Endurance

1

February 20, 2015

YOU HAVE TO go to the ends of the Earth in order to leave the Earth. Since the space shuttles were retired in 2011, we’ve depended on the Russians to launch us into space, and we must start with a journey to the Baikonur Cosmodrome on the desert steppes of Kazakhstan. First, I fly from Houston to Moscow, a familiar journey of eleven hours, and from there ride in a van to Star City, Russia, forty-five miles away—anywhere from one to four hours, depending on Moscow traffic. Star City is the Russian equivalent of the Johnson Space Center; it’s the place where the cosmonauts have been trained for the last fifty years (and, more recently, the astronauts who will travel to space with them).

Star City is a town with its own mayor and a church, museums, and apartment blocks. There is a giant statue of Yuri Gagarin, who became the first human in space in 1961, taking a simple, humble socialist-realist step forward while holding a bouquet of flowers behind his back. Years ago, the Russian space agency built a row of town houses especially for us Americans, and staying in them is sort of like staying on a movie set based on a Russian stereotype of how Americans live. There are huge fridges and huge TVs but somehow everything is slightly off. I’ve spent a lot of time in Star City, including serving as NASA’s director of operations there, but it still feels foreign to me, especially in the heart of the frozen Russian winter. After a few weeks of training, I find myself longing to head back to Houston.

From Star City we fly 1,600 miles to Baikonur, once the secret launch site for the Soviet space program. People sometimes say that a place is “in the middle of nowhere,” but I never say that anymore unless I’m talking about Baikonur. The launch site was actually built in a village called Tyuratam, named for a descendant of Genghis Khan, but was referred to as Baikonur, the name of another town several hundred miles away, as subterfuge. Now this is the only place called Baikonur. Early on, the Soviets also referred to their launch facility as Star City so as to further confuse the United States. For an American who grew up and trained as a Navy pilot during the tail end of the Cold War, it will always feel a bit strange that I’m invited into the epicenter of the former Soviet space program to be taught its secrets. The people who live in Baikonur now are mostly Kazakh, descendants of Turkic and Mongol tribes, with a minority of ethnic Russians who were left behind after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Russia leases the facilities here from Kazakhstan. The Russian ruble is the main currency, and all the vehicles have Russian license plates.

From the air, Baikonur seems to have been flung randomly onto the high desert steppes. It’s a strange collection of ugly concrete buildings, horribly hot in summer and harshly cold in winter, with mounds of rusting, disused machinery piled everywhere. Packs of wild dogs and camels scrounge in the shadows of aerospace equipment. It’s a desolate and brutal place, and it’s the only working human spaceport for most of the world.

I’m descending toward Baikonur in a Tupolev 134, an old Russian military transport plane. This aircraft might once have been outfitted with bomb racks and in a pinch could have served as a bomber, part of the Cold War arsenal the Soviets developed with the purpose of attacking my country. But now it’s used to transport international crews of space travelers—Russian, American, European, Japanese, and Canadian. We are former enemies remade as crewmates, on our way to the space station we built together.

The front of the plane is reserved for the prime crew (my two Russian crewmates and me) and a number of VIPs. Occasionally I wander toward the back, where I’ve flown on previous trips to Baikonur. Everyone has been drinking since we left Star City this morning, and the junior Russian personnel have their own party going on back here. Russians never drink without eating, so in addition to vodka and cognac they are serving tomatoes, cheese, sausage, pickled cucumbers, dried salty fish chips, and slices of salted pork fat called salo. On my first trip to Kazakhstan, in 2000, I was making my way through the party at the back of the plane to find the bathroom when I was stopped and forced to drink shots of samogon, Russian moonshine. The junior guys were so drunk they were stumbling around from the turbulence and alcohol, spilling the stuff on themselves and on the floor of the plane, all while chain-smoking. We were lucky to have made it to Kazakhstan without exploding into a giant fireball of moonshine and jet fuel.

Today everyone is drinking heavily again, and we are pretty well fueled by the time we plunge from the clouds over the flat, frozen desert and touch down on Baikonur’s single runway. We climb out, blinking in the cold, and encounter a welcoming party: officials from Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, and Energia, the company that builds the Soyuz spacecraft, one of which will take us into orbit to dock with the International Space Station. The mayor of Baikonur is here, as well as other local dignitaries. My Russian crewmate Gennady Padalka strides forward and speaks sternly to them as we stand at semi-attention, “My gotovy k sleduyushchim shagam nashey podgotovki.” (“We are ready for the next steps of our preparation.”)

