Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery

10

July 24, 2015

TODAY the Expedition 44 crew arrived. Their launch was a relief after the recent Progress failures, and docking went off without a hitch. When we opened the hatch and the new guys came floating through, looking dazed as baby birds right out of the shell, I was reminded of the day I passed through the same hatch in my Captain America suit, Misha and me fitting through the opening together like a set of conjoined twins. It feels like that was years ago. The days are going by quickly, but the weeks crawl.

The three new guys will need a lot of help acclimating to the environment, getting settled, and learning to do the work. For experienced astronauts serving on ISS for the first time, the adjustment period is longer than for those who have lived here before; for first-time space travelers, like Kjell Lindgren and Kimiya Yui, it’s longer still. (This is Oleg Kononenko’s third time in space.) I trained a year for each of my flights on the space shuttle, preparing in detail for each day’s activities on a two-week mission. In the ISS era, with such a large spacecraft and much longer missions, our training is more generic. We don’t know exactly what we’re going to be doing from day to day. It’s much more challenging, and the biggest challenge is at the start of the mission.

More than two-thirds of space travelers suffer from some degree of space motion sickness, sometimes debilitating, and there isn’t much to be done but wait it out. Kjell and Kimiya both feel pretty bad on day one, and they will be nauseous and only marginally functional until their bodies adjust to the disorientation of zero g. Until they fully adapt, they will be as clumsy and tentative as babies just learning to walk. They will need help with the simplest things; even moving from one module to another without knocking shit off the walls is a challenge. They will need help talking to the ground, preparing food, using the bathroom. Even the process of throwing up requires help initially. It will take them four to six weeks to feel fully normal.

Soon after the new guys come floating through the hatch, we have a quick videoconference with the ground so they can greet their families, still in Baikonur. Most of the questions from the ground can be answered by just saying, “I’m fine. It was the ride of my life.” Misha helpfully floats an apple and an orange behind Kimiya as a visual aid while he talks.

I know Kjell and Kimiya won’t sleep well their first night here. In the middle of the night, I get up to use the bathroom and find Kjell going through bags of stuff in one of the storage modules.

“Hey, what are you looking for?” I ask him. It’s close to impossible to find anything even with the lights on, and out of courtesy Kjell has left them off.

“To tell you the truth, I’m looking for more puke bags,” Kjell says. “I’m out.”

“There’s got to be some more here somewhere,” I say. I look in the few places that seem most likely, then search in the computer inventory management system. I ask Houston where I should be looking. After a minute, they say we don’t have a stash of puke bags on board. We don’t include them among supplies sent up to the station because the Russians used to bring them on the Soyuz.

“We’ll improvise something,” I assure Kjell. As with everything else up here, vomit has a tendency to go everywhere, so there has to be a way for the bag to absorb it and hold it in place. It’s also nice to be able to wipe off your face, since surface tension holds liquids on your skin when they can’t drip off due to gravity.

Rooting through our supplies, I invent a new puke bag for Kjell made out of a ziplock bag lined with maxi pads. It works.

For much of what Kjell and Kimiya do on their second day, they need me floating at their elbows, talking them through the procedures, offering help in learning to maneuver in zero g. Kjell’s first task is to inventory the contents of a bag of spare parts that came up with them on their Soyuz and then stow them on ISS. On Earth, it would be a simple task—you could put the bag down on the floor, take everything out, and check off each item on a list as you put it back in. In space, as Kjell quickly learns, the moment you open the bag, objects jump out at you and start drifting away. Just getting everything back under control can take up all of the time that was allotted for the job.

