Endurance

15

October 28, 2015

I’M FLOATING in the U.S. airlock, wearing a 250-pound spacesuit, while the air is slowly pumped out. I can’t see Kjell’s face because we are crammed into a space the size of a compact car, at odd angles, his head down near my feet. I’ve been in the suit for four hours now. Kjell is wearing the only extra-large spacesuit on station because he couldn’t fit into the large-sized one, so I’m wearing a suit that’s clearly too small for me, feeling like ten pounds of potatoes stuffed into a five-pound bag. I’m already tired and sore.

“How you doing, Kjell?” I ask, staring directly at his boots.

“Great,” Kjell says and gives a quick thumbs-up I can barely see through the bottom of my visor. Any normal person, upon experiencing the air leaving the airlock around him, would be somewhere on the scale between apprehensive and terrified. But Kjell and I have trained for this, our first spacewalk, for a long time, and we feel prepared and confident in the equipment and the people who are keeping us safe.

Suddenly a series of loud bangs reverberates through the airlock, a sound I’ve never heard in training. It’s like someone knocking on a door loudly and urgently. Then it’s quiet. Has something gone wrong? Should we be doing something? I mention the sound to the ground, and they tell me that it’s normal, one of the things that happens when the air is sucked out of the airlock. No one thought to tell us about it in training, or maybe they just forgot to mention it, or maybe they did and I forgot. I’ve practiced this moment many times, wearing a spacesuit and being lowered into a giant swimming pool containing an ISS mock-up at JSC, but it’s different doing it for real, in space, with no safety divers to help us out if things go wrong.

Once the airlock is nearly at vacuum, Kjell and I do a series of checks on our spacesuits to make sure they are not leaking. This process consists of a series of switch throws and slides of a lever, all of which are extremely difficult to do while wearing the suit’s gloves, sort of like trying to change a car’s tires while wearing a baseball glove. To make things worse, we can’t see the controls, so we have to use mirrors attached to our wrists to see what we are doing (the labels on the controls are written backward so we can read them).

Looking ahead at the procedures, I see that once the airlock is down to a complete vacuum, each of us will turn our water switch on, which will allow water to flow through the cooling system to control the temperature in our suits. We can’t do this prematurely because the water can then freeze and crack the lines. As the air continues to escape the airlock, I consider warning Kjell that the water switch is easy to flip accidentally. It’s right next to a similar-looking switch that we use often to silence alarms or scroll through lines of status messages on a small LCD screen. But I tell myself that Kjell is as well trained as I am for this spacewalk. I’m not going to micromanage him.

When the airlock is not quite at a vacuum, Kjell says, “Houston—and Scott—I just hit my water switch on/off.”

Shit! I think, but don’t say. I take a breath to steady myself. “You cycled it?” I ask. He’s just done the very thing I decided against warning him about.

“Yeah.”

Our capcom for the spacewalk is Tracy Caldwell Dyson, my crewmate from my second shuttle flight—she gained a new last name through marriage in the intervening time. “Houston copies,” Tracy responds. “Kjell, can you tell us how long it was on?”

“Less than half a second,” Kjell says. He sounds dejected. We’ve already spent hours today—and entire working days over the past two weeks—getting ready for this spacewalk. We do not want to have to start all over, not to mention the possibility of damaging the $12 million suit.

While spacesuit experts on Earth confer about how to proceed, I’m pissed at myself for not warning Kjell. Knowing the way NASA works, we are aware there is a very good chance they will not allow us to continue. If that happens, it will be because the experts cannot guarantee Kjell’s safety, and the most important thing is that we both finish the day alive. On the off chance NASA will let us continue, I need Kjell to keep his head in the game.

“It’s happened before, Kjell,” I tell him. “It’ll happen again.”

“Yeah,” Kjell answers, sounding dispirited.

“Don’t worry about it,” I say, wishing I could make eye contact to see how he’s doing.

“No worries,” Kjell replies in a flat tone completely at odds with his words. Astronauts have seen their careers permanently affected by mistakes like this.

“It’ll be all right,” I say, talking to myself as much as I’m talking to him now.

