Endurance

16

THE RUSSIANS HAVE a very different system for medically certifying people to fly, and when we travel in their Soyuz we must abide by their rules. So it was a problem when my new flight surgeon Steve Gilmore presented me as a crew member to fly on the Soyuz to the International Space Station after having recently been treated for cancer.

Russian surgical procedures and treatment options for prostate cancer are not as advanced as those in the United States, and as a result, their statistics on survival and recovery are very different. Russian doctors overestimated the chances that I would experience debilitating negative effects from the surgery or have an early recurrence of the cancer. They were especially concerned that I would suddenly find myself unable to urinate in flight, which would require a costly and dramatic early departure. They didn’t want to take that risk.

Steve worked hard to convince the Russian doctors that my surgery had been a success and that I was going to be able to pee just fine in space. We called Steve “Doogie,” because of his youthful appearance, or “Happy,” for his cheerful disposition. He worked on this issue for more than a year. It would have been easier for NASA to simply replace me with someone else, and I’m grateful they stood by me. In the end, the Russians agreed to let me fly, recognizing that our expertise and experience in this area were superior to theirs. They still made me fly with a catheterization kit in the Soyuz.

I began training for my mission to the space station in late 2007, with the launch scheduled for October 2010. Missions to ISS were divided into expeditions of six crew members, and my time on station would cover both Expeditions 25 and 26. In 2008, I began working with Sasha Kaleri, the Soyuz commander, and Oleg Skripochka, who would fly in the left seat as the flight engineer. Sasha is a quiet and serious guy with a full head of dark hair speckled gray. He was one of the most experienced cosmonauts, having flown three long-duration missions on Mir and one on the ISS—608 days altogether. He also brought a lot of old-school attitude and tradition, including some small Soviet flags, as part of his kit of personal items we get to launch in the Soyuz. He seems to be nostalgic for the Communist system, which of course was odd to me, but I liked him nonetheless. Oleg was on his first spaceflight. Studious and well prepared, he tried to model himself after Sasha in every way, and in turn Sasha treated Oleg like a son or a little brother.

This wasn’t my first time training with the Russians, of course; I had trained to fly as the backup for Expedition 5 in 2001 and again as part of the backup crew for the flight prior to this one. By now, I was intimately familiar with the way the Russian space agency handles training similarly to NASA, such as an emphasis on simulator training, and the way they don’t, like their emphasis on the theoretical versus the practical—to an extreme. If NASA were to train an astronaut how to mail a package, they would take a box, put an object in the box, show you the route to the post office, and send you on your way with postage. The Russians would start in the forest with a discussion on the species of tree used to create the pulp that will make up the box, then go into excruciating detail on the history of box making. Eventually you would get to the relevant information about how the package is actually mailed, if you didn’t fall asleep first. It seems to me this is part of their system of culpability—everyone involved in training needs to certify that the crew was taught everything they could possibly need to know. If anything should go wrong, it must then be the crew’s fault.

Before we can fly on the Soyuz, we must pass oral exams, graded on a scale of one through five, just like the exams given throughout the entire Russian educational system. We took our final exams before a large commission, nearly twenty people in all, who were grading us. We also had a larger audience of spectators. Privately, I referred to the oral exams as a “public stoning.” Part of the process is a postexam debrief in which crew members argue for the grade they believe they have earned, minimizing and avoiding responsibility for any mistakes. This arguing over grades is something like a sport, and it seems we were being graded partly on how we pled our cases. I never wanted to argue—I was willing to take whatever grade the instructors wanted to give me, because I knew that in the end I would soon fly in space regardless.

Some of our training took place at other sites, as we learned to do everything from repairing the equipment on the space station to conducting experiments across many scientific disciplines. One day at the Johnson Space Center, I was in a session with a materials scientist who was teaching a group of astronauts how to use a new piece of equipment on the space station, a furnace for heating materials in zero gravity. While he was explaining the properties of the furnace, he showed us a golf-ball-sized sample of a material that had been “forged” in the furnace and said repeatedly that it was “harder than a diamond.” I found that difficult to believe and asked whether I could hold it. He smiled and handed it to me.

“Is this really harder than a diamond?” I asked.

He assured me that it was.

I put the sample on the floor and raised my heel over it, looking at the scientist questioningly.

“Go ahead,” he said.

I brought down my heel hard and the sample shattered, pieces flying all over the room. Apparently, it wasn’t harder than a diamond. This incident became part of a narrative about me in some people’s minds at NASA—that I didn’t have enough respect for the scientific work being done on the space station. It’s true that I’m not a scientist and that research was never my main motivation for going to space. But even if the science wasn’t what drove me to become an astronaut, I have a profound respect for the pursuit of scientific knowledge and I take my part in that seriously. After all, I would argue, testing that sample from the furnace was an example of using the scientific method to gain knowledge.