Working through this together is time-consuming, but it will be worth it in the long run. I’m teaching Kjell general techniques he can use throughout his time here—for instance, the importance of putting things away in the right places. I tell Kjell he can keep the contents of a container from leaping out at him when he opens it by slowly spinning in place while holding the bag. Centrifugal force pushes the contents toward the bottom of the bag and holds them there as long as you keep spinning. Organizing the parts being inventoried is a bit trickier, but I show Kjell how to use a mesh bag to hold the objects that would otherwise be floating all over the lab and perhaps hiding themselves. Then he can move each item from the mesh bag back into the original bag as he accounts for it. For small or delicate objects, I show him how to lay out long pieces of duct tape faceup on the wall, bisected by shorter pieces facedown to hold the long one in place. Then he can stick items on the tape, keeping them from wandering off. There are patches of Velcro strategically placed on the walls, and new items often come up with Velcro dots affixed. It’s hard to express how much easier this makes life; when a certain number of new items arrive without Velcro dots, I express annoyance that probably seems out of proportion to those on the ground. But every object that arrives without Velcro on it threatens to rob me of time, patience, and ingenuity, all of which are sometimes in short supply.

KJELL HAS a great attitude so far and seems enthusiastic about everything he approaches, even though he looks a bit pale, with dark circles under his eyes. Every once in a while, he gets a distracted look, then excuses himself to throw up. The first few days in space can make anyone cranky, but Kjell doesn’t seem to have forgotten for one second that he is living his boyhood dream, and his positive attitude is contagious.

Kjell was born in Taiwan, to a Chinese mother and a Swedish American father. They moved to the American Midwest and then to England, where Kjell spent most of his childhood. He grew up wanting to be an astronaut, and when he was only eleven he wrote to the Air Force Academy asking for an application. When he applied as a high school senior, he was admitted and did well there. His plan had been similar to mine: become a pilot, fly jets for the military, become a test pilot, then apply to NASA and fly the space shuttle.

But after Kjell finished his degree at the academy and started flight school, a flight surgeon diagnosed him with asthma, a disqualifying condition. Kjell hadn’t experienced any symptoms, but the flight surgeon’s verdict was absolute. It looked like Kjell would never get to fly military aircraft. Forging a new life plan, he became a researcher studying the cardiovascular effects of spaceflight, then earned a medical degree. He completed residencies in emergency and aerospace medicine, then earned a master’s in public health. He went to work for NASA as a flight surgeon, looking after astronauts preparing to go to space.

Some of Kjell’s new flight surgeon colleagues were surprised or even skeptical about why he had been grounded when they heard his story. He still had not experienced any symptoms of asthma, never taken asthma medication, and was an avid runner and in great health. Some of his colleagues at the Johnson Space Center pointed out to him that while he might have been disqualified from military aviation, NASA went by its own rules. They encouraged him to apply when there was a call for new astronauts, and he did. When he was examined, no trace of asthma was found. Kjell was accepted into the astronaut corps in 2009.

I met Kjell for the first time in Star City, when he was a flight surgeon and I was training for Expedition 25/26. He is sincere and enthusiastic without ever seeming fake or calculating. He is a little on the tall side for an astronaut, with a military haircut and demeanor, but with a perpetual smile. Kjell is religious but is tolerant and respectful of other people’s beliefs; he is one of the most positive people I have ever met.

Kimiya Yui has a background similar to the one Kjell thought he was going to have. He went to Japan’s military academy and joined the Japan Air Self-Defense Force. He flew the F-15 fighter jet and then became a test pilot. Like Kjell, he joined the astronaut corps in 2009, the first class to join NASA knowing they would never get to fly on the space shuttle. Kimiya is an outstanding pilot. He is also one of the hardest-working people I’ve ever known. It’s difficult enough to learn the systems of the space station, the inner workings of the Soyuz, and a foreign language, all at once—Kimiya learned two foreign languages (Russian and English).