Suit experts on the ground are still discussing whether to proceed, and what precautions we’ll need to take. Meanwhile, we are told we can open the hatch and enjoy the view while they decide on a course of action. As I put my hand on the handle, I realize that I have no idea whether it will be day or night outside. I unlock the hatch handle and crank it, releasing the “dogs.” Now I have to simultaneously translate the hatch toward my chest and rotate it toward my head, which is challenging, because with nothing to hook my feet onto, I’m pulling myself toward the hatch almost as much as I’m pulling it toward me.

I tug and push and pull for a few minutes, and finally the hatch cracks open. The reflected light of Earth rushes in with the most abrupt and shocking clarity and brightness I’ve ever seen. On Earth, we look at everything through the filter of the atmosphere, which dulls the light, but here, in the emptiness of space, the sun’s light is white-hot and brilliant. The bright sunshine bouncing off the Earth is overwhelming. I’ve just gone from grunting in annoyance at a piece of machinery to staring in awe at the most beautiful view I’ve ever seen.

Inside my spacesuit, I feel like I’m in a tiny spacecraft rather than wearing something. My upper body floats inside the hard torso, my head encased in the helmet. I hear the comforting humming noise of the fan moving the air around inside my suit. The helmet has a faint chemical smell, not unpleasant, perhaps the anti-fog solution our visors are treated with. Through the earpiece built into my comm cap, I can hear the voices of Tracy in Houston and Kjell just a few feet away from me out here in outer space—that, and the strangely amplified sound of my own breathing.

The surface of the planet is 250 miles below my face and whizzing by at 17,500 miles per hour. It takes the ground about ten minutes to tell Kjell and me to go outside the hatch, where we can move around better, so I can check over Kjell’s suit for a leak. In the cold of space, a leak would look like snow shooting out of the backpack of the suit. If I don’t see snowflakes, we may be allowed to continue.

I grab both the handrails on either side of my head, getting ready to pull myself out. The airlock’s hatch faces the Earth, which would seem to be the direction we would call “down.” When we trained in the pool, the hatch was facing toward the floor, which always felt like down. Though I was neutrally buoyant in the pool, gravity still forced me toward the center of the Earth, providing a clear sense of up and down. For the hundreds of hours we practiced for this spacewalk, I got used to the idea of this configuration.

Once I’m about halfway through the hatch, though, I have a transition in perspective. Suddenly I have the sensation of climbing up, as if out of the sunroof of a car. The large blue dome of Earth hovers over my head like some nearby alien planet in a sci-fi film, looking as if it could come crashing down upon us. For a moment, I’m disoriented. I’m thinking about where to look for the attachment point, a small ring where I will hook my safety tether, but I don’t know where to look for it.

Like any highly trained pilot, I know how to compartmentalize, to push thoughts out of my mind that aren’t helping me to complete the task at hand. I focus on what is immediately in front of me—my gloves, the handrail, the small labels on the outside of the station I’ve familiarized myself with through countless hours of training—and ignore the looming Earth above and the feeling of disorientation it creates. I don’t have time for it, so I set it aside and get to work. I take the hook from my safety tether off my mini-workstation, a high-tech toolholder attached to the front of my spacesuit, and secure it to one of the rings just outside the airlock, checking to make sure the hook is in fact closed and locked with complete certainty. Like putting an airplane’s landing gear down before landing, this is one of those things you absolutely do not want to screw up.

During my last long-duration mission on ISS, two of the Russian cosmonauts, Oleg Skripochka and Fyodor Yurchikhin, did a spacewalk together to install some new equipment on the outside of the Russian service module. When the two of them came back inside, they both looked shaken, Oleg especially. I assumed at first his reaction was to being outside for the first time, and it wasn’t until this yearlong mission that I learned all the details of what had happened that day: during their spacewalk, Oleg had become untethered from the station and started to float away. The only thing that saved him was hitting an antenna, sending him tumbling back toward the station close enough to grab on to a handrail, saving his life. I’ve often pondered what we would have done if we’d known he was drifting irretrievably away from the station. It probably would have been possible to tie his family into the comm system in his spacesuit so they could say good-bye before the rising CO₂ or oxygen deprivation caused him to lose consciousness—not something I wanted to spend a lot of time thinking about as my own spacewalk was approaching.