This is a ritual, like so many in spaceflight. We Americans have similar staged moments at similar points of launch preparation. There is a fine line between ritual and superstition, and in a life-threatening business such as spaceflight, superstition can be comforting even to the nonbeliever.

We see a strange but welcoming sight at the edge of the tarmac: a group of Kazakh kids, little ambassadors from the end of the Earth. They are round cheeked, black haired, mostly Asian in appearance, wearing bright, dusty clothes and holding balloons. The Russian flight doctor has warned us to stay away from them: there has been concern about a measles outbreak in this region, and if one of us were to be infected it would bring serious consequences. We have all been vaccinated, but the Russian flight surgeons are very cautious; no one wants to go to space with measles. Normally we do what the doctor says, especially since he has the power to ground us. But Gennady walks confidently forward anyway.

“We must say hello to the children,” he says firmly in English.

I’ve known both Gennady and our third crewmate, Mikhail Kornienko (“Misha”), since 2000, when I started traveling to Russia to work on the joint space station program between our two countries. Gennady has a thick head of silver hair and a sharp gaze that doesn’t miss much. He is fifty-six and is the commander of our Soyuz. He’s a natural leader, gruffly shouting out orders when necessary but listening carefully when one of his crew has another perspective. He’s a person I trust implicitly. Once, in Moscow, near the Kremlin, I saw him break away from his fellow cosmonauts to pay his respects at the site where an opposition politician had been murdered, possibly by surrogates of Vladimir Putin. For a cosmonaut, an employee of Putin’s government, that gesture was risky. The other Russians with us seemed to be reluctant even to discuss the murder, but not Gennady.

Misha, who will be my fellow traveler for a year, is fifty-four and is very different from Gennady—casual, quiet, and contemplative. Misha’s father was a military helicopter pilot working with the cosmonaut rescue forces, and when Misha was only five, his father died in a helicopter crash. His early dreams of flying in space were only reinforced by this unfathomable loss. After serving in the military as a paratrooper, Misha needed to get a degree in engineering from the Moscow Aviation Institute to qualify as a flight engineer. He couldn’t get in, because he wasn’t a resident of the Moscow region, so he became a Moscow police officer to establish residency and was then able to study at the institute. He was selected as a cosmonaut in 1998.

When Misha stares at you with his light blue eyes, it feels like nothing is more important to him than fully comprehending what you are saying. He is more open with his feelings than the other Russians I know. If he were American, I could picture him as a Birkenstock-wearing hippie living in Vermont.

We approach the Kazakh kids gathered to welcome us. We greet them, shake hands, and accept flowers that for all I know are covered with measles. Gennady chats with the children happily, his face lit up with his signature smile.

The entire party—prime crew, backup crew, and support staff—boards two buses for the ride to the quarantine facility where we will spend the next two weeks. (The prime crew and backup crew always travel separately, for the same reason the president and vice president do.) As we are boarding, for a laugh, Gennady sits in the driver’s seat of our bus, and we all take pictures of him with our phones. Many years ago, crews used to travel to Baikonur, spend one day here checking out the Soyuz spacecraft, then travel back to Star City to wait out the two weeks until launch. Now, cutbacks require that we make only one trip, so we will be stuck here for the duration. I take a window seat, pop in my earbuds, and rest my head against the window, hoping to become sleepy enough to take a nap before we get to our hotel-like quarantine facility. This road is in terrible shape—it always has been, and it only gets worse—and the rutted and patched asphalt rattles my head against the window enough to keep me awake.

We pass dilapidated Soviet-era apartment complexes, huge rusted satellite dishes communicating with Russian spacecraft, mounds of garbage randomly strewn about, the occasional camel. It’s a clear, sunny day. We pass Baikonur’s own statue of Yuri Gagarin, this one with his arms raised—not in the triumphant V of a gymnast celebrating a perfect dismount, but the joyful straight-up gesture of a kid about to try a somersault. In this statue, he’s smiling.

Far over the horizon a launch tower rises above the same deteriorating concrete pad from which Yuri first rocketed off Earth, the same pad from which nearly every Russian cosmonaut has left Earth, the same pad from which I will leave Earth two weeks from now. The Russians sometimes seem to care more about tradition than they do about appearance or function. This launchpad, which they call Gagarinsky Start (Gagarin’s Launchpad), is imbued with the successes of the past, and they have no plans to replace it.

