Endurance

20

March 1, 2016

THE SIX OF US are gathered in the Russian segment, having another awkward photo op floating in front of the Soyuz hatch. When it’s time, Sergey, Misha, and I each hug Tim, Tim, and Yuri and say our good-byes. They snap pictures of us as we float through the hatch. I know from a great deal of experience that it’s an odd feeling to say good-bye from that side, knowing that you will be staying behind in space while your friends return to Earth. After having spent so much time together in such close quarters, we’ve now closed a door between us that won’t open again.

Just before Sergey closes the hatch behind us, Misha turns and reaches through to touch the wall of the space station one last time. He gives it a pat, the way you’d pat a horse. I know he’s thinking he might not be here again and he’s feeling nostalgia for this place that has meant so much to him.

If the process of getting up to space is violent and uncomfortable, the process of coming back down is even more so. Descending in the Soyuz capsule is one of the most dangerous moments of this year, and it will be one of the most physically grueling. Earth’s atmosphere is naturally resistant to objects entering from space. Moving at the high speed of orbit, any object will create friction with the air—enough friction that most objects simply burn up from the heat. This is a fact that generally works to our advantage, as it protects the planet from the many meteoroids and orbital debris that would otherwise rain down unexpectedly. And we take advantage of it when we fill visiting vehicles with trash and then set them loose to burn up in the atmosphere. But it’s also what makes a return from space so difficult and dangerous. The three of us must survive a fall through the atmosphere that will create temperatures up to three thousand degrees and up to 4 g’s of deceleration. The atmosphere seems designed to kill us, but the Soyuz capsule, and the procedures we go through, are designed to keep us alive.

The return to Earth will take about three and a half hours, with many steps we must get through successfully. After pushing away from the station, we will fire the engine to slow us slightly and ease our way into the upper layers of the atmosphere at just the right speed and angle to start our descent. If our approach is too steep, we could fall too fast and be killed by excessive heat or deceleration. If it’s too shallow, we could skip off the surface of the atmosphere like a rock thrown at a still lake, only to later enter much more steeply, likely with catastrophic consequences. Assuming our deorbit burn goes as planned, the atmosphere will do most of the work of slowing us down, while the heat shield will (we hope) keep the temperatures from killing us, the parachute will (we hope) slow our descent once we are within ten kilometers, and then the soft landing rockets will (we hope) fire to further slow our descent in the seconds before we hit the ground. Many things need to happen perfectly or we will be dead.

Sergey has already spent days stowing the cargo we will be bringing with us on the Soyuz—our small packages of personal items, water samples, blood and saliva for the human studies. We pack up some trash to be disposed of in the habitation module of the Soyuz, and I include the head of the gorilla suit, since I don’t want to be held responsible for any future Space Gorilla antics. Most of the storage space in the capsule is devoted to things we hope we never have to use: the radio, compass, machete, and cold-weather survival gear in case we land off course and must wait for the rescue forces.

Because our cardiovascular systems have not had to oppose gravity all this time, they have become weakened and we will suffer from symptoms of low blood pressure on our return to Earth. One of the things we do to counteract this is fluid loading—ingesting water and salt to try to increase our plasma volume before we return. The Russians and the Americans have different philosophies about the best fluid-loading protocols. NASA gives us a range of options that include chicken broth, a combination of salt tablets and water, and Astro-Ade, a rehydration drink developed specifically for astronauts. The Russians prefer more salt and less liquid, in part because they prefer not to use the diaper during reentry. Having figured out what worked for me on my previous flights, I stick to drinking lots of water and wearing the diaper.

I struggle into my Sokol suit, which is even harder to get into here than it was in Baikonur, where gravity kept things still and I had suit technicians to help me. We used the suits once when we relocated the Soyuz before Gennady left, and I put mine on again a few days ago for the fit check—other than that, it’s been waiting for me patiently in the habitation compartment of the Soyuz for a year. As I pull the neck ring up over my head, I try to remember the day I put this suit on for launch, a day when I’d eaten fresh food for breakfast, had taken a shower, and had gotten to see my family. I also saw a lot of other people that day, people everywhere—hundreds altogether, some of them strangers I’d never seen before and would never see again. That is the part that seems strangest now. Everything about that day seems distant to me, like a movie I saw once about someone else.