The U.S. spacesuits include simple propulsive jets we could use to maneuver ourselves in space in case our tether breaks or we screw up, but we would not want to rely on them or, truth be told, try them out at all. The only way we practiced using the jet packs during our training was with virtual reality simulations, during which astronauts sometimes ended up running out of fuel or missing the space station altogether. I’m acutely aware that if I become detached and run out of fuel and the station is just one inch from my glove tips, it may as well be a mile. The result will be the same: I will die.

Once I’m certain my tether is secured, I remove Kjell’s tether from me and attach it to the outside of the station as well, being just as careful to double-check it as I was with my own. Kjell starts handing me bags of equipment we will need for our work, and I secure each of them to the circular handrail outside the airlock. Once we have everything we need, I give Kjell the go to exit. The first thing we do once we are both outside is our “buddy checks,” looking over each other’s suits from head to toe making sure everything is in order. Tracy talks us through it from mission control, telling me step-by-step how to check Kjell’s PLSS (portable life support system, the “backpack” we wear with the spacesuit) for signs of water having frozen in the sublimator. It looks completely normal—there are no snowflakes, I’m happy to report to the ground. Kjell and I both breathe a sigh of relief. Our spacewalk will proceed. (Later we would learn that some of the engineers wanted to call off the spacewalk and the lead flight director overruled them.) We go over each other’s helmet lights, helmet cameras, mini-workstations, jet pack handles, checking to make sure everything is properly stowed. One of Kjell’s jet pack handles is not—it was partially deployed while Kjell was on his way out of the airlock—and one of mine was as well. After fixing them, we check our tethers one more time. You can’t be too careful with tethers. Nearly five hours after getting into our spacesuits, we are ready to get to work.

FOR NEARLY as long as human beings have been going into space, we have been determined to climb out of the spacecraft. It’s partly just to achieve the fantasy of a human being floating alone in the immensity of the cosmos, nothing but an umbilical connecting him or her to the mother ship. But spacewalks are also a practical necessity for exploration. The ability to move from one spacecraft to another, to explore the surfaces of planetary bodies, or (especially relevant to the International Space Station) to perform maintenance, repairs, or assembly on the exterior of the spacecraft—all are crucial to long-term space travel.

The first spacewalk was carried out in 1965 by cosmonaut Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov. He opened the hatch of his Voskhod spacecraft, floated out on an umbilical, and reported to Moscow: “The Earth is absolutely round”—probably to the dismay of flat-earthers everywhere. It was a triumphant moment for the Soviet space program, but after twelve minutes, Alexei Arkhipovich found that he could not get back through the hatch. Due to a malfunction or poor design, his spacesuit had inflated to the point that he could no longer fit through the narrow opening; he was forced to let some of the precious air out of his suit in order to struggle back through. Doing so caused the pressure to drop so much he nearly passed out. This was not an auspicious beginning to the history of spacewalks, but since then more than two hundred people have successfully suited up to float out an airlock into the blackness of space.

While some of the challenges of spacewalks have gotten easier, they are no less dangerous. Just a few years ago, astronaut Luca Parmitano’s helmet began filling with water while he was outside, raising the terrifying specter of an astronaut drowning in space. Spacewalks are much riskier than any other part of our time in orbit—there are so many more variables, so many pieces of equipment that can fail and procedures that can go wrong. We are so vulnerable out there.

As pilot and commander of the space shuttle, I never had the chance to do a spacewalk. The mission specialists went through the hundreds of hours of training necessary to work outside the spacecraft while I trained to fly and command the mission. For most of the shuttle era, those of us designated as pilots knew that, because of this division of labor, we would never have the chance to put on a spacesuit and float out into the cosmos. A shuttle could return safely with a missing or injured mission specialist, but a missing pilot or commander would be much more problematic. But we are now in another era of spaceflight, and this mission on ISS has given me the chance.

Getting ready to go outside takes a great deal of time. We plan in advance as thoroughly as we can what we will do and in what order, to minimize problems and to maximize efficiency and performance. We prepare the suits, check and double-check all of the components that will keep us alive in the vacuum of space, and organize and prepare the tools we will use—custom-designed for use in zero gravity with our bulky gloves.