Kimiya is one of seven active Japanese astronauts (there are approximately forty-five active American astronauts and sixteen representing the European Space Agency). When I first got to know him in training, he seemed very formal—though I had no way to measure that, never having been assigned with a Japanese astronaut before. He would call me “Kelly-san,” a formal (though not the most formal) way to address another person in Japan. When I kept trying to get him to just call me “Scott,” he started calling me “Scott-san”; eventually, he stopped calling me anything at all. Kimiya understands that Americans value informality and equality—at least in our interactions—and he tries to meet us halfway, even if it makes him uncomfortable. Yesterday, while using the water dispenser, he saw me floating toward him out of the corner of his eye. He greeted me and moved out of the way, acting as though he was busy doing something else. But as soon as I finished getting my water and floated away, I saw him going back to the dispenser to finish filling his water bag.

Oleg Kononenko is a seasoned cosmonaut and a brilliant and rigorous engineer. He is a quiet and thoughtful person, consistently reliable. He is the same age as me and has a pair of twins the same age as Charlotte, a boy and a girl.

Kjell and Kimiya got to know each other well while training for this mission, including a wilderness course through the National Outdoor Leadership School, meant to put us into high-pressure situations, somewhat like the ones we might face in space. I wasn’t on that training course, since we weren’t originally supposed to be on the same crew, so we’ll have to get to know one another up here. In the fall, I’m going to perform two spacewalks with Kjell, and our lives will depend on us working together.

TODAY, Kjell, Kimiya, and I are all taking our blood, then separating it in our state-of-the-art centrifuge before storing it for eventual return to Earth.

The Russians are taking blood today too, and I go to their service module to pick up some of the samples they asked us to store in our freezer. As soon as I pass through the hatch to the Russian segment, the modules are smaller and more cluttered, the equipment is louder, and the ambient light is yellower. But this time it’s worse: the Russians are starting up their centrifuge as I arrive, and it sounds like a chainsaw. All three cosmonauts laugh when they see my reaction.

“Can you believe this?” Gennady asks, gesturing at the centrifuge, then at his ears. “Fucking blya.”

“That thing sounds like it’s about to blow,” I say, and the Russians laugh some more. If their centrifuge were to come apart, it could take the hull of the service module with it, and we would all die.

I float back to the U.S. segment, shaking my head, my ears still ringing. I feel awful from my brief exposure to the noise—like nails on a chalkboard, but much worse.

This is just another example of the differences between our countries’ approaches to equipping the station. The Russian space agency’s goal is always to get the job done as cheaply and efficiently as possible, and I have to admit their cost-saving solutions for some problems can be impressive. The Soyuz that gets us up and down from space is a great example of this: it’s cheap, simple, and reliable. But ultimately, because the Russian hardware is unsophisticated, they are limited in the science they are able to get done. And of course at times like today, I worry about the safety of their equipment.

Kjell and Kimiya are growing used to the strangely sterile life up here. But at least now we have some plants: we have begun an experiment in the European module growing lettuce in a system that uses LED lights to bathe a plant “pillow” of control-release fertilizer. We are learning more about the challenges of growing food in space, which will be important if humans are to make a journey to Mars.

Because I’ve already spent so much time up here, I’m able to tune in to the subtleties of the station. I can feel a slight temperature change from one side of a module to the other. I can feel the vibration in a handrail changing slightly. The sounds of the equipment—always whirring, humming, buzzing—vary almost imperceptibly. I’ll stop Kjell or Kimiya floating through and ask, “Do you hear that whooshing sound?” Often they won’t have noticed it until after I’ve pointed it out. This hypervigilance isn’t entirely a good feeling. It’s another symptom of not being able to detach and shut down, of never really being off the clock. But it might keep us safer—if something were to start to go wrong I might have an early indication of it.

I recently noticed that my brain has made a transition to living in zero g—I can now see things in all orientations. If I’m “upside down” relative to the module I’m in, instead of the environment looking foreign and disorienting, as it would if you stood on your head in an equipment-packed laboratory on Earth, now I immediately recognize where I am and can find whatever I need. This is a transition I never made last time, even after 159 days in space. This may have to do with the six weeks I spent by myself on the U.S. segment—without seeing another astronaut oriented in the normal “upright” way, I was maybe better able to adapt. Or it may be that this is a transition that takes the human brain more than six months to complete. If so, I may have found one of the answers, albeit a small one, that Misha and I are here in search of.