Misha’s and my mission to spend a year on ISS is unprecedented. A normal mission to the space station lasts five to six months, so scientists have a good deal of data about what happens to the human body in space for that length of time. But very little is known about what happens after month six. The symptoms might get precipitously worse in the ninth month, for instance, or they might level off. We don’t know, and there is only one way to find out.

Misha and I will collect various types of data for studies on ourselves, which will take a significant amount of our time. Because Mark and I are identical twins, I’m also taking part in an extensive study comparing the two of us throughout the year, down to the genetic level. The International Space Station is a world-class orbiting laboratory, and in addition to the human studies of which I am one of the main subjects, I will also spend a lot of my time this year working on other experiments, like fluid physics, botany, combustion, and Earth observation.

When I talk about the International Space Station to audiences, I always share with them the importance of the science being done there. But to me, it’s just as important that the station is serving as a foothold for our species in space. From there, we can learn more about how to push out farther into the cosmos. The costs are high, as are the risks.

On my last flight to the space station, a mission of 159 days, I lost bone mass, my muscles atrophied, and my blood redistributed itself in my body, which strained and shrank the walls of my heart. More troubling, I experienced problems with my vision, as many other astronauts have. I have been exposed to more than thirty times the radiation of a person on Earth, equivalent to about ten chest X-rays every day. This exposure will increase my risk of a fatal cancer for the rest of my life. None of this compares, though, to the most troubling risk: that something bad could happen to someone I love while I’m in space with no way for me to come home.

Looking out the window at the strange landscape of Baikonur, I realize that for all the time I’ve spent here, weeks in fact, I have never really seen the town itself. I’ve only been to the designated spaces where I have official business: the hangars where the engineers and technicians prepare our spacecraft and rocket for flight; the windowless fluorescent-lit rooms where we get into our Sokol pressure suits; the building where our instructors, interpreters, doctors, cooks, management people, and other support staff stay; and the nearby building, affectionately called Saddam’s Palace by Americans, where we stay. This opulent residence was built to accommodate the head of the Russian space agency and his staff and guests, and he allows the crews to use it while we’re here. It’s a nicer place than the other facility, and far nicer than the austere crew quarters housed in an office building where shuttle astronauts used to spend quarantine at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Saddam’s Palace has crystal chandeliers, marble floors, and a four-room suite for each of us, complete with Jacuzzi tubs. The building also has a banya, or Russian sauna, with a cold pool to jump into afterward. Early in our two-week quarantine I go out to the banya to find a naked Misha beating on a naked Gennady with birch branches. The first time I saw this scene I was a bit taken aback, but once I experienced the banya myself, followed by a dip in a freezing cold pool of water and a homemade Russian beer, I completely understood the appeal.

Saddam’s Palace also has an elaborate dining room with pressed white tablecloths, fine china, and a flat-screen TV on the wall that constantly plays old Russian movies the cosmonauts seem to love. The Russian food is good, but for Americans it can start to get old after a while—borscht at nearly every meal, meat and potatoes, other kinds of meat and potatoes, everything covered with tons of dill.

“Gennady,” I say while we are eating dinner a few days into our stay. “What’s with all the dill?”

“What do you mean?” he asks.

“You guys put dill on everything. Some of this food might actually be good if it weren’t covered in dill.”

“Ah, okay, I understand,” Gennady says, nodding, his signature smile starting to emerge. “It’s from when the Russian diet consisted mostly of potatoes, cabbage, and vodka. Dill gets rid of farts.”

Later I google it. It’s true. As it happens, getting rid of gas is a worthwhile goal before being sealed into a small tin can together for many hours, so I stop complaining about the dill.

THE DAY AFTER we arrive in Baikonur we have the first “fit check.” This is our opportunity to get inside the Soyuz capsule while it’s still in the hangar and not yet attached to the rocket that will launch us into space. In the cavernous hangar known as Building 254 we pull on our Sokol suits—always an awkward process. The only entrance into the suits is in the chest, so we have to slide our lower bodies into the chest hole, then struggle to fit our arms into the sleeves while blindly pulling the neck ring up over our heads. I often come away from this procedure with scratches on my scalp. Not having hair is a disadvantage here. The chest opening is then sealed through a disconcertingly low-tech process of gathering the edges of the fabric together and securing them with elastic bands. The first time I was introduced to this system I couldn’t believe those rubber bands were all that was meant to protect us from space. Once I got to the space station, I learned the Russians use the exact same rubber bands to seal their garbage bags in space. In one sense I find this comical; in another way I respect the efficiency of the Russian philosophy on technology. If it works, why change it?

