Endurance

17

November 6, 2015

NOVEMBER MARKS the nine-year anniversary of my surgery, and I reflect on the fact that I have spent more than a year of my life in space after having been diagnosed with and treated for cancer. I don’t think of myself as a “cancer survivor”—more like a person whose prostate gland had cancer, which was removed and disposed of. But I’m happy if my story is meaningful to others, especially kids, as an example that they can still achieve great things.

Once again, Kjell and I have spent days preparing our suits and equipment, reviewing procedures, and conferencing with experts on the ground. This spacewalk will have two goals: one is to replumb a cooling system, bringing it back to its original configuration so a spare radiator can be saved for future use. The other is to top off that cooling system’s ammonia supply (the space station uses high-concentration ammonia to cool the electronics). These tasks might sound unexciting, and in many ways they are. Yet the story of how we have kept the space station cool—a huge chunk of metal flying through space getting roasted by the unfiltered sun for forty-five minutes out of every ninety while its enormous solar arrays generate electricity—is a story of an engineering triumph with important implications for future spaceflight. The work Kjell and I will do today to keep the cooling system working will be one small piece of that larger story, just as the work of the astronauts and cosmonauts who have performed the hundreds of spacewalks from the station over the years have each contributed something invaluable to its construction.

The day of our second spacewalk starts much like our first: up early, quick breakfast, prebreathe oxygen, get suited up. Today I’ve decided to wear my glasses, because I found the Fresnel lenses attached to my visor didn’t work as well as I’d hoped on our first venture outside the station. At one point, the tether for one of the tools I was working with became tangled, and I wasn’t able to see the knot clearly enough to undo it. Luckily, it magically untangled itself. There are risks involved in wearing glasses—if they slip off, there will be nothing I can do about it with my helmet on, but I prepare for that problem by taping them to my head. Being bald, I have the perfect haircut for this technique. I regret not getting comfortable with contact lenses.

I put my comm cap on and scratch any itchy spots one last time before my helmet is sealed. Kjell and I get into the airlock. This time, I know that neither of us will flip our water switches early, and I also know I won’t have to be the one to struggle to get the hatch open or closed—that’s the job of the lead spacewalker.

Our work site today will be all the way out at the end of the truss, 150 feet from the airlock—so far that we need to use the length of both our safety tethers together to reach it. As we start the journey, translating hand over hand along the rails, I notice again how much damage has been done to the outside of the station by micrometeoroids and orbital debris. It’s remarkable to see the pits in the metal handrails going all the way through like bullet holes. I’m shocked again to see them.

Our ground IV today is a veteran astronaut I’ve known for fifteen years, Megan McArthur. Despite being one of the youngest astronauts when she was selected, at twenty-eight, she’s always been calm and sure of herself, even under pressure. She is talking us through our work today, and with her help, Kjell and I get ourselves and our tools out to the work site.

Our first task is a two-person job: removing a cover from a metal box and driving a bolt to open a valve that opens the flow of ammonia. Kjell and I get into an easy rhythm where it seems as though we can read each other’s minds, and it feels as if Megan is right there in lockstep with us. We work together with an uncanny level of efficiency. With our visors almost pressed against each other, Kjell and I can’t help but make occasional eye contact, and when we do, I get a sense he is thinking the same thing as me. Even though I’m not superstitious, I don’t want to jinx it, or us, by saying, “This is going great” or “This is turning out to be pretty easy.” We just need to keep it up until we are done.

When we get the cover back on the box, Kjell and I separate to work on different tasks for a while. He continues reconfiguring the ammonia lines, and I work on the vent lines on the back side of the space station’s truss. Both are difficult tasks, and we are each absorbed in them completely. This is not the ammonia you might have found under your grandmother’s sink, but something a hundred times stronger and much more lethal. If this ammonia were to get inside the station, we could all be dead within minutes. An ammonia leak is one of the emergencies we prepare for most. So working with the cooling system and the ammonia lines is especially important to get right the first time. We must make sure not to get any of the ammonia onto our suits.

As I had learned on my first spacewalk, I’m finding that the focus required to work outside is absolute. Every time I adjust my tethers, move a tool on my mini-workstation, or even just move, I have to concentrate with every bit of my attention, making sure I’m doing the right thing at the right time in the right way, double-checking that I’m not getting tangled up in my safety tether, floating away from structure, or losing my tools.