I’ve been noticing that Misha has a different philosophy of pacing himself through the year than I do—he often announces the exact number of days we still have to go, which bugs the shit out of me, but I keep that to myself. I prefer to count up rather than counting down, as if the days are something valuable I’m collecting.

TODAY I AM doing a Twitter chat, answering questions from followers “live.” Because my internet connection can be slow, I’m dictating my answers to Amiko and another public affairs person, and they are typing them into Twitter almost in real time. I’m answering the usual questions about food, exercise, and the view of Earth when I receive a tweet from a user with the handle @POTUS44, President Obama.

He writes, “Hey @StationCDRKelly, loving the photos. Do you ever look out the window and just freak out?”

Amiko and I share a moment of being pleased that the president is following my mission. I think for a moment, then ask Amiko to type a reply: “I don’t freak out about anything, Mr. President, except getting a Twitter question from you.”

It’s a great Twitter moment, unplanned and unscripted, and it gets thousands of likes and retweets. Not long after, a reply appears from Buzz Aldrin: “He’s 249 miles above the earth. Piece of cake. Neil, Mike & I went 239,000 miles to the moon. #Apollo11.”

There is no good way to engage in a Twitter debate with an American hero, so I don’t. In my mind, I reflect on the fact that the crew of Apollo 11 spent eight days in space, traveling half a million miles; by the time I’m done I will have spent a total of 520 days in space and will have traveled over two hundred million miles, the equivalent of going to Mars and back. Only later, when the Twitter chat is over, do I have the chance to reflect that I just experienced being trolled, in space, by the second man on the moon, while also engaging in a Twitter conversation with the president.

A few days later, it’s time to harvest the lettuce we’ve been growing. Kjell, Kimiya, and I gather in the European module to eat it with some oil and vinegar, and it’s surprisingly good. This is the first time American astronauts have eaten a crop grown in space, though the Russians have grown and eaten leafy greens on previous missions. As often happens, the public reaction to the space lettuce surprises me—people seem to be fascinated by the idea of growing and eating plants in orbit, while at the same time Misha and Gennady are outside doing a spacewalk that gets no attention in the United States whatsoever. Kimiya confides in me later that he had to force himself to eat the lettuce for the camera—he grew up on a lettuce farm, and in the summer he had to get up in the middle of the night to harvest it, so since then he’s hated lettuce.

That evening, we bring the Russians some lettuce to sample for Friday dinner. The main topic of discussion is the Soyuz that will be coming up soon, bringing our total to nine. We talk about the new guys—Sergey, Andy, and Aidyn—and I mention that I’ve never met Aidyn and don’t even have an idea of what he looks like. That’s incredibly unusual: before flying in space with someone, even someone from another country, you normally train with him or her, if only a little.

Gennady offers to show me a picture. I decide it will be fun if I have no idea what he looks like until he comes floating through the hatch. Oleg and Gennady agree this will be entertaining.

At about one a.m. I’m awakened from a dead sleep by the failure of one of our power channels. The outage takes down half the power in Node 3, which is where we keep most of our environmental control equipment—our O₂ generator, one of the Seedras (the one I hate), and all the equipment that processes our urine into water, including the toilet itself. It takes a couple of hours working with the ground to get things under control, at which point I tell the rest of the crew to go back to sleep. I stay up another hour and a half myself as the ground attempts to regain ventilation and smoke detection capability. The culprit turned out to be a power regulator way out on the truss. By the time I get back to my CQ, I know I’ll only get a couple of hours of sleep at most.

Later, when I talk to Amiko, she tells me she was in mission control when the power went down. It hadn’t occurred to me that she might have been there on console, watching the displays light up like a Christmas tree with our power failure. We haven’t talked much about the fact that her job at NASA could potentially put her in the strange position of watching live while some disaster threatens her partner’s life.