I’ve been up since five-thirty this morning and have been hurrying to stay ahead of the timeline all day. I got into a diaper and the liquid cooling garment we wear under the spacesuits, like long underwear with built-in air-conditioning once it’s connected to the suit. Then I ate a quick breakfast I’d laid out the night before to save time and made my way to the airlock to start getting suited up. My goal was to be out of the airlock early—my philosophy is that for complicated jobs, if you aren’t ahead of schedule, you’re already behind.

Kjell and I spent an hour breathing pure oxygen to reduce the amount of nitrogen in our blood so we wouldn’t get the bends (decompression sickness). Kimiya is the intravehicular crew member (IV) for this spacewalk, responsible for helping us get dressed, managing the procedure for prebreathing oxygen, and controlling the airlock and its systems. His tasks might seem mundane, running down a checklist with hundreds of steps, but his job is critical for Kjell and me. It’s practically impossible to get in and out of a spacesuit without help, and if Kimiya makes even the smallest mistake—puts on my boot incorrectly, for instance—I could die a horrible death. My suit includes a life support system that keeps oxygen flowing, scrubs the carbon dioxide that I exhale, and keeps cool water flowing through the tubes covering my body so I don’t get overheated. Although weightless, the suit still has mass. It’s also stiff and bulky, making it difficult to maneuver.

I slid into the pants of the suit, and Kimiya helped me squeeze into the hard upper torso. Nearly dislocating my shoulders and hyperextending my elbows, I pushed my arms into the sleeves and my head through the neck ring. Kimiya connected my liquid cooling garment umbilical, then sealed the pants to the torso. Each connection between pieces of the suit is critical. The last step was to put my helmet on. My visor had been fitted with Fresnel lenses to correct my vision without me having to wear glasses or contacts. Glasses can slip, especially when I’m exerting myself and sweating, and I can’t adjust them when I’m wearing my helmet. Contact lenses would be an option, too, but they don’t agree with my eyes.

Once we were suited up, Kimiya floated us into the airlock—first me, then Kjell—allowing us to conserve our energy for what was to come. We floated and waited for the air to be pumped out of the airlock and back into the station. Air is a precious resource, so we don’t like to vent it out into space.

Tracy’s voice breaks the silence: “All right, guys, with Scott leading, we will begin translating out to your respective work sites.”

By “translate,” she means to move ourselves, hand over hand, along a path of rails attached to the outside of the station. On Earth, walking is done with the feet; in space, especially outside the station, it’s done with the hands. This is one of the reasons why the gloves of our spacesuits are so critical.

“Roger that,” I tell Tracy.

I translate out to my first work site, on the right side of the giant truss of the space station, occasionally looking back to see how my tether is routed and making sure it doesn’t get snagged on anything. At first, I feel like I’m crawling hand over hand across a floor. I’m immediately struck by how damaged the outside of the station is. Micrometeoroids and orbital debris have been striking it for fifteen years, creating small pits and scrapes as well as holes that completely penetrate the handrails, creating jagged edges. It’s a little alarming—especially when I’m out here with nothing but a few layers of spacesuit between me and the next strike.

Being outside is clearly an unnatural act. I’m not scared, which I guess is a testament to our training and to my ability to compartmentalize. If I were to take a moment to ponder what I’m doing, I might completely freak out. When the sun is out, I can feel its intense heat. When it sets, forty-five minutes later, I can feel the depths of the cold, from plus to minus 270 degrees Fahrenheit in minutes. We have glove heaters to keep our fingers from freezing but nothing for our toes. (Luckily, my ingrown toenail has healed after a few weeks without any further intervention or this would be even more uncomfortable.)

The color and brilliance of the planet, sprawling out in every direction, are startling. I’ve seen the Earth from spacecraft windows countless times now, but the difference between seeing the planet from inside a spacecraft, through multiple layers of bulletproof glass, and seeing it from out here is like the difference between seeing a mountain from a car window and climbing the peak. My face is almost pressed against the thin layer of my clear plastic visor, my peripheral vision seemingly expanding out in every direction. I take in the stunning blue, the texture of the clouds, the varied landscapes of the planet, the glowing atmosphere edging on the horizon, a delicate sliver that makes all life on Earth possible. There is nothing but the black vacuum of the cosmos beyond. I want to say something about it to Kjell, but nothing I can think of sounds right.