After a few hours, I head back toward the CETA cart (CETA stands for crew and equipment translation aid), which is sort of like one of those old manual handcars once used on railways. It’s designed to let us move large equipment up and down the truss. When we were planning this spacewalk, I had raised concerns about whether this task, tying down the brake handle so no one could accidentally lock the brake, really needed to be done. This is much less important than our primary objective of reconfiguring the ammonia system, and it takes me far away from Kjell—too far to help if he runs into any trouble, like in my skydiving dream. The lead flight director insisted that we would be able to do both.

I’m plodding through my task with the brake handle, using reminders written on a checklist on my wrist. I am working mostly on my own, as Megan is concentrating on talking Kjell through his much more complex task. As I continue working, I can hear Kjell struggling with the ammonia connections. These can require all your strength, even for a strong guy like him, and they are technically complex, requiring upward of twenty steps each to mate or demate a connection, all the while remaining alert for ammonia to come shooting out and contaminate your suit. Each time I hear him struggle to complete a step, I again question to myself why I am working on the cart when I should be there to help him.

I finish up and take one last look over my work site, making sure everything looks right, before heading back out to the end of the truss to help Kjell. Hand over hand, it takes me a few minutes to get to him. I look over his suit, inspecting it for yellow spots of ammonia. I see a few places that look suspicious, but when I look closer I can see the threads of the suit material below the discoloration, which rules out ammonia as the cause. I’m glad I decided to wear my glasses, which haven’t slipped or fogged up, or I might not have been able to tell the difference. We’re preparing to vent the ammonia system—Kjell opens a valve and quickly moves clear. High-pressure ammonia streams out the back of the space station like a giant cloud of snow. As we watch, the sun catches the huge plume, its particles glistening against the blackness of space. It’s a moment of unexpected beauty, and we float there for a minute, taking it all in.

When the venting seems to be complete, Megan instructs us to separate—Kjell will stay here and work on cleaning up the ammonia vent tool while I venture back to the solar array joint to remove and stow an ammonia jumper I installed earlier. The solar array joint continually rotates in the same direction to keep the solar arrays pointed at the sun, 360 degrees every ninety minutes, while passing electricity downstream. Megan talks me through the process. I struggle with one of the connections.

“Hey Megan. With the bale all the way aft, the white band should be visible or not?” I ask.

“Yes,” Megan replies, “the forward white band should be visible.”

I work with it for a few more minutes before getting it configured the way it’s supposed to be.

“Okay,” I report. “Forward white band visible.”

“Okay, Scott, I copy the forward white band is visible—check the detent button is up.”

“It’s up.”

When I hear Megan’s voice again, there is a subtly different tone.

“I’m going to ask you to pause right here, and I’m going to tell you guys what we’ve got going on.”

She doesn’t say what this pause is about, but Kjell and I know: Megan has just been given some news within mission control, something the flight directors have to make a quick decision about. It may be something that puts us in danger. She doesn’t leave us hanging for long.

“Okay. Currently, guys, from a momentum management perspective, we’re getting close to a LOAC [loss of attitude control] condition,” she says. She means the control moment gyroscopes, which control the station’s attitude—our orientation in the sky—have become saturated by the venting ammonia. Soon we will lose control of our attitude, and when that happens, we will soon lose communication with the ground. This is a dangerous situation, just as we anticipated.

Megan continues. “So what we need Kjell to do is to pull out of your current activity and head over toward the radiator. We’re going to have you redeploy it.”

If we can’t cinch down this radiator properly, we will have to put it back out in its extended position.

“Copy,” Kjell answers crisply.

“You’ve probably gathered from a timeline perspective where we’re going,” Megan says. “We’re going to have you clean up the vent tool eventually, Kjell. And Scott, you’re going to continue with the jumper, but we are not going after cinching and shrouding the radiator today. It will take too long.”

We both acknowledge her. This situation with the gyroscopes is serious enough to alter our plans. Even under the best of circumstances, when we hear we are close to saturating the gyros, it’s one of those “Oh, shit” moments. The station won’t start spinning out of control like a carnival ride, but losing communication with Megan and all the experts on the ground is never a good thing. And with the two of us outside, a communication blackout would add a new danger to an already risky situation. In all the preparation we’ve done for this spacewalk, we had never discussed the possibility of losing attitude control due to ammonia venting.