Another uniquely Russian spaceflight practice was the creation of custom-molded seat liners for each crew member. The first time I served as a backup crew member, I went to Zvezda, the company that makes the Soyuz seats and Sokol suits, as well as the spacesuits the cosmonauts wear on spacewalks and ejection seats for Russian military aircraft. With a NASA flight surgeon and an interpreter who specializes in medical translation, I traveled to the other side of Moscow from Star City, through many miles of Moscow suburbs. Once inside the guarded and gated Zvezda facility, I was helped into a container like a small bathtub, then had warm plaster poured in all around me. After the plaster hardened, I was helped out, then got to watch while an old weathered technician with a beard like Tolstoy’s—he was really more like an artisan—went to work. I watched his huge, callused hands, with long sensitive fingers like a sculptor’s, carve out the excess plaster to create a perfect mold of my back and butt.

A few weeks later, I came back to Zvezda for a fit check of the newly made seat liner, followed by the dreaded pressure check—an hour and a half on my back in my custom-made spacesuit in my custom-made seat liner with the suit pressurized. The circulation in my lower legs got cut off, and the position became a distinctly painful form of torture. All the cosmonauts and astronauts dread this procedure, but if anyone complains, they are met with a curt answer: “If you can’t deal with this pain now, how can you deal with it in space?” I never bothered arguing about it, but this was a flawed argument; in space you can deal with discomfort that you know is keeping you alive. A few weeks later, I came back for the pressure check again, this time in a vacuum chamber, a ritual meant to give us confidence in the suits. These activities can feel more like ceremonial rites of passage than engineering necessities, as with so many of the traditions in the Russian space program. In the coming years, I would carry out this painful ritual two more times.

We traveled to Baikonur two weeks before the scheduled launch date. The last morning, we went through the process of getting suited up, doing our leak checks, and speaking to our loved ones through the pane of glass. We rode the bus out to Gagarin’s launchpad, peed on the tire, and climbed into the capsule. Among the things we had to do to get the vehicle ready was configure the oxygen system, a task that was the responsibility of the flight engineer 2—in this case, me. Toward the end of the launch countdown, I was manipulating one of the O₂ valves when we heard a loud squeal. We guessed it was compressed oxygen leaking into the cabin, and we were right. I immediately closed the valve, but we had a massive oxygen leak anytime the valve was taken out of the closed position, which was a requirement during the flight.

At the direction of the ground, Sasha tried to get the situation under control by venting the O₂ through the hatch valve into the habitation module above us, then overboard through a valve that led to the outside. He unstrapped himself from his seat so he could sit up to reach the valve directly over his head. I looked at the readings on our LCD screens, paying close attention to the partial pressure of oxygen compared to our total pressure. I did some mental math and calculated that there was close to 40 percent oxygen in the capsule, the oxygen concentration threshold at which many materials become easily flammable with an ignition source, like a small spark.

All astronauts knew that the crew of Apollo 1 had been killed by a fire in their capsule because it had been pumped full of pure oxygen and that a tiny spark caused a conflagration of the Velcro-lined capsule. NASA didn’t use high-pressure oxygen anymore in this way, and they also redesigned the hatch on the Apollo capsule to open outward—and so have all hatches on NASA human-rated launch vehicles since. Not the Russians. The hatch on our Soyuz opened inward, so if there was a fire, the expanding hot gases would put outward pressure on the hatch and trap us, just like the crew of Apollo 1. As Sasha struggled to reach the valves, flailing in his seat, the metal buckles on his straps struck exposed metal on the capsule’s interior. I thought distinctly to myself, This is not a good place to be right now.

Once Sasha was back in his seat and it seemed clear we weren’t going to catch fire, we talked about our predicament. I decided not to voice my concern about the flammability risk.

“It’s too bad we won’t launch today,” I said.

“Da,” Sasha agreed. “We will be first crew to scrub after strapping in since 1969.” This is an incredible statistic, considering how often the space shuttle used to scrub, right up to the seconds before launch, even after the main engines had lit.

A voice from the control center interrupted us. “Guys, start your Sokol suit leak checks.”

What? Sasha and I looked at each other with identical What-the-fuck? expressions. We were now inside five minutes to launch. Sasha raced to get strapped back into his seat properly. The emergency escape system had been activated, and if something had set it off, the rocket would have launched us away from the pad without warning. Sasha would have likely been killed if it had activated while he was not strapped in. We closed our visors and rushed through the leak check procedures. With less than two minutes to spare, we were ready to go. We settled into our seats for our last minutes on Earth.

The launch experience was different from the shuttle—the Soyuz capsule was much smaller than the shuttle’s cockpit, and less advanced, so there was less for the crew to do. Still, it was much more automated than the space shuttle was. Nothing could match the acceleration of the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters pushing us away from the Earth with an instantaneous 7 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, but anytime you rocket off the planet, it’s serious business.