My first task is to remove insulation from a main bus switching unit, a giant circuit breaker that distributes power from the solar arrays to the downstream equipment, so the unit can later be removed by the main robotic arm. This is a job that would normally require a spacewalk, but we are trying to use the robot arms to do more work.

Kjell’s first task is to put a thermal blanket on the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a particle physics experiment. It’s been sending back the kind of data that could alter our understanding of the universe, but it needs to be protected from the sun if it’s going to continue doing its job—it’s getting too hot. The spectrometer was delivered to the station by the last flight of Endeavour in 2011, which was commanded by my brother. Neither of us would have guessed five years ago that I would be leading a spacewalk to extend its lifespan.

The Hubble Space Telescope and other instruments like the AMS have transformed our understanding of the universe in recent years. We had always assumed that the stars and other matter we could observe—200 billion galaxies each with 100 billion stars on average—made up all of the matter that existed. But we now know that less than 5 percent of the matter in the universe is actually observable. Finding dark energy and dark matter (the rest of what’s out there) is the next challenge for astrophysics, and the AMS is searching for them.

Removing and stowing the insulation from the main bus unit is a relatively simple task for a spacewalk, but as with everything we do in zero g, it is harder than you would think—sort of like trying to pack your suitcase if it were nailed to the ceiling. The focus required to do even simple work in space is daunting, similar to the focus required to land an F-14 Tomcat on an aircraft carrier, or land the space shuttle. But in this case I have to maintain that focus all day, rather than only for a matter of minutes.

The three most important things to keep track of today are what I think of as the three T’s: tethers, task, and timeline. From moment to moment, I have to be aware of my tethers and whether they are properly attached. There is nothing more important to my continued survival. In the medium term, I have to focus on the task at hand and on completing it properly. And in the long term, I have to think about the overall timeline for the spacewalk—the scheduled sequence of tasks planned out to make the best use of our finite suit resources and our own energy.

When I finish removing the insulation and stuffing it into a bag, I get congratulations from the ground for a job well done. For the first time in hours, I take a deep breath, stretch as best I can in the stiff spacesuit, and look around. This would normally be a good time to break for lunch, but that’s not on today’s schedule. I can sip water through a straw in my helmet, but that’s it. I’m making good time and still have a lot of energy. We are going to be able to nail this spacewalk, I think to myself. As the day goes on, it will become clear that this is a false sense of confidence.

The next task for me is working on the end effector, the “hand” of the robot arm. Without it, we can’t capture and bring in the visiting vehicles that deliver food and other necessities to the U.S. side of the station. Once I’m secured in a foot restraint, I realize how lucky I am: rather than facing the blank exterior of an ISS module, as spacewalkers usually do (and as Kjell is at this moment), I am facing out toward the Earth. I can watch the stunning view splayed out below my feet as the Earth goes by while I work, rather than having to turn around and look out the corner of my eye during the rare free moment. I feel like Leonardo DiCaprio at the bow of the Titanic, and I’m king of the world.

While I was training for this mission, I practiced greasing a replica of this end effector, using tools identical to the ones I’m using up here. While I practiced, I wore a duplicate of my spacesuit gloves. But the experience is still disorientingly different now that I, the grease gun, and the grease are all floating in space, the sun rising and setting spectacularly every ninety minutes, the planet spinning majestically underfoot. The grease gun is well designed, like a high-grade version of a caulking gun from a hardware store, but it’s awkward to use with the fat-fingered gloves of the pressurized suit. For several hours, I wield this cumbersome tool like a five-year-old with finger paint. The grease goes everywhere. Small beads of grease jump off the gun as if they have a will of their own to explore the cosmos. Some of them come right toward me, which could pose a serious problem; if grease starts to coat the faceplate of my helmet, I may not be able to see to find my way back in. This task is taking much longer than had been scheduled, and soon my hands are aching to the point where I start to think I might not be able to move them. Of all the things that are tiring about this spacewalk, the amount of effort it takes to manipulate the gloves is by far the worst. My knuckles are rubbed raw, the muscles beyond fatigued, and I still have a great deal left to do. I work with Kimiya as he precisely maneuvers the robot arm to place it exactly where I need it. I put grease on the end of a long wire tool and stick it into the dark hole of the end effector. I can’t see in there and can only hope the grease is going in the right place as I blindly feel around.