Houston is discussing handing over attitude control to the Russian segment. The Russian thrusters can control our attitude, less elegantly, with the use of propellant. The handover process isn’t instantaneous, and we could lose communication with the ground in the meantime anyway. On top of that, the Russian thrusters use hypergolic fuel, which is incredibly toxic and a known carcinogen. If any of the hydrazine or dinitrogen tetroxide got onto our spacesuits, we could bring those chemicals back into the station with us.

But attitude control is important. If we can’t talk to the ground, we lose the expertise of the thousands of people in Houston, Moscow, and other sites all over the world who understand every aspect of the systems keeping us alive up here. Our spacesuits, the life support systems within the station, the Soyuz meant to get us back safely to Earth, the science experiments that are the reason for us being here in the first place—our comm system is our only connection to the experts on all of these. Our only connection to Earth. We have no choice but to take the risk.

I think about just how alone Kjell and I are out here. The ground wants to help us, but we may not be able to hear them. Our crewmates inside the station would do anything to ensure our safety, but they can’t reach us. Kjell and I have only each other. Our lives are in our own hands.

As instructed, we re-extend the spare radiator rather than taking the time to cinch it down and install a thermal cover. It will be safe in this configuration until a future spacewalk can retract it. We are nearing the seven-hour mark, the point where we were planning to head back to the airlock, but we are still far away with much left to do before we can get inside. We start the process of cleaning up our work site and inventorying our tool bags and mini-workstations to make sure we aren’t leaving anything behind. Once everything is packed up and checked, we start the laborious process of traveling hand over hand back to where we started.

We are about halfway to the airlock when I hear Megan’s voice again in my headset.

“Scott, if you’re okay with it, we need you to go back to the vent valves and make sure they are in the right configuration. The specialists are seeing some data they aren’t happy with.”

This is a simple request, but Megan’s tone communicates a lot—she wants me to know this action is not required and that I can say no without causing any problems. It’s a task that could easily be left for the next astronauts, who will be launching next month. She knows that we have been outside a long time and are exhausted. My body is aching, my feet are cold, my knuckles are rubbed raw (some astronauts even lose fingernails from the intense pressure spacewalks put on our hands). I’ve been sweating and am dehydrated. There is still so much we have to do before we can get safely back inside, especially if anything unexpected happens between now and then.

I answer her right away, putting a vigor into my voice that I don’t actually feel. “Sure, no problem,” I say.

I’ve been convincing myself all day that I actually feel fine, that I have plenty of energy left. Both Kjell’s life and my own depend on our ability to push past our limits. I’ve convinced myself so effectively that I’ve convinced the ground team too.

I head to the back side of the truss again to check the vent valves. It’s dark now and starting to get cold. I don’t waste the effort to adjust the cooling on my suit—even just that simple gesture would hurt my hands too much. I would rather just freeze.

In the darkness, I get turned around and upside down. I can see only what’s immediately in front of my face, like a scuba diver in murky waters, and it’s completely disorienting. Everything looks unfamiliar in the dark. (One difference between the Russian approach to spacewalking and ours is that the Russians stop working when it’s dark; the cosmonauts just hang on to the side of the station and rest, waiting for the sun to come up again. This is safer in one sense—they are probably less likely to make mistakes, and to tire—but they also expend twice as many resources and do twice as many spacewalks because they only work half the time they are outside.)

I start to head in a direction I think is the right one, then realize it’s wrong, but I can’t tell whether I’m upside down or right side up. I read some mile markers—numbers attached to the handrails—to Megan, hoping she can help tell me where I am.

“It looks much different in the dark,” I tell Megan.

“Roger that,” she says.

“Did I not go far enough aft?” I ask. “Let me go back to my safety tether.” I figure once I find the place where my tether is attached I’ll be able to get my bearings.

“We’re working on cuing up the sun for you,” Megan jokes, “but it’s going to be another five minutes.”

I look in the direction I think is Earth, hoping to catch a glimpse of some city lights 250 miles below in the darkness to get my bearings. If I just knew which way Earth is, I could figure out where I am on the truss. When I look around, all I see is black. Maybe I’m looking right at the Earth and not seeing any lights because we’re passing over the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean, or perhaps I’m just looking at space.