Once we reached orbit, we were stuck in this cold tin can with very little to do for two whole days until we were to dock to the space station. As the spacecraft moved in and out of communication coverage, the sun rising and setting every ninety minutes, we quickly lost track of any normal sense of time and drifted in and out of sleep. The habitation module was cramped and spartan, lined in a dull yellow Velcro with an occasional exposed metal frame or structure, which quickly became covered in condensation. We didn’t even have a good view of the Earth because the Soyuz constantly spun to keep the solar arrays pointing at the sun in order to charge its batteries. I had brought my iPod, but the battery soon died. I spent most of the time floating in the middle of the habitation module, feeling like I did when I was a kid in after-school detention, staring at the clock, waiting for the day to be over. When docking day came, I was excited, but when I looked at my watch and realized the moment we were to float through the hatch was still eighteen hours away, I thought to myself, Oh, shit. What the fuck am I going to do for the next eighteen hours? The answer is: nothing. I just floated there. I’ve said that any day in space is a good day, and I believe it, but two days in a Soyuz is not that good.

This was also Amiko’s first time seeing me launch into space. She had witnessed three previous shuttle launches, including one of my brother’s, before I knew her well. (She remembered seeing me at a prelaunch party in Cocoa Beach, Florida, carrying around a sleeping baby Charlotte with her head of curly blond hair.) So she wasn’t new to the launch experience, but it was different traveling to Baikonur and seeing the Russian way of doing things. And of course it was very different seeing a launch with someone she cared about on board. My brother told me later, once I was safely in orbit, that she cried while watching my launch. I was surprised to hear that because, despite the fact that we had been together for more than a year, I had never seen her cry. When I asked Amiko about it, she said she hadn’t been expecting to be so emotional, but she was moved by the beauty and awe of the launch and by her happiness for me. She knew what it meant to me to get to fly in space, and she knew how hard I had worked to get there.

Years later, I learned more about what went on that day in the launch center in Baikonur. Someone in launch control had said that they understood this anomaly, and that there was a workaround: cycling the oxygen valve partially open, then closing it before opening it fully to reseat a sticky valve. In the minutes before launch, officials were passing around a piece of paper they needed to sign indicating that they were go for launch in spite of the oxygen leak and Sasha’s struggle to equalize the pressure as time ticked away. As a crew member getting ready to ride the rocket to space, I found this to be troubling.

WHEN I FLOATED through the hatch to officially join the crew of Expedition 25 on the ISS, I was elated to be starting a long-duration mission. It had been a long road from DOR, backup on Expedition 5, the Columbia accident, my STS-118 mission, prostate cancer, my second backup training flow, and now my prime assignment—ten years all told.

On board were two Americans and one Russian: Doug Wheelock was serving as the commander for this expedition and would be turning over ISS to me when he left. Doug was a great first ISS commander to serve under. He took a hands-off approach to leadership, letting everyone find his or her own strengths.

My other American crewmate was Shannon Walker. I didn’t know Shannon very well before this mission, but I was surprised by how different she looked when we met in space: her hair had grown out gray over the months she’d been in space without access to hair dye. Shannon had trained to fly in the left seat of the Soyuz, which meant she needed to know the systems well enough to take over in an emergency that might incapacitate the Russian Soyuz commander, and as a result she spent much more time training in Russia than I did. When I got on board ISS, I was impressed with her abilities as a crew member. This was her first flight, so when I arrived I was at first thinking of her as a rookie, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that she had almost ten times as much time in space as I did, and that in fact I could use her help. At NASA, we talk about “expeditionary behavior,” which is a loose term for being able to take care of yourself, take care of others, help out when it’s needed, stay out of the way when necessary—a combination of soft skills that’s difficult to define, hard to teach, and a significant challenge when they are lacking. Shannon was a master at this.

The Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin, a short, stocky guy with a broad smile, was already on board. Fyodor was one of only two people I’ve been in space with more than once (the other being Al Drew). Fyodor was born in the country of Georgia to Greek parents, which is unusual in a cosmonaut corps made up largely of ethnic Russians. He had a real enthusiasm for photography, and loved taking pictures of the Earth. Even more, he loved showing his pictures to his crewmates regardless of what they were trying to do at the time. The cosmonauts aboard ISS generally don’t have as hectic a schedule as the Americans do, and sometimes that difference can show when they are free to socialize during the day, floating around the dining room table sharing coffee or a snack, while we rush from one thing to the next.

On this mission I learned the differences between visiting space and living there. On a long-duration flight, you work at a different pace, you get more comfortable moving around, sleep better, digest better. As my first long-duration mission went on, what surprised me most was how little force it actually took to move around and to hold myself still. With just a slight push of a finger or a toe, I could travel across a module and wind up exactly where I wanted to be.

One of the first tasks I tackled when I got on board was repairing a device called Sabatier, which combines oxygen from the CO₂ the Seedra collects and leftover hydrogen from the oxygen-generating assembly to create water. Sabatier is an important part of the nearly closed-loop environmental system of the station. My job was to tune the system, a tedious multiday task, using flow meters and other diagnostic tools. At the time I thought I handled it well, but looking back at it years later with much more experience doing this kind of repair, I realize how much Shannon helped me by getting all the tools and parts together for me in advance, checking on me when I seemed to be struggling, and encouraging me when I got frustrated. Without her help, the task would have been nearly impossible to carry out so early in the mission.