The Sokol suit was designed as a rescue suit, which means that its only function is to save us in case of a fire or depressurization in the Soyuz. It’s different from the spacesuit I will wear during spacewalks later in my mission; that suit will be much sturdier and more functional, a little spaceship in its own right. The Sokol suit serves the same purpose as the orange NASA-designed pressure suit I used to wear to fly on the space shuttle. NASA introduced that suit only after the Challenger disaster of 1986; before that, shuttle astronauts wore simple cloth flight suits, as the Russians did before a depressurization accident killed three cosmonauts in 1971. Since then, cosmonauts (and any astronauts to join them in the Soyuz) have worn the Sokol suits. In a weird way, we are surrounded by the evidence of tragedies, too-late fixes that might have saved the astronauts and cosmonauts who took the same risks we are taking and lost.

Today is like a dress rehearsal: we suit up, perform leak checks, then get strapped into our custom-made seats, built from plaster molds taken of our bodies. This is not for our comfort, which is not a particularly high priority for the Russians, but for safety and to save space—no sense building more seat than is strictly necessary. The custom-molded seats will cradle our spines and absorb some of the impact on the hard return to Earth a year after we depart.

As much time as I have spent in the Soyuz simulators in Star City, I’m still amazed by how difficult it is to wedge myself and my pressure suit into my seat. Each time, I have a moment of doubt whether I’m going to fit. But then I do—just barely. If I were to sit up out of the seat liner, my head would smash against the wall. I wonder how my taller colleagues do it. Once we’re strapped in, we practice using the hardware, reaching out for buttons, reading data off screens, grabbing our checklists. We discuss what we might want to have customized for us, down to details such as where we want our timers (used for timing engine burns), where we want our pencils, and where we want the bits of Velcro that will allow us to put things “down” in space.

When we finish, we clamber back out of the hatch and look around the dusty hangar. The next Progress resupply vehicle is here; it looks very similar to the Soyuz, because the Russians never create two designs when one will do. In a few months, this Progress will deliver equipment, experiments, food, oxygen, and care packages to us on the ISS. After that, a Soyuz will launch in July carrying a new three-person crew. Somewhere in this hangar, the parts for the next Soyuz to fly after that are being assembled, and another one after that, and another one after that. The Russians have been launching the Soyuz since I was three years old.

The Soyuz spacecraft—Soyuz means “union,” as in “Soviet Union,” in Russian—is designed to maneuver in space, dock with the station, and keep human beings alive, but the rockets are the workhorses, humanity’s answer to the pull of Earth’s gravity. The rockets (which for some odd reason are also called Soyuz) are prepared for launch in an assembly and test facility across from the hangars known as site 112. Gennady, Misha, and I cross the street, pass the gathered Russian media, enter that enormous building, and stand in another cavernous, quiet room, this time regarding our rocket. Gunmetal gray, it lies on its side. Unlike the space shuttle or the colossal Apollo/Saturn that preceded it, the Soyuz spacecraft and rocket combination is assembled horizontally and rolled out to the launchpad in that position. Only when it reaches the launchpad, a couple of days before we launch, will it be set upright to vertical, pointing toward its destination. This is yet another example of how the Russians and Americans do things differently. In this case, the procedure is less ceremonial than the NASA way, with its stately, majestic rollouts of vertical launch vehicles balanced on an enormous crawler transporter.

At 162 feet long, this rocket, the Soyuz-FG, is noticeably smaller than the assembled space shuttle, but it’s still a daunting colossus, a building-size object that will, we hope, leave the ground, with us riding on top of it, at twenty-five times the speed of sound. Its navy gray sheet metal, adorned with low-tech rivets, is unbeautiful but somehow comforting in its utility. The Soyuz-FG is the grandchild of the Soviet R-7, the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile. The R-7 was designed during the Cold War for launching nuclear weapons at American targets, and I can’t help remembering how as a child I was aware that New York City, and my suburb of West Orange, New Jersey, would certainly have been among the first targets to be instantly vaporized by a Soviet attack. Today, I’m standing inside their formerly secret facility, discussing with two Russians our plans to trust one another with our lives while riding to space on this converted weapon.