This task is taking so long I know I won’t get to complete some of our other scheduled activities. Kjell is running long as well; the cables he is routing to enable future visiting vehicles to dock are proving to be as difficult to wrangle as my grease gun. We are well past the six-and-a-half-hour mark when we start getting organized to call it a day and head back to the airlock. Despite having consumables that would last another few hours, we have to leave enough time to deal with any unexpected problems.

We still have the toughest part of the spacewalk in front of us: Kjell and I must maneuver ourselves back into the airlock. Kjell goes first and guides his bulky suit through the opening without getting hung up on anything. Once inside, he attaches his waist tether. Then I release his safety tether, which is still connected to the outside of the station, and attach it to myself, then release my own. I swing my legs over my head and flip upside down into the airlock, so I will be facing the hatch to close it.

By the time we are both inside we are breathing hard. Closing the hatch, absolutely mandatory, will be much harder than opening it, with the fatigue from the spacewalk taking its toll. My hands are completely spent.

The first step is to close the thermal cover of the outside hatch, which has been severely damaged by the sun, like most of the equipment exposed to its harsh rays. The cover doesn’t fit right anymore—it’s assumed the shape of a potato chip—and it takes a lot of finesse to get it secured properly. With the thermal cover closed, it’s time to get hooked back up to the umbilical that provides oxygen, water, and power to the suits via the station’s systems rather than the suit itself. This isn’t an easy task either, but after a few minutes we manage to get them connected properly.

Despite my fatigue, I manage to get the hatch securely closed and locked. As the air hisses in around us, Kjell and I are still breathing hard from the work of getting back inside. We will have a wait of about fifteen minutes, punctuated by a few leak checks, to make sure the hatch is properly closed while the airlock returns to the pressure of the station. As we wait, I struggle to equalize my ears by pressing my nose against a pad built into my helmet and blowing (this Valsalva device is designed to replicate the effect of holding our noses). This requires much more force than I thought it would, and later I will discover I have burst some blood vessels in my eyes in the process.

We have been in these suits for eleven hours now.

At some point during the repressurization process, we lose comm with the ground. We know it means that for at least a while we aren’t being broadcast on NASA TV and can say what we like.

“That was fucking insane!” I say.

“Yeah,” agrees Kjell. “I’m beat.”

We both know we will have to do another spacewalk in nine days.

When the hatch opens and we see Kimiya’s smiling face, we know we are nearly done. Kimiya and Oleg do a close inspection of our gloves and take many pictures of them to send to the ground. The gloves are the most vulnerable parts of our suits, prone to cuts and abrasions, and the glove experts on the ground want to know as much as possible about how our gloves have fared today. Any holes will be easier to see while our suits are still pressurized.

When we are ready to get out of the suits, Kimiya helps us remove our helmets first, which is a relief in one way. But we will miss the cleaner air: the CO₂ scrubbers in the suits do a much better job than Seedra. Getting out of the suits was hard on Earth, but there we had the advantage of gravity, which helped by pulling our bodies down toward the floor. Here in space, my suit and I are floating together, so I need Kimiya to hold on to the arms of the suit and pull hard while he pushes down on the pants in the other direction with his legs. Extruding from the hard upper torso reminds me of a birthing horse.

Once I’m out of the spacesuit, it hits me all at once how draining it’s been just being in the suit, never mind the full day of grueling work I did while wearing it. Kjell and I head to the PMM, where we remove our long underwear and dispose of our used diapers and biomedical sensors. We take a quick “shower” (move the dried sweat around on our bodies with wipes, then towel off to dry) and eat some food for the first time in fourteen hours. I call Amiko and tell her how it went—she watched the whole thing from mission control, but I know she’s waiting to hear what it was actually like for me. She worried about this spacewalk more than she worried about any other part of this mission.

“Hey,” I say as soon as she picks up the phone, “that was something. I don’t know exactly how to describe it. It was fucking crazy.”

“I’m so proud of you,” she says. “It was intense to watch.”

“It was intense for you?” I joke, though I understand what she means. She’d been in mission control since three in the morning Houston time and didn’t eat or even go to the bathroom until I was back inside safely.

“It was more intense than seeing you launch,” she says. “At least when you launched I had the chance to say good-bye to you right before. Today, I knew if something went wrong I would have to deal with not having seen you for seven months.”