I make my way back to where my tether is attached, but when I get there, I remember that Kjell had attached the tether, not me, so I’m not familiar with the area. I’m as disoriented as ever. I float for a minute, frustrated, thinking about what to do next.

“Scott, can you see the PMM?”

I can’t, but I don’t want to give up. I see a tether that I think is Kjell’s—if it is, I might be able to figure out where I am.

“Scott,” Megan says, “we’re just going to send you back now—we don’t need to get this, so just head back to where your tether location is and then head back to the airlock.” She takes an upbeat tone, as if this is good news, but she knows it will be frustrating to me to hear they’re giving up on me.

Eventually I catch a glimpse of lights above me. I’m not sure what it is at first, since above me is what I thought was the blackness of space. But as the lights come into focus, I see they are city lights—the unmistakable lights of the Middle East, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi, stretched along the Persian Gulf standing out against the blackness of the water and the desert sands.

The lights reorient me—what I’d thought was down is up—and I feel the strange sensation of my internal gyroscope righting itself. Suddenly it’s clear where I am and where I need to go.

“I see the PMM now, so I think I’m close,” I tell her. “I can go do it. I’d prefer to do it if you guys are okay with it.”

A pause. I know Megan is consulting with the flight director about whether to let me continue or tell me to come back inside.

“Okay, Scott, we’re going to take your lead. We’re happy to have you go and do that.”

“Okay. I think I’m in good shape now.”

When I reach the work site, the sun finally shines over the horizon while Megan talks me through the steps of configuring the vent valve on the ammonia tank. Once I’m done, Megan tells us to head back to the airlock.

I contemplate making a joke to the ground by calling myself “Magellan”—a nickname we used to use in the Navy for those who got lost. But they might not get it, and besides, Magellan was killed before he made it home.

I head back to the airlock, where I climb in first this time and get my tether secured so Kjell can follow. He crams himself in behind me. As he struggles to close the hatch, I try to hook up the oxygen and cooling umbilical to my suit. But my hands are so fatigued I’m fumbling. To make matters worse, my glasses are positioned in such a way that I’m peering at the connection between the umbilical and my suit through the very bottom edge of the lenses, and the distortion prevents me from seeing clearly. I struggle for a good ten minutes, by which time Kjell has maneuvered himself into a position where he can see my connection and help me out. Working together, we get it connected. This is why we do spacewalks in pairs.

Kjell gets the hatch closed, and the air hisses in around us. The carbon dioxide in Kjell’s suit is showing an elevated reading, so when the airlock finishes repressurizing, Kimiya and Sergey hurry to get him out of his helmet first. Through my visor, I can see that he is okay, nodding and talking. It will be ten minutes before Kimiya can take my helmet off. Kjell and I are attached to opposite walls, facing each other, held in place by the racks that secure our spacesuits. We have been in these suits for almost eleven hours. While I float there and wait to get out of my helmet, Kjell and I don’t have to talk—we just share a look, the same look you’d give someone if you’d been riding down a familiar street together, chatting about this and that, and missed by nanoseconds being T-boned by an oncoming train. It’s the look of realizing we’ve shared this experience that we both know was at the limit of our abilities and could have killed us.

When Kimiya lifts my helmet off my head, Kjell and I can finally see each other without plastic in between. We still don’t feel any need for words.

Kjell smiles an exhausted smile and nods at me. His face is pale and sweaty, bathed in the artificial light.

Hours later, Kjell and I pass in the U.S. lab. “There ain’t going to be no rematch,” I say, quoting from Rocky.

“I don’t want one,” says Kjell, laughing his big boisterous laugh.

We have no way of knowing it yet, but only one of us is done with spacewalks.

A FEW DAYS LATER, I wake up to find a public affairs event on the schedule with the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology for both Kjell and me. We’ve been given no preparation or warning, as we should have been for such an important event, and because my day is packed between now and then, I won’t have the chance to get ready. Even worse, when Kjell and I are connected we discover that we are being conferenced into a committee hearing, and that our participation will be considered testimony. I’m furious that the office of public affairs has not given me warning that I will be testifying before a committee of the people who oversee NASA and determine its funding. But I have to set aside that reaction and pretend to be prepared.