I celebrated my first Thanksgiving on the space station shortly before taking over as commander of ISS for the first time. The next day, Shannon, Doug, and Fyodor departed for Earth, leaving behind Sasha, Oleg, and me.

A few weeks later, the new crew arrived. American astronaut Cady Coleman was a retired colonel in the U.S. Air Force and held a Ph.D. in chemistry, and, I came to learn, played the flute. Some people who knew Cady and me thought that we might not click as crewmates, or that I might kill her, because we came from such different backgrounds—the fighter pilot (me) and the scientist (Cady). In fact, Cady and I became great friends and she was a great crew member, even though I was never able to get her to go to bed on time. Sometimes I would get up to use the bathroom at three a.m. on a work night and find her playing her flute in the Cupola. Cady taught me how to be more in touch with my feelings and those of the people we worked with on the ground. She also helped me see the value of reaching out more to the public, letting people share the excitement of what we were doing in space. This would turn out to be enormously helpful on my yearlong mission.

The Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli, a talented engineer with a great sense of humor, was the third member of the new crew. Paolo is really tall—too tall to fit into the Soyuz, in fact, and the European Space Agency had to pay the Russians to modify the seat, setting it at a steeper angle, in order to fit him into the capsule.

The Soyuz commander was Dima, who had been on the Expedition 5 backup crew with me and with whom I had done survival training a decade ago. This was his first spaceflight. Back when Dima and I were assigned to the same backup crew, he had argued that he should be commander of ISS because he was the commander of the Soyuz and a military officer. Sasha Kaleri, with his extensive experience in space, was much better qualified to command but was not a military officer. Dima was so convinced that he had been wronged that he wrote two strongly worded letters to his management saying that Sasha wasn’t performing up to par and should be removed from the crew. This incredible breach of protocol meant that Dima was not assigned to a flight for many years, despite his superior technical skills.

I had heard about crew members not getting along during spaceflights, but I had never personally experienced it myself—until now. I floated down to the Russian segment one day to ask about something, and while I was there Dima asked for my help with a piece of Russian hardware he was struggling to fix—the Russian Elektron, their device for producing oxygen from water. That wouldn’t have seemed unusual, but he asked me with Sasha floating in the vicinity. Sasha offered to help, to his credit, but Dima pretended not to hear him. I couldn’t imagine what it was like working, eating, and sleeping on top of each other for four months with that much tension between them. Their lack of communication made their work harder and could have cost them their lives—and, potentially, ours too—in an emergency.

After I had been in space for a few months, the press was reporting that Sasha Kaleri had brought with him a Quran that had been given to him by Iran. The rumor was that the Quran was a symbolic response to a recent desecration of Qurans in the United States on the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The ISS program manager wanted to know if it was true. When the chief astronaut asked me about it, I said I didn’t care what books crew members brought on board with them, and I was surprised that NASA would take an interest in such details. I said I wasn’t going to ask anyone about his or her private belongings, and I thought that would be the end of it. But soon after, I heard directly from the space station program manager: I was told in no uncertain terms that I was expected to find out whether Sasha had brought a Quran on board.

Usually I would push back against a request from the ground only once, and if they persisted, I would do it their way unless it was a safety issue. This was easier than having a showdown over every small disagreement and would preserve my sanity and energy for when it was really needed. But in this case, I still felt strongly that I shouldn’t acquiesce.

The next day, I floated over to the Russian segment and found Sasha in the confined space of the Russian airlock, working on one of their spacesuits.

“Hey, Sasha,” I said. “I’m supposed to ask you something, but I don’t personally care what the answer is.”

“Okay,” Sasha said.

“I’m supposed to ask you whether there’s an Iranian Quran on board the station.”

Sasha thought for a moment. “That’s none of your business,” he said agreeably.

“Got it,” I responded. “Take it easy.” I floated back to the U.S. segment and passed his answer on to my management. That was the last I heard of it.

JANUARY 8, 2011, WAS a bright sunny day in Tucson, Arizona, but on the space station, the weather was the same as always, and I was fixing the toilet. I had taken it apart and organized the pieces around me so they wouldn’t float away, and now I would not do anything else until I finished the job. We can use the toilet in the Russian segment if necessary, but it’s far away, especially in the middle of the night, and puts unnecessary stress on their resources. The toilet is one of the pieces of equipment that gets a great deal of our attention—if both toilets break we could use the Soyuz toilet, but it wouldn’t last long. Then we would have to abandon ship. If we were on our way to Mars and the toilet broke and we couldn’t fix it, we would be dead.

I was so involved in the work that I didn’t notice the TV feed being cut. We lost our signal pretty routinely, whenever the space station went out of the line of sight between our antennas and the communication satellites, so I didn’t think it was a big deal. Then a call came from the ground.

Mission control told me that the chief of the Astronaut Office, Peggy Whitson, needed to talk to me and would be calling on a private line in five minutes. I had no idea why, but I knew the reason wouldn’t be anything good.