I’m preparing to climb into the capsule for the ride home, contemplating packing myself into that tiny space again. We float into the center section of the Soyuz, the descent capsule, one by one. First Misha squeezes his tall frame in, closing the hatch partially behind him in order to struggle into the left seat. Misha opens the hatch so I can float down; then I squeeze myself past the hatch, hoping that none of the hardware on my suit scratches up the hatch seal. I get into the center seat, close the hatch to get it out of the way, then awkwardly shimmy myself over to the right seat. Once I’m in, I open the hatch again, and Sergey settles himself into the center seat. We sit with our knees pressed up to our chests.

We are in the seat liners that were custom molded to fit our bodies, and they are more important now than they were on launch day. We will go from 17,500 miles per hour to a hard zero in less than thirty minutes, and the seats, along with many other parts of the Soyuz, must work as designed to keep us on the winning side of a battle against the forces of nature. We strap ourselves in as best we can using the five-point restraints, easier said than done when the straps are floating around us and any tiny force pushes us away from the seats. It’s hard to get secured very tightly, but once we are hurtling toward Earth, the full force of deceleration will crush us down into our seats, making it easier to fully tighten our straps.

A command from mission control in Moscow opens the hooks that hold the Soyuz to the ISS, and soon after, spring-force plungers nudge us away from the station. Both of these processes are so gentle that we don’t feel or hear them. We are now moving a couple of inches per second relative to the station, though still in orbit with it. Once we are a safe distance away, we use the Soyuz thrusters to push us farther from the ISS.

Now there is more waiting. We don’t talk much. This squashed position creates excruciating pain in my knees, as it always has, and it’s warm in here. A cooling fan runs to circulate air within our suits, a low comforting whirr, but it’s not enough. I remember sitting in the right-hand seat of a different Soyuz, remarking to Misha that our lives without fan noise were over. That seems so long ago. Now, I can’t remember what it’s like to be in silence, and I yearn to experience it again.

I find it hard to stay awake. I don’t know if I’m tired just from today or from the whole year. Sometimes you don’t feel how exhausting an experience has been until it’s over and you allow yourself to stop ignoring it. I look over at Sergey and Misha, and their eyes are closed. I close mine too. The sun rises; forty-five minutes later, the sun sets.

When we get word from the ground that it’s time for the deorbit burn, we are instantly, completely awake. It’s important to get this part right. Sergey and Misha execute the burn perfectly, a four-and-a-half-minute firing of the braking engine, which will slow the Soyuz by 300 miles per hour. We are now in a twenty-five-minute free fall before we slam into Earth’s atmosphere.

When it’s time to separate the crew module—the tiny, cone-shaped capsule we are sitting in—from the rest of the Soyuz, we hold our breaths. The three modules are exploded apart. Pieces of the habitation module and instrumentation compartment fly by the windows, some of them striking the sides of our spacecraft. None of us mentions it, but we all know that it was at this point in a Soyuz descent in 1971 that three cosmonauts lost their lives. A valve between the crew module and the orbital module opened during separation, depressurizing the cabin and asphyxiating the crew. Misha, Sergey, and I wear pressure suits that would protect us in the case of a similar accident, but this moment in the descent sequence is still one we are glad to put behind us.

We feel gravity begin to return, first slowly, then with a vengeance. Soon everything is oddly heavy, too heavy—our checklists, our arms, our heads. My watch feels heavy on my wrist, and breathing gets harder as the g forces clamp down on my trachea. The capsule heats up, and flaming pieces of the heat shield fly by the window as it’s scorched black.

We hear the wind noise building as the thick air of the atmosphere rushes past the capsule, a sign that the parachute will soon be deployed. This is the only part of reentry that is completely automated, and we concentrate on the monitor, waiting for the indicator light to show that it worked. It won’t be long, maybe only a second or two, before we feel the jerk of the parachute, but we watch anyway. Everything now depends on one parachute, manufactured in an aging facility outside Moscow by similarly aging workers using quality standards inherited from the Soviet space program. After all I’ve experienced this year—the long days, the grueling spacewalks, living through the missed birthdays and celebrations, the struggles personal and professional—everything depends on that parachute. We are falling at the speed of sound. We fall and wait and watch.