Kjell and I answer questions about what we’re doing on station—we describe the biomedical experiments we are taking part in and talk about growing lettuce. One representative points out that we are in a “difficult geopolitical situation” with the Russians and wants to know whether we share all of our data with our Russian colleagues.

I explain that the international cooperation on the space station is its strength. “I was up here as the only American with two Russian guys for six weeks this summer,” I tell him, “and if something had happened to me, I would have counted on them for my life. We have a great relationship, and I think the international aspect of this program has been one of its highlights.”

One of the representatives on the committee, Dr. Brian Babin, happens to be a dentist, and the Johnson Space Center is in his congressional district. He is very curious about our oral health; we assure him that we brush and floss regularly. The last question is about Mars—a representative from Colorado points out that the planets will be lined up advantageously for a voyage in 2033. “Do you guys think that’s feasible?” he asks.

I tell him I personally think it’s feasible, and that the most difficult part of getting to Mars is the money. He knows what I mean without my having to spell it out—we can do it if his committee gives NASA the funding. “I think it’s a trip that is worth the investment,” I say. “I think there are things tangible and intangible we get from investing in spaceflight, and I think Mars is a great goal for us. And I definitely think it’s achievable.”

A COUPLE OF weeks later, we are eating breakfast when a fire alarm sounds. Even though we have had many false alarms over the time I’ve been here, this is still a sound that captures our full attention. It takes us only a few minutes to trace the alarm to the European module, where a biology experiment with rotating incubators is showing a slightly elevated carbon monoxide level. We power down the experiment and confirm that there are no elevated readings anywhere else in the station. We sample the experiment to see if there are signs of combustion. There are. It’s a real fire.

I always find the alarms entertaining in a strange way, unless they happen in the middle of the night and wake me up. Then I hate them. Alarms are a good reminder of the risk we live with and also a chance to review and practice our responses. In this case, the fire alarm does reveal an error in the procedure, which we later fix.

ON DECEMBER 6, a Cygnus resupply launches successfully. This is the first flight of an enhanced Cygnus with an extended pressurized module, which allows it to carry 25 percent more cargo. The module is named Deke Slayton II after one of the Mercury astronauts (the first Deke Slayton Cygnus blew up on launch the previous year). In addition to the regular supplies of food, clothes, oxygen, and other consumables, Cygnus is also carrying experiments and supplies to support research in biology, physics, medicine, and Earth science. It’s also carrying a microsatellite deployer and the first microsatellite to be deployed from ISS. And, important only to me, on board is a gorilla suit sent by my brother to replace the one lost on SpaceX. Once Cygnus safely reaches orbit—a stage we no longer take for granted after all the disasters earlier this year—Kjell captures it with the robot arm, his first time doing so. This was supposed to be my turn, but I decided to let Kjell do it, which meant giving up my last chance to grab a free-flying satellite, one of the few things I’ve never done in space.

A few days later, on December 11, we gather to say good-bye to Kjell, Kimiya, and Oleg. I remember when they arrived here about five months ago, which seems like another lifetime. Kjell and Kimiya, who showed up like helpless baby birds, are leaving as soaring eagles. They are now seasoned space flyers who can move around the station with ease, fix hardware of all kinds, run science experiments across multiple disciplines, and generally handle anything that comes their way without my help. It’s a rare vantage point I have of their time here. I’ve known at some level how much astronauts learn and improve over the course of a single long-duration mission, but it’s another thing entirely to witness it. I say good-bye knowing I still have three months ahead of me. I’ll miss them.

YURI MALENCHENKO, Tim Kopra, and Tim Peake launch from Baikonur on December 15 at eleven a.m. our time and dock after a six-and-a-half-hour trip. I watch from the Cupola as they approach us, the bulbous black-and-white Soyuz with its solar panels spread like an insect’s wings, a sight I never quite get used to. The capsule starts out so tiny it looks like a toy, like a scale model of itself, at times appearing to be on fire as the sunlight reflects off its surface. But then it gets bigger and bigger, slowly revealing itself to be a full-size spacecraft.

As I watch it get closer, I start to feel that something about the approach isn’t quite right, the angle or speed or both. The Soyuz is too far forward from its docking port. Just a few meters away from the station, the Soyuz stops by firing its braking thrusters toward us, to hold its position. This is not normal.