She tells me she was so excited for me that I was able to do a spacewalk after all these years of being an astronaut, and she says that everyone at NASA felt that enthusiasm.

“I’m beat,” I say. “I’m not sure I want to do that again.” I tell her that this was definitely the “type two” kind of fun—fun when it’s done—but I know that by the time of our next spacewalk, I will be ready to go again. I tell her I love her before hanging up.

That evening, we go down to the Russian segment for a little celebration. Successful spacewalks are one of the events, like holidays, birthdays, and crew arrivals and departures, that warrant special dinners. This will be a short one, though, because Kjell and I are tired. While we eat, we talk about the day, what went well, what surprised us, what we might do differently next time. I tell Kjell what a great job he did, knowing he is still trying to put that errant switch throw behind him. He knows I don’t give unearned praise, so I hope he can finish this day feeling that he did well. I tell Kimiya again what a great job he did as IV, and I thank the Russians again for their help. On days like this it’s clear that this crew can truly pull together as a team, and that is one of the rewards of the hardest day I’ve ever had.

After we say our good nights, I slide into my bag, turn off the light, and try to fall asleep. As of tomorrow, Kjell, Kimiya, and Oleg will have spent one hundred days in space. Kjell and I will have some time to recover before preparing for our second spacewalk. That one will be even more complicated and physically demanding. But for now, I can rest. One of the biggest hurdles of this year is now behind me.

I CALL my father one evening to see how he’s doing, and he tells me that my uncle Dan, my mother’s brother, has died. He had suffered from a debilitating skeletal condition for most of his life, so his death was not a huge surprise, but because he was only ten years older than me he still seems too young to be gone. When Mark and I were about ten, Uncle Dan had moved into my family’s basement for a while, and because he was closer to our age than to my mother’s, I remember him being more like a big brother than an uncle. I remark to my father that death doesn’t wait while I’m in space, any more than life does. The fact that I never said good-bye and won’t be back until long after the funeral is a reminder that I’m missing things that can never be made up.

A few days later, I stop Kjell when he is floating through the U.S. lab and ask him if he could spare a minute. I put on a serious face and tell him I need to talk with him.

“Sure, what’s up?” Kjell responds with his characteristic upbeat tone. People who are this sunny and positive can come across as fake, but I’ve learned from working with Kjell all this time in close quarters and under challenging circumstances that his attitude is completely real. He actually is that positive. I imagine this trait served him well as an emergency room doctor, and it’s equally valuable in long-duration spaceflight.

“It’s about the next spacewalk,” I say, with a serious tone. I pause as if I’m searching for the right words.

“Yeah?” Kjell says, now with a hint of apprehension.

“I’m afraid I have to tell you—you’re not going to be EV Two.” EV2 was the role Kjell had played on our first spacewalk—I was the leader (EV1) as the more experienced astronaut, though it was the first time outside for both of us.

A look of concern crosses Kjell’s face, followed quickly by sincere disappointment.

“Okay,” he answers, waiting to hear more.

I decide I’ve fucked with him enough. “Kjell, you’re going to be EV One.”

It was a mean trick, but it’s worth it to see the relief and excitement on his face when he realizes that he has been promoted. Kjell will fly more future missions and likely will conduct more future spacewalks, so it will be invaluable for him to get experience as the leader. I have full confidence in his ability to carry out this role, and I tell him so. We have a lot of preparation to do.

NOVEMBER 3 IS a midterm election day on Earth, so I call the voting commission in my home county—Harris County, Texas—and get a password that I can use to open a PDF they emailed to me earlier; I fill out my ballot and email it back to them. There are no political candidates on the ballot, just referendums. Still, I take pride in exercising my constitutional rights from space, and I hope it sends a message that voting is important (and that inconvenience is never a good excuse for failing to vote).

I follow the news from space, especially political news, and it seems like the presidential election next year is going to be like no other. Like the hurricanes I watch from above, a storm seems to be gathering on the horizon that will shape our political landscape for years to come. I pay close attention to the primaries of both parties, and though I don’t tend to be a worrier, I start to worry. Sometimes before going to sleep I look out the windows of the Cupola at the planet below. What the hell is going on down there? I mutter to myself. But I have to concentrate on the things I can control, and those are up here.