Five minutes is a long time to think about what emergency might have occurred on the ground. Maybe my grandmother had died. Maybe one of my daughters had been hurt. I didn’t make any connection between the blank TV screen and the phone call—NASA had deliberately cut the feed to spare me learning bad news.

Before leaving for this mission, I had decided that Mark should act as my proxy in cases of emergency. He knew me better than anyone, and I trusted him to decide what I should hear and when, whether it should come through him or someone else, like a flight surgeon or another astronaut. He knew that in a crisis I would likely want to have all the information up front as soon as possible.

Peggy came on the line. “I don’t know how to tell you this,” she said, “so I’m just going to tell you. Your sister-in-law, Gabby, was shot.”

I was stunned. This was such a shocking thing to hear, it seemed surreal. Peggy said she didn’t have any more information, and I told her I wanted to know any news as it came in, that she shouldn’t keep secrets to spare me. Even if the information was unconfirmed or incomplete, I still wanted to know.

When I got off the line, I told Cady and Paolo what had happened, and then I told the cosmonauts. I tried to assure everyone I was going to be okay, but I also told them I was going to need some time and that I was going to spend most of it on the phone. They were shocked and upset as well and of course gave me the room I needed. Though I was hesitant to turn over this crucial job of fixing the toilet to Cady and Paolo, I had no choice but to trust them.

I liked Gabby from the first time I met her, and I’ve only gotten to like her more over the years. She treats everyone the same—she is interested in everyone she meets, no matter who they are, where they are from, or what political party they vote for. She wants to help everyone she comes across, and she was completely dedicated to her work as a congresswoman on behalf of the people of Arizona. That was why it was so hard to fathom what had occurred. This sort of random violence should never happen to anyone, but it seemed especially awful that this should happen to her.

I called Mark. He was hurriedly packing his bags in Houston as we talked and had arranged to fly to Tucson as quickly as possible. He told me he’d received a call from Pia Carusone, Gabby’s chief of staff, telling him about the shooting. Pia told him that Gabby had been shot at a public event, that an unknown number of people had been hurt or killed, that Gabby’s status was uncertain, and that he needed to get to Tucson right away. Mark said okay and hung up—then immediately called Pia back and asked her to repeat everything she had just said. The idea of his wife being shot was so shocking, it simply hadn’t sunk in. He needed to hear Pia say it all over again to be sure that it was real.

Mark and I agreed we would connect again as soon as he landed in Tucson. Not long after, mission control called to tell me that the Associated Press was reporting that Gabby had died.

I immediately tried to call Mark again, but he was already in the air on the way to Tucson with our mother and his two daughters. Our good friend Tilman Fertitta had lent them his private jet so they could get to Tucson as quickly as possible. This is the kind of thing Tilman does for his friends, and I’ve always been grateful for the way he stepped up that day. I called Tilman to find out what he had heard.

“Gabby’s not dead,” he said. “I don’t believe it.”

“How do you know that?” I asked. “All the news media are saying it.”

“I don’t know for sure, but it just doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “She went into surgery, and she should still be in the operating room.”

One of the things I like about Tilman is that he immediately sees through bullshit. Even with a subject completely outside his expertise, like brain surgery, he questions everything, and most of the time he’s right. I took hope in his words.

The next several hours were some of the longest in my life. My mind kept traveling to my brother—what he must be feeling, not knowing whether he would ever see his wife alive again. I called Amiko and my daughters and repeated to them what Tilman had told me: regardless of what they were saying on TV, it didn’t make sense that Gabby was dead. Soon after Mark landed in Arizona, I got him on the phone.

“What’s happening?” I asked the moment he picked up. “They’re saying Gabby died.”

“I know,” he said. “I got the news on the plane. But I just spoke to the hospital, and it was a mistake. She’s still alive.”

There is no way to describe the relief you feel when you’ve been told someone you care about is alive after spending hours thinking she was dead. We knew Gabby would still have a long and hard road ahead of her, but knowing she was still drawing breath was the best news we could have hoped for.

I made dozens more calls that day and the next—to my brother, to Amiko, to my mother and father, to my daughters, to friends. Sometimes I wondered whether I was calling too much, whether in my effort to be there for them I was becoming intrusive. That first day, I learned that thirteen other people had been injured in the shooting and six had been killed, including a nine-year-old girl named Christina-Taylor Green, who was interested in politics and wanted to meet Gabby. I talked to Mark and Amiko a dozen times that day.

The next day, we had a videoconference with Vladimir Putin that had been planned long before. I was surprised by how much of the time he took speaking directly to me. He told me that the Russian people were behind my family and that he would do anything he could to help. He seemed sincere, which I appreciated.

On Monday, President Obama announced a national day of mourning. The same day, I was to lead a moment of silence from space. I don’t get nervous easily, but this responsibility weighed heavily on me. This would be the first public statement from my family. As the time grew near, I called Amiko at work in mission control in Houston. I confided to her that I was uneasy—I didn’t know exactly how long a moment of silence should be, and for some reason I had focused on that seemingly insignificant question.

“It should be as long as you want,” she assured me. “As long as feels right.”