The Soyuz thrusters are blowing unburned propellant at the Cupola windows, so I hurry to close the shutters. Beads of the stuff bounce around between the window and the shutters, a strange and alarming sight. I rush down to the Russian service module to find out from Sergey and Misha what’s going on.

“They had failure in automatic docking system,” Sergey tells me. No one knows why. Yuri, the Soyuz commander, takes over manual control, and after spending a few minutes getting realigned with the docking port, he guides the craft in successfully, just nine minutes behind schedule. This is a great example of why we train so much for things that are unlikely to happen. The automated system is generally reliable, but a failure could cost the crew their lives if someone isn’t ready to take over.

After a leak check, which always seems to take longer than it should—a couple of hours this time—we open the hatch and welcome our three new crewmates aboard. As always, their first day is a full one. Throughout, I’m aware that this is the last time I will introduce new people to space, and it gives me a strangely sad feeling, a kind of pre-nostalgia.

I don’t know Yuri especially well, though he is one of the most experienced space travelers in history. He has a reputation for being technically brilliant, and his handling of this emergency manual docking will likely only add to that reputation. He has flown in space five times, including a long-duration mission on Mir, a space shuttle mission, and three previous long-duration missions on the International Space Station for a total of 641 days in space. He also has the distinction of being the only person to have gotten married while in space—on his first ISS mission, in 2003, he and his bride, Ekaterina, exchanged vows via videoconference while her friends and family gathered around her at home in Houston. (Knowing Yuri, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t crazy about this idea, but he went along with it anyway.) On his fourth flight, in 2008, Yuri’s Soyuz landed so far from his intended touchdown point, the local Kazakh farmers who came upon his steaming spacecraft had no idea what it was. When he and his two female crewmates, Peggy Whitson and Yi So-yeon, emerged from the capsule, the Kazakhs mistook him for an alien god who had come from space with his own supply of women. Had the rescue forces not arrived, I suspect the farmers would have appointed him their leader.

Tim Kopra was an Army aviator and engineer before joining NASA in the 2000 class. He went to West Point and is a colonel in the Army. He also has multiple master’s degrees—one in aerospace engineering from Georgia Tech, one in strategic studies from the Army War College, and one in business administration from a joint program between Columbia University and the London Business School. He’s been an astronaut for fifteen years, but this is only his second time in space. He flew one mission on ISS in 2009 that was unusually short—just more than a month. He had been scheduled for a second mission in 2011 on the space shuttle, but a few weeks before the launch he fell off his bike and broke his hip.

Tim Peake was a helicopter test pilot in the United Kingdom until he became the first official British astronaut chosen by the European Space Agency. This is his maiden voyage to space, making him the only rookie on the crew. For the UK, Tim is sort of their Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard rolled into one. That’s a lot to live up to, but as our mission together goes on, I will come to find that he is more than up to it.

One of the first things Tim Peake does when he gets on board is to open up a package of bonus food that came with him, select a BLT sandwich (a “bacon sarnie” in British English), and eat it, pieces of bacon floating out tantalizingly in every direction. Tim doesn’t realize that this sandwich, from the European Space Agency, is not available to the rest of us. We haven’t had a proper sandwich in months (for me, nine months), so watching him eat it is a very special form of torture. When he notices us eyeballing his sarnie, Tim offers Misha and me bites. Afterward, we watch him finish eating, salivating like two dogs on steak night.

As always with newcomers to the space station, Tim and Tim are as awkward and clumsy as toddlers. Sometimes when I want to help one of them get to where he needs to be, or want to get one of them out of the way quickly, I find it’s easiest to physically grab him by the shoulders or the hips and move him around in space the way I’d move a bulky piece of cargo. Neither of them seems to mind.

The next day, I hear during the daily planning conference that we have a problem. The mobile transporter is stuck—it is attached to the CETA cart I worked on during my second spacewalk with Kjell. Flight controllers had started to move it to a different work site near the center of the truss so the robotic arm would be in position to perform some maintenance activities before the new Progress arrives next week. But it quickly became stuck in a position that makes dockings impossible for future visiting vehicles. The moment I hear these words, my heart sinks. I immediately know what went wrong: when I was working on the CETA cart, I must have inadvertently locked the brakes while tying down the brake handles.