“I bet that was scary,” I say.

“Yeah, it was a bit scary,” she says. “But I stayed on console until I could see that everything was okay.” She tells me that soon after, the lead flight director Mike Lammers came by her console to see how she was doing. Mike was also the lead flight director for the second half of my previous mission to ISS; he is someone I trust, the person I always think of as my space station flight director. He has also set himself apart from many of the other flight directors in mission control by checking on Amiko, congratulating her on the accomplishments of the mission so far, and supporting her as my partner.

The next day, I talk to Charlotte on the phone. She’s still not much of a phone person, and as usual she seems to be distracted by something, maybe the TV. She’s never rude or unfriendly, but her answers are brief and vague. After a while I run out of topics and start wrapping up the conversation.

“Okay, I should get going,” I say. “Just wanted to check to see how you were doing.”

I expect her to answer with a good-bye, but instead there is a pause. For a second, I wonder whether we have lost our connection.

“Tell me how you’re doing, Dad,” Charlotte says. She suddenly seems to be giving me her full attention, speaking to me in a more adult tone.

I tell her about the power failure last night and how we dealt with it. She sounds interested and asks questions. I tell her more about my new crewmates and how they’re settling in. I tell her about some of the experiments I’ve been working on and about how the clouds and airplane contrails over Europe looked while I was drinking my morning coffee. By the time we get off the phone, I feel as though I’ve observed a milestone of growth in Charlotte, like watching her take her first step or say her first word. She seems as though she’s matured by years within the space of a short phone call. It’s another milestone I’ve spent away from Earth.

ON THE WEEKENDS, I don’t set an alarm, letting myself wake up naturally, maybe an hour later than usual. One Sunday morning in mid-August as I’m slowly waking up, I start to become aware of a welcome sound I haven’t heard for many years. Maybe I’m dreaming about the weekend mornings when I was growing up in New Jersey, when the bagpipers would play at the nearby high school football field. The sound would drift into my room and wake me in a pleasant way, unlike the sounds of my parents fighting that sometimes woke me in the night.

Fully awake, I know I’m in my sleeping bag in my CQ, not in my childhood bed on Greenwood Avenue. But I’m still sure that I’m hearing bagpipes: “Amazing Grace.” I make my way out of Node 2 and follow the sound to find an unexpected sight: Kjell floating at the far end of the Japanese module, playing the bagpipes. Astronauts have been bringing instruments to space for decades—at least as far back as 1965, when astronauts played “Jingle Bells” on the harmonica. As far as I know, Kjell is the first bagpiper in space.

“Sorry, did I wake you?” says Kjell.

“No, it’s great,” I said. “Play anytime you like.”

Today, Gennady, Misha, and I are moving a Soyuz, the one Gennady will go home in, to the aft of ISS in a complex shell game designed to most efficiently utilize the docking ports. Gennady could move the Soyuz by himself, but Misha and I must come along for the ride because this Soyuz is our lifeboat, and once it undocks it’s never guaranteed we will be able to get back aboard the station.

On Earth, moving the Soyuz would be as simple as reparking a car. Up here, as we get into our Sokol suits, we jokingly refer to this brief journey as our summer vacation away from the ISS. Even though we are only away from the station for twenty-five minutes, the whole procedure takes several hours with all of the preparations. As the right seater, I don’t have much to do, so I bring my iPod to listen to my classical music playlist including Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Strauss, and Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. I had almost forgotten how uncomfortable this position is on my knees—I’m not looking forward to doing this again seven months from now when we leave the station for the last time.

When we push away from the station and start the fly-around, I find it strange to see the station from the outside again. It’s been five months since I’ve been outside. Even though it’s in jest that we’ve been calling this our “vacay,” it is actually good to get away. And like earthbound vacations, this one feels too short and leaves me somehow feeling more tired than when I left.