Her assurance helped. At the appointed time, I floated in front of the camera. I’d put a great deal of thought into the brief remarks I’d written, but I wanted to sound as if I was speaking from the gut rather than reading from a prepared statement—because I was.

“I’d like to take some time this morning to recognize a moment of silence in honor of the victims of the Tucson shooting tragedy,” I said. “First, I’d like to say a few words. We have a unique vantage point here aboard the International Space Station. As I look out the window, I see a very beautiful planet that seems inviting and peaceful. Unfortunately, it is not.

“These days, we are constantly reminded of the unspeakable acts of violence and damage we can inflict upon one another. Not just with our actions, but with our irresponsible words. We are better than this. We must do better. The crew of ISS Expedition Twenty-six and the flight control centers around the world would like to observe a moment of silence in honor of all the victims, which include my sister-in-law, Gabrielle Giffords, a caring and dedicated public servant. Please join me and the rest of the ISS Expedition Twenty-six crew in a moment of silence.”

Those of us who have had the privilege to look down on the Earth from space get the chance to take a larger perspective on the planet and the people who share it. I feel more strongly than ever that we must do better.

I bowed my head and thought of Gabby and the other victims of the shooting. Just as Amiko had assured me, it wasn’t hard to sense when the moment was complete. I thanked Houston, and we went back to work for the day. On the space station, we followed our normal routine. But I knew that on Earth some things would never be the same.

MY BROTHER had been assigned to the second-to-last flight of the space shuttle program, a mission to deliver components to the International Space Station. He was scheduled to fly on April 1, less than three months after the shooting. Gabby’s condition was stable, but she had a long road of surgeries and therapy ahead of her. He knew that if he was going to step aside and let someone else command that mission, he should do it as soon as possible so the new commander would have time to get up to speed.

It wasn’t clear whether NASA management would make the decision or if Mark would be allowed to decide for himself, and the uncertainty added to Mark’s stress. And in the early days after the shooting, he wasn’t sure what he would choose if it were up to him. He wanted to be there for Gabby as she started the long process of recovering from her catastrophic injury, but he also felt a duty to see his mission through. He and his crewmates had been training together for months, and a new commander would not know the mission or the crew as well as Mark did. We talked on the phone about it many times, but in the end, it was Gabby who made the decision. She would have been devastated if the shooting had robbed him of his last chance to fly in space. She urged him to go.

Because astronauts always have to prepare for the possibility we won’t survive a mission, Mark now had to consider his responsibilities to Gabby in a new way. On his previous flight, Mark had straightened out his affairs and written a letter to be delivered to Gabby in the eventuality he didn’t come back. But now he wasn’t just Gabby’s husband, he was also her main caretaker and her main support. If he were suddenly gone, that would be disastrous in a very different way.

In all our discussions about Mark’s mission and the possibility he could die, we couldn’t help but note the irony. As astronauts, Mark and I had been confronted with the risks of flying in space. None of us could have imagined that it would be Gabby, not Mark, whose work nearly cost her her life.

IN FEBRUARY, Discovery came up and docked with the station on its last flight. It was funny seeing a shuttle crew come on board, as I had done myself not that long before, flying around in the Superman orientation—floating horizontally—rather than the more upright position of seasoned long-term space travelers. The new guys were bumping into everything and kicking equipment off the walls everywhere they went. The day after they arrived, I floated over to visit Discovery, the orbiter I had flown on my first flight. I remembered the last time I had been on board, December 28, 1999, climbing out that evening at the end of the flight. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

Looking around the mid-deck, I felt a wave of nostalgia for the time I’d spent there. The three remaining orbiters were remarkably similar, especially Discovery and Endeavour, which both had similar upgrades made after Columbia had been assembled. But there were differences between them that we who flew on them found unmistakable. When I had flown on Endeavour several years earlier, it still had a new-car look to it, even though it had been in service for sixteen years. At twenty-seven, Discovery was the oldest orbiter, the workhorse of the fleet on its thirty-ninth and last mission. But rather than seeming past its prime, it seemed to me like a well-loved classic with the refinement of a vintage car.

I floated up to the flight deck where the pilot, Eric Boe, was strapped into his seat running through some checklists. He greeted me and continued with his work.

“Hey, Eric, do you mind if I jump up into your seat for a minute? I just want to see how it feels.”

Eric is a sharp guy. “Your first flight was on Discovery, wasn’t it?” he asked. With a smile, he got out of the way.

I floated into the seat and strapped myself in, surveying my former office. I looked over the mass of switches, buttons, and circuit breakers that controlled the many complex systems I had been responsible for so many years ago. I knew I could fly her right now if I had the chance. I remembered sitting in this seat, and my former self seemed so young and inexperienced compared to where I was now, having spent so much more time in space. Little did I know what the future still had in store for me.