“I think I know who screwed that up,” I tell Houston.

Later, I get on the phone with the flight director and tell her I’m almost certain about the brake handle.

There is a pause on the other end of the connection. “How certain are you?” she asks.

“Very certain,” I say. I know what my answer will mean: I will have to do an unplanned spacewalk before the Progress can dock, and it’s launching a week from tomorrow. We’ll have a terrifyingly short period of time to prepare, both in space and on Earth.

It’s important to me to admit mistakes immediately, and I don’t make excuses. But I think to myself that I should not have been asked to do that task in the first place when I couldn’t give it the proper amount of attention. Working with the cart had been an afterthought, and there is no place for afterthoughts when you’re outside in space.

If some other piece of equipment had been left in the wrong configuration, we could likely wait until the next scheduled spacewalk, even if it was months away, to fix it. But the mobile transporter is now stuck between work sites and isn’t secure enough to withstand the forces of Progress dockings. In addition to making it impossible for us to dock visiting vehicles, the stuck cart prevents us from moving the station in order to avoid debris, firing thrusters to reduce the momentum on our gyros, or using the robot arm for anything else. I start mentally preparing myself to go outside for the third time. I share the news with the Russian crew, and they say they will help in any way necessary. The next day, NASA makes the official decision that we will try to fix the transporter on an emergency spacewalk.

It’s hard enough to prepare for a spacewalk under ideal circumstances; it’s much harder to do it on short notice and with colleagues who are still acclimating to this strange environment. Tim Kopra, though an experienced astronaut, has been here only a few days and is still adjusting to living in space. He will have to get into a spacesuit and venture outside with me. Tim Peake, who is still figuring out the most basic aspects of life up here, like eating and sleeping, will have to serve as IV. Both of them will have little margin for error in their demanding jobs.

I email Amiko that I may have to go outside again next week, expressing my frustration with myself for being such a dumbass to have locked the brakes. She is sympathetic—she knows better than anyone but Kjell what the previous two spacewalks were like both physically and mentally. I also mention to her that Tim Kopra has a strange habit of repeating me. If I say, “I wonder if there’s any football on today,” Tim will say, as if I had never spoken, “I wonder if there’s any football on today.” I mentioned to Tim that my calf muscles have shrunk dramatically since I’ve been here, and he immediately responded, “My calves have shrunk dramatically too.”

“But Tim,” I said, “you just got here.”

“Yeah, but I have really small calves.”

This is not something I ever noticed about Tim working with him on the ground, and it’s not like me to get annoyed by a crewmate—I’ve made it this long without being annoyed by anyone, which I think proves I’m pretty tolerant. Amiko suggests that maybe Tim is feeling insecure about joining me as a crewmate when I’ve been up here for so long. I agree and tell her I also wonder if it’s just me.

The Russians spend the next few days packing trash into the Progress, which will be departing soon to burn up in the atmosphere. They have some extra room and ask if we want to put trash on board. Like many things in space—oxygen, water, food—trash removal capacity is a resource, and our two countries trade it like currency. I give them a couple of our large trash bags without telling Houston I did so. It would create a lot of work for people on the ground to ask permission, and we would likely not be granted permission anyway. I’ve been doing this all year, sneaking trash off the space station when the Russians have room for it, and we help them out too when we can. (This will cause a problem later when we pack the Cygnus and don’t have all the trash Houston thinks we should—ten bags. After a lot of questions, I eventually tell them, “The trash fairy must have come in the middle of the night.” No one mentions it again, which is a relief.) On December 19, I watch from the Russian service module as Sergey and Yuri monitor the departure of Progress on their displays as it inches away almost imperceptibly. As with the Soyuz, they can take over manually if there is a malfunction, but everything goes according to plan. Now that Progress is gone, we have room for the new Progress that will launch in a few days. I realize the next time something pushes away from the station, two and a half months from now, it will be me.

IN THE MORNING, I find an email from the ground asking me to submit a guest list for my landing. A limited number of people will be allowed to come to the control center in Houston to watch on the big screens as our Soyuz lands in Kazakhstan. I start making a list: Amiko, Samantha, and Charlotte. My dad, Mark, and Gabby. Gabby’s chief of staff, Pia. Amiko’s sons, Corbin and Tristan. My friends Tilman, Todd, Robert, Gerry, and Alan. Sarah Brightman. I picture the spectator area in mission control, canted seats behind glass, my friends and family gathered there and watching as our capsule falls through the atmosphere and lands—we hope—safely on the desert steppes of Kazakhstan.

