I look around the junk on the walls in the U.S. lab, which suddenly feels much larger. I have the strange feeling I meant to say something more to Terry or Samantha, that I wanted to remind them about something, but I can’t think what.

Then I hear Terry’s voice, breaking in midsentence, as if he were here with me: “…pills for the fluid loading protocol, Anton? Or did you leave them on station?”

“I’ve got them,” Anton answers, then rattles off a series of numbers in rapid-fire Russian to their control center. Now that the communications on the Soyuz are set up, I can hear through our intercom system every word my former crewmates say as if I were in there with them. I join the space-to-ground channel to warn Terry that his mic is hot and that everyone with an internet connection or tuned to NASA TV can hear every word he says. I wouldn’t want one of them to inadvertently drop an F-bomb and then have to hear about it when he or she gets back to Earth. (Since inadvertently dropping the F-bomb to Earth myself, I am sensitive to the nuances of our comm system. On my second shuttle flight, I said “Fuck” while struggling with a piece of hardware in the airlock. My crewmate Tracy Caldwell called out, “Hot mic!” from the flight deck to let me know I could be heard on NASA TV. “Shit!” I said in response, making two FCC violations in ten seconds.)

I go through the rest of the afternoon listening to Terry, Anton, and Samantha’s voices. As I work on a physics experiment, I can hear Samantha humming absentmindedly. A couple of times I turn around to say something to her, then remember where she is.

When the Soyuz is ready to detach and push away from station, three hours after we closed the hatch, I watch its departure on a laptop screen on NASA TV, just as many people on Earth are doing. I grab a mic.

“Fair winds and following seas, guys,” I say. “It was a real pleasure spending time up here with you, and good luck on your landing.”

Terry answers, “Thanks, Scott, we miss you guys already.”

Gennady adds from the Russian segment, “Samantha, I think you forgot your sweater.”

I hear them talking to one another this way, trading idle work chat and calling out numbers to the control center, almost all the way to the ground. If I didn’t know what they were doing—falling like a meteor at supersonic speed toward the planet’s surface—I could never have guessed.

Several hours later, they are on the ground safely in Kazakhstan. They had been here with me twenty-four hours a day for months, and now they are as far and unreachable as everyone else on Earth, as Amiko and my daughters and the 7 billion other humans.

That night, when I turn out the lights and climb into my sleeping bag, I’m aware of the quiet. There is no rustling in the other crew quarters or quiet talking as crewmates communicate with the ground or say good night to their families on the phone. If this were a normal six-month flight I would already be halfway done, but instead I feel I have as long as I did when I first got up here. Nine months. I don’t often let these kinds of thoughts into my head, but when they do it’s hard to get them out again. What have I gotten myself into?

SUNDAY RARELY FEELS like a Sunday on the space station, but today might be an exception. Yesterday I did both my weekly cleaning and my exercise, so today I actually have the entire day off. When I wake, I read the daily summary that was sent to us overnight and see that today Gennady sets the world record for the most days in space: 803. By the time he leaves, he will have 879, a record I expect to stand for a long time. I sleep late, eat breakfast, read a bit, then decide to clean out my email inbox. But when I open my laptop, there is no internet connection. This has been an ongoing problem: on Saturday nights the ground reboots the laptops remotely, and no one notices that the internet connection has been dropped. When I call down to ask for it to be fixed on Sunday morning, I’m told that the only person who knows how to do it doesn’t come in until later in the day.

There is a SpaceX launch scheduled today for 2:20 p.m. our time (10:20 a.m. in Florida), and I had looked forward to watching it live, but my internet connection won’t be fixed by then. SpaceX is carrying a lot of things we are looking forward to getting, most important being an International Docking Adapter, a $100 million mechanism that will convert docking ports built for the space shuttle to a new international docking standard, agreed to in 2010 by NASA, ESA, Roscosmos, the Japanese space agency, and the Canadians. (Ultimately it could even be used by China or other nations.) Without these adapters in place, we wouldn’t be able to bring people up on SpaceX or the Boeing spacecraft still under development.

Also on board SpaceX: food (the Russians are still running low); water; clothing for American astronaut Kjell (pronounced “Chell”) Lindgren and Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui, who will both arrive next month; spacewalk equipment for Kjell, who will be my spacewalking partner in the fall; filtration beds for removing contaminants from our water (which is close to undrinkable with increasing levels of organic compounds, since the last set of beds, which we badly needed, blew up on Orbital); experiments designed by schoolchildren (some of the kids who saw their experiments blow up on Orbital are being given a second chance to see their work go to space today).

Personally, I’m looking forward to an extra set of running shoes, another harness for the treadmill, clean clothes, medications, and crew care packages that my friends and family chose for me.

Launch time comes and goes. Shortly after, my laptop’s internet starts working again. I look up the video for the SpaceX launch, but the connection isn’t strong enough to stream the video. I get a jerky, frozen image. Then my eye stops on a headline: “SpaceX Rocket Explodes During Cargo Launch to Space Station.”

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

The flight director gets on a privatized space-to-ground channel and tells us the rocket has been lost.

“Station copies,” I say.

I take a moment to think over all the stuff that has been lost. Kimiya’s underwear, my pills, NASA’s $100 million adapter. Schoolchildren’s science experiments. All blown to bits. I joke to Mark that the thing I’m saddest about is the gorilla suit. After having to be talked into it, I had started thinking about all the fun Space Gorilla could have up here. Now he is a burned cinder and raining into the Atlantic Ocean, like everything else on the spacecraft. As stunned as I am by the loss, as overwhelmed as I am by what this will mean for the rest of my year in space and beyond, I’m almost as annoyed that I didn’t get to watch the launch—and the explosion—live. I feel oddly left out of something that is having a huge impact on my life.

I call Amiko and she fills me in on what it looked like: two minutes after launch, the rocket reached maximum aerodynamic pressure, as it was supposed to, then it suddenly blew up in the clear Florida sky. As we talk, it starts to sink in that we have lost three resupply vehicles in the last nine months, the last two in a row. Our consumables are now down to about three months’ worth, and the Russians are much worse off than that.

It occurs to me that maybe we should delay the next crew’s launch until after the increment in September when, for a brief period, we will have nine people up here, with limited supplies and sky-high CO₂. It also occurs to me that the ground should have listened to me when I suggested Terry leave his spacesuit gloves for Gennady to use if we have to do an emergency spacewalk. New gloves are coming up on SpaceX, I was told dismissively. Now those gloves are flaming bits off the coast of Florida.

I think about the schoolchildren who saw their experiments blow up on Orbital, rebuilt them, and saw them blow up on SpaceX. I hope they will get a third chance. There is a lesson here, I guess, about risk and resilience, about endurance and trying again.