The crew of the Discovery mission did a few spacewalks, and one of them involved a Japanese payload called “Message in a Bottle.” It wasn’t an experiment but simply a glass bottle that Al Drew opened at a certain point in the spacewalk to “let space in.” Once the glass bottle returned to Earth, it would be displayed in museums throughout Japan in order to raise children’s interest in spaceflight (personally, I was skeptical about how excited children would get about an empty glass bottle). After the spacewalk was over and the bottle was back in the station, the Japanese control center wanted to know whether I had “safed” the bottle (I was supposed to tape the lid closed to make sure it wasn’t accidentally opened). I was busy doing a number of things, but they kept pestering me about it, until I finally got on the Space to Ground channel and said, “Message in a Bottle is on Discovery, and I opened it to make sure there was nothing inside.” There was a long pause. Then I said, “Just kidding.”

Shortly after Discovery and its crew returned to Earth, it would have its engines removed and would be sent to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., to become a permanent display. Discovery had left Earth more times than any spacecraft in history, a record of distinction that I expect it to keep for a long time to come.

Sasha, Oleg, and I were scheduled to return to Earth on March 16, 2011. Never having experienced reentry on the Soyuz, I was curious what it would be like. For some strange reason that I still haven’t quite figured out, people didn’t talk about the experience of landing in the Soyuz as much as we did with the space shuttle. It might partly be because, until recently, the astronauts who flew on Soyuz were not former test pilots and so maybe lacked the curiosity bordering on obsessive interest in the performance of spacecraft that shuttle pilots had. I had been given a range of different impressions by different people—that it would be terrifying, that it would be fine, and that it would actually be fun, like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disney World.

That day everyone was concerned about the weather, because there were blizzard conditions at the landing site. Our capsule smacked into the hard frozen surface of the desert steppes of Kazakhstan, bounced around, tipped over, then was dragged a hundred yards by the parachute. I’ve never been in a car accident that ended in multiple rollovers, but I imagine that landing in the Soyuz that day felt a lot like that—violently jarring. But I found it exhilarating.

Eventually, the rescue forces corralled the parachute and knocked it down before it could drag us any farther. Not long after, the hatch opened and the blizzard blew into the capsule—the first fresh air I had smelled in six months, incredibly refreshing. It was a sensation I’ll never forget.

A FEW DAYS AFTER I returned to Earth, Amiko and I went to visit Gabby at TIRR Memorial Hermann, where she was being treated. I was shocked at first by how different she looked. She was in a wheelchair and was wearing a helmet to protect her head where a piece of her skull had been removed to allow her brain to swell. Her hair was short—it had been shaved for brain surgery—and her face looked different. It took me a moment to process the enormity of what had happened to her. When I heard she had been shot, I had understood intellectually what that meant. But it was another thing entirely to see my vivacious sister-in-law in such a different state—not only physically changed but unable to speak as she once had. Sometimes Gabby would get a look on her face as if she had something to say, and when we all looked at her and paused, she would say, simply, “Chicken.” Then she’d roll her eyes at herself—that wasn’t what she wanted to say!—and try again.

“Chicken.”

I could see how frustrating it was for Gabby, who used to make speeches to thousands of people that inspired them and won their votes. Mark explained that she had aphasia, a communication disorder that made it hard for her to speak, though her ability to comprehend language, her intelligence, and, most important, her personality remained unaffected. She understood everything we said to her, but putting her own thoughts into words was extremely challenging.

We had dinner together at the hospital, and as the visit went on I could see Gabby’s warmth and her sense of humor. Later, Amiko and I talked about how Gabby was doing, and Amiko said she thought Gabby looked great considering how recent her injury was. Amiko reminded me how long it had taken her own sister to walk, to speak, to regain aspects of her personality after sustaining a traumatic brain injury in a car accident. Amiko didn’t want to be overoptimistic, but she knew from experience that people could make huge strides after being in terrible shape. Gabby was still very much herself, and that was a promising indication for her recovery.

“I can see Gabby in Gabby” is how Amiko put it, and she was right.

Less than two months later, I was standing next to Gabby on the roof of the Launch Control Center at Kennedy, watching Endeavour prepare to launch for its last mission, with Mark as its commander. Gabby had been to a space shuttle launch before, and of course I had been to many. It’s an experience that never gets old. The ground shakes, the air crackles with the power of the engines, and the rockets’ flames burn a searing orange in the sky. Seeing an object the size of a tall building lift itself straight up into the sky at supersonic speed is always moving, and when someone you know and care about is on board, it’s that much more so. There was a low cloud cover that day, and Endeavour punched up through it, lighting them up orange for a moment, then disappeared. Eight minutes later, it was in orbit around the Earth.

When Mark had decided he would see this mission through, Gabby had set the goal of being well enough to fly to Florida and see him off. That had been extremely ambitious, and she had done it. For Gabby, just being here was an accomplishment on par with a shuttle launch. She seemed to thrive on the challenge to do hard things.

SOON AFTER, the space shuttle was retired, fulfilling the terms of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. I was sad to see it go. The shuttle was unique in its range of capabilities—heavy-lift cargo vehicle, science laboratory, orbiting service station for busted satellites. It was the spacecraft I’d learned to fly and learned to love, and I doubt we’ll see anything like it again in my lifetime.