Suddenly it occurs to me that making this list is the first thing I am doing to prepare for my return to Earth. From now on I will do more and more—throwing things out, packing things up, making more lists, thinking about what my next steps will be in life. I have a lot more time in space to go, but as of today a small part of my mind is on my future on Earth.

Tim, Tim, and Yuri will still be up here when I leave, less than three months from now. As the end is drawing nearer, my remaining time seems to stretch out longer, like taffy. I’m three-quarters of the way through—it should all be downhill from here. Yet when I allow myself to think about it, I remember the first three months, the way it felt when my first set of crewmates left, how long it felt like I’d already been here, how long ago that was. I can barely remember what Terry, Samantha, and Anton look like, what their mannerisms are, or what their voices sound like, the sound of Samantha humming. Like old friends who drifted away long ago, they are now a distant memory.

Running through the rain, driving a car, sitting outside, smelling fresh-cut grass, relaxing with Amiko, hugging my kids, deciding what to wear—it is hard to remember such acts with any specificity. I no longer have any sensory reminders of what they feel like. I am a fully acclimated space creature, and my return doesn’t seem much closer than it was when I started. I will still be up here, in the same small spaces, for months.

One day soon after, I’m answering some emails and come across an invitation to speak at a conference in April. When I open my calendar, I realize that I’m scheduling my first event for after I get back to Earth.

ON MONDAY, December 21, I wake up early, diaper up, and get into my liquid cooling garment for the third time. Tim Kopra and I start our prebreathe of pure oxygen, then an hour later Tim Peake helps us get into our spacesuits. This spacewalk will be shorter than the previous ones—we will get the CETA cart and the mobile transporter unstuck, then do a couple more tasks we know will need to be done at some point (called get-ahead tasks) so as to make the best use of the time and resources it takes just to get suited up and get out the door. Tim Peake does a great job as IV—as he moves through the checklist to get us ready (with the help of Sergey), any concern I might have had about whether he was prepared to take on this role after only being up here for six days dissolves. He works efficiently and confidently, and soon we are in the airlock and doing our leak checks.

I’m wearing the spacesuit with red stripes again, EV1. When the airlock is fully depressurized, Tim Kopra and I switch our suits to battery power and the spacewalk has officially begun. This is Tim’s second spacewalk, but his first was in 2009, so it’s been a while. Once we are outside and have completed our buddy checks, I translate to the CETA cart. When I reach the cart, I try moving it along the truss and, sure enough, it’s stuck. I release the brake handle, then move it freely in both directions. The ground is satisfied.

It feels odd to have accomplished our main objective only forty-five minutes in. We finish up some of the tasks that Kjell and I had to leave undone the last time we were out here, mostly routing cables to locations where they can later be connected with future hardware. We come back inside after three hours and fifteen minutes, and while I’m far from the exhaustion I felt at the end of my earlier spacewalks, I’m still tired and sore. My fatigue level is more like what I used to feel after the training runs we did in the pool in Houston. Much easier, but still not easy.

After I come back in, I speak with Amiko and then check my email. There is one from Kjell, telling me he had watched the spacewalk on NASA TV. It’s strange to imagine him in Houston, watching in the predawn early morning, sitting in a chair of some kind, gravity holding him there. “You guys crushed it!” his email reads. He asks about what we did and what the experience was like with the specificity and enthusiasm of someone who had just been there. In my response I tell him it was less than half as long as our shorter spacewalk but required only about a fifth the effort. I tell him either the time versus perceived effort is exponential or else those were just exceptionally tough spacewalks he and I did.

“How’s Earth?” I type to end my message. “Starting to forget what space is like yet? Merry Christmas!”

For the rest of my mission, I occasionally look out the window and catch sight of the area at the end of the truss where Kjell and I worked on that second spacewalk. It looks far away, farther than home, and it gives me a strange feeling of nostalgia, like the feeling I get when I visit my old neighborhood in New Jersey. Not just a place I’ve spent time, but a place imbued with strong emotions, a place familiar yet at the same time distant, now unreachable.