The chute catches us with a jerk, rolling and buffeting our capsule crazily through the sky. I’ve heard this experience compared to a train accident followed by a car accident followed by falling off your bike. I’ve described it myself as the sensation of going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, while on fire. In the wrong frame of mind this would be terrifying, and from what I’ve heard some people who have experienced it have been terrified. But I love it. It’s like a carnival ride on steroids.

Misha’s checklist comes loose from its tether and flies at my head. I reach up and grab it out of the air left-handed. The three of us look at one another with amazement.

“Left-handed Super Bowl catch!” I shout, then quickly realize Sergey and Misha might not know what the Super Bowl is. This is not only a moment to revel in my athleticism; it’s also a good indication that the motion of the Soyuz must not be as crazy as it seems to us—a lot of the perceived motion is our vestibular systems overreacting to the force of gravity.

After all the tumult of the descent, the minutes we spend drifting at the whim of the parachute are oddly calm. Later I will see a photograph taken of our Soyuz dangling under the white-and-orange parachute against the backdrop of a fluffy blanket of clouds. The heat shield is jettisoned, pulling off the burned window coverings. Sunlight streams in the window at my elbow as we watch the ground come closer and closer.

From their position in helicopters nearby, the rescue forces count down over the comm system the distance to go until landing.

“Open your mouth,” a voice reminds us in Russian. If we don’t keep our tongues away from our teeth, we could bite them off on impact. When we are only five meters from the ground, the rockets fire for the “soft” landing (this is what it’s called, but I know from experience that the landing is anything but soft). I feel the hard crack of hitting the Earth in my spine. My head bounces and slams into the seat, the sensation of a car accident. We are down. We have landed with the hatch pointing straight up rather than on one side, which is rare. We will wait a few minutes longer than usual while the rescue crew brings a ladder to extract us from the burned capsule.

When the hatch opens, the Soyuz fills with the rich smell of air and the bracing cold of winter. It smells fantastic. We bump fists.

After Sergey gets out of the capsule, I’m surprised to find that I can unstrap myself, pull myself out of my seat, and reach the hatch overhead, despite the fact that gravity feels like a crushing force. I remember coming back from STS-103 after only eight days and feeling like I weighed a thousand pounds. Now, with a little help from the rescue forces, I pull myself entirely out of the capsule to sit on the edge of the hatch and take in the landscape all around. The sight of so many people—maybe a couple hundred—is startling. It feels indescribably strange to see more than a handful of people at a time, and the sight is overwhelming. I pump my fist in the air. I breathe, and the air is rich with a fantastic sweet smell, a combination of charred Soyuz and honeysuckle. The Russian space agency insists on having the rescue crew help us down from the capsule and deposit us into nearby camp chairs for examination by doctors and nurses. We follow the Russians’ rules when we travel with them, but I wish they would let me walk away from the landing. I feel sure I could. My flight surgeon Steve Gilmore is there, and I’m reminded of what his medical care and friendship have meant to me—over the years, he and other flight surgeons have worked tirelessly to keep me on flight status and kept me flying safely when it would have been easier to declare me unqualified. I notice Chris Cassidy, the chief astronaut, and my friend Joel Montalbano, the deputy ISS program manager. Near Sergey and Misha, I recognize Sergey’s father, a former cosmonaut, and Valery Korzun. In the distance, I see the rescue force troops, some of whom I first met in Russa in 2000 during winter survival training and whose dedication I have come to appreciate and rely on. I notice Misha smiling and waving at them, and I’m certain he’s thinking of his father, who was once one of them.

Chris hands me a satellite phone. I dial Amiko’s cell—I know she’ll be at mission control in Houston along with Samantha (Charlotte watched from home in Virginia Beach), my brother, and close friends watching the live feed on the huge screens.

“How was it?” Amiko asks.

“It was fucking medieval,” I say. “But effective.”

I tell her I feel fine. If I were on the first crew to reach the surface of Mars, just now touching down on the red planet after a yearlong journey and a wild-hot descent through its atmosphere, I feel like I would be able to do what needed to be done. One of the most important questions of my mission has been a simple yes or no: could you get to work on Mars? I wouldn’t want to have to build a habitat or hike ten miles, but I know I could take care of myself and others in an emergency, and that feels like a triumph.

I tell Amiko I’ll see her soon, and for the first time in a year that’s true.