In 2012, NASA learned the Russians were going to send a cosmonaut to the space station for a year. Their reasons were logistical rather than scientific, but once this had been decided, it put NASA in the position of having to either explain why an American astronaut was not up to the same challenge or announcing a yearlong mission themselves. To their credit, they chose the latter.

Once the Year in Space mission had been announced, NASA still had to choose the astronaut to do it. At first, I wasn’t sure I wanted it to be me. I remembered exactly how long 159 days on the space station had felt. I had spent six months at sea on an aircraft carrier and that was long; six months in space is longer. Spending twice as long up there wouldn’t just feel twice as long, I thought—it could be exponential. I knew I would miss Amiko and my daughters and my life on Earth. And I knew how it would feel if something bad happened to someone I loved while I was gone, because I had already experienced it. My father was getting up there in age and wasn’t in the greatest health.

But I had decided a long time before always to say yes to whatever challenge came my way. This yearlong mission was the hardest thing I’d ever have the opportunity to do, and after some reflection I decided I wanted to be the one to do it.

Many other astronauts also expressed interest. After all, spaceflight opportunities don’t come around every day. The requirements to be considered were many: we had to have previously flown a long-duration flight, we had to be certified to do spacewalks, we had to be capable of being assigned as commander, we had to be medically qualified, and we had to be available to be off the Earth for that year. With such a fine filter put on the requirements, in the end only two people qualified: Jeff Williams, one of my astronaut classmates, and me.

At around the same time, NASA was also looking to assign a new chief astronaut, because Peggy Whitson had stepped down in order to be eligible for the yearlong mission herself. I put my name in for the job of chief. In the interview, I was asked whether I would rather be chief of the Astronaut Office or fly in space for a year. Without hesitation, I said, “Chief of the Astronaut Office.” I thought there would be other opportunities to fly in space again, but maybe not another opportunity to serve as chief astronaut. My preference might have been considered, but the managers decided differently. A few weeks later, I learned I would be flying in space for a year.

Twenty-four hours after I was assigned, I was told that after further evaluation I had been medically disqualified and that Jeff would fly. On my previous mission I had experienced some damage to my eyes, and NASA didn’t want to take the risk of sending me up again. There could be some unexpected acceleration of the harmful effects after the six-month point, leaving me with permanent damage to my vision. I thought the danger was exaggerated, and I was disappointed, but I was resigned to the decision.

When I got home that night, I told Amiko about being medically disqualified. Rather than looking disappointed, as I expected, she looked puzzled.

“So they’re going to send someone who has been on two long flights and has not suffered vision damage?” she asked.

“Right,” I said.

“But if the point of this mission is to learn more about what happens to your body on a long mission,” she asked, “why would they send someone who is known to be immune to one of the things they intend to study?”

This was a good point.

“In all the time I’ve known you,” she said, “I have never seen you take no for an answer so easily.”

That night, after Amiko was asleep, I looked through my NASA medical records, an enormous pile of paper two feet high documenting years of data. I had experienced damage to my vision on my long-duration flight, but it had been mild and had returned to normal when I came back to Earth, though I still had some structural changes. Amiko was right: we could learn more about vision changes from someone like me than from someone who had demonstrated an immunity to the problem. I decided to present my case to management. They listened, and to my surprise they reversed their decision.

When I was preparing for the press conference to announce Misha and me as the one-year crew members, I asked what I thought was an innocent question about genetic research. I mentioned something we hadn’t previously discussed: Mark would be a perfect control to study throughout the year. It turns out my mentioning this had enormous ramifications. Because NASA was my employer, it would be illegal for them to ask me for my genetic information. But once I had suggested it, the possibilities of studying the genetic effects of spaceflight transformed the research. The Twins Study became an important aspect of the research being done on station. A lot of people have assumed that I was chosen for this mission because I have an identical twin, but that was just serendipitous.

The yearlong mission was announced in November 2012, with Misha and me as the crew.

THE IDEA of leaving the Earth for a year didn’t feel especially vivid until a couple of months before I was to go. On January 20, 2015, I attended the State of the Union Address at the invitation of President Obama. He was planning to mention my yearlong mission in his speech. It was an honor to sit in the House Chamber with the gathered members of Congress, the Joint Chiefs, the cabinet, and the Supreme Court. I sat in the gallery wearing my bright blue NASA flight jacket over a shirt and tie. The president described the goals of the yearlong mission—to solve the problems of getting to Mars—and called me out personally.

“Good luck, Captain!” he said. “Make sure to Instagram it! We’re proud of you.”

The assembled Congress got to their feet and applauded. I stood and gave an awkward nod and a wave. To see the government come together, even if only in a physical sense, was touching, and it was great to experience in person the bipartisan support NASA often enjoys.

I was seated next to Alan Gross, who had been held in a Cuban prison for five years. He suggested that while I was in space I should count up—count the number of days I had been there—rather than counting down the number of days I had left. It will be easier that way, he said. And that’s exactly what I did.