Gennady, Misha, and I all served in our militaries before being chosen to fly in space, and though it’s something we never talk about, we all know we could have been ordered to kill one another. Now we are taking part in the largest peaceful international collaboration in history. When people ask whether the space station is worth the expense, this is something I always point out. What is it worth to see two former bitter enemies transform weapons into transport for exploration and the pursuit of scientific knowledge? What is it worth to see former enemy nations turn their warriors into crewmates and lifelong friends? This is impossible to put a dollar figure on, but to me it’s one of the things that makes this project worth the expense, even worth risking our lives.

THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION got its start in 1984, when President Reagan announced during his State of the Union address that NASA was designing a space station, Freedom, to be put in orbit within ten years. Resistance from Congress created years of cutbacks and reconfigurations, and Freedom was no closer to actually being built when, in 1993, President Clinton announced that the station would be merged with the Russian Federal Space Agency’s proposed space station Mir-2. With the addition of space agencies representing Europe, Japan, and Canada, the international coalition came to include fifteen countries. It took more than one hundred launches to get the components into orbit and more than one hundred spacewalks to assemble them. The ISS is a remarkable achievement of technology and international cooperation. It has been inhabited nonstop since November 2, 2000; put another way, it has been more than fourteen years since all humans were on the Earth at once. It is by far the longest-inhabited structure in space and has been visited by more than two hundred people from sixteen nations. It’s the largest peacetime international project in history.

I wake up my last morning on Earth at around seven. I spend the morning looking through all of my bags—one to meet me in Kazakhstan, others to send back to Houston. The logistics are strange: What do I want to have with me when I first land? What will I not need until later? Did I make sure to write down my credit card and account numbers for things like my utilities and bank? It’s hard enough to deal with these sorts of details on Earth, but I need to be prepared to avoid defaulting on my mortgage, as well as to buy Amiko and the girls presents, from space.

My last earthly breakfast is a Baikonur attempt at American cuisine: runny eggs (because I could never make the Kazakh cook understand the term “over medium”), toast, and “breakfast sausages” (actually microwaved hot dogs). Getting ready on the day of launch takes much longer than you’d think it would, like so many aspects of spaceflight. First I take a final trip to the banya to relax, then go through the preflight enema ritual—our guts shut down in space initially, so the Russians encourage us to get things cleaned out ahead of time. The cosmonauts have their doctors do this, with warm water and rubber hoses, but I opt for the drugstore type in private, which lets me maintain a comfortable friendship with my flight surgeon. I savor a bath in the Jacuzzi tub, then a nap (because our launch is scheduled for 1:42 a.m. local time). When I wake, I take a shower, lingering awhile. I know how much I’ll miss the feeling of water for the next year.

The Russian flight surgeon we call “Dr. No” shows up shortly after I’m out of the shower. He is called Dr. No because he gets to decide whether our families can see us once we’re in quarantine. His decisions are arbitrary, sometimes mean-spirited, and absolute. He is here to wipe down our entire bodies with alcohol wipes. The original idea behind the alcohol swab-down was to kill any germs trying to stow away with space travelers, but now it seems like just another ritual. After a champagne toast with senior management and our significant others, we sit in silence for a minute, a Russian tradition before a long trip. As we leave the building, a Russian Orthodox priest will bless us and throw holy water into each of our faces. Every cosmonaut since Yuri Gagarin has gone through each of these steps, so we will go through them, too. I’m not religious, but I always say that when you’re getting ready to be rocketed into space, a blessing can’t hurt.

We do a ceremonial walkout past the media with a traditional Russian song playing, “Trava u doma,” a song about cosmonauts missing home that sounds like a Soviet marching band playing at a carnival:

We get on the bus that will take us to the building where we get suited up. The moment the door to the bus closes behind us, a rope holding back the crowd is cut, and everyone rushes forward. It’s chaotic, and I can’t spot my family at first, but then I see them, in the front row—Amiko, Samantha, Charlotte, and Mark. Someone lifts up Charlotte, who is eleven, so she can put her hand on the window, and I put my hand up to hers, trying to look happy. Charlotte is smiling, her round white face in a grin. If she’s sad that she won’t see me for a year, if she’s scared to watch me leave Earth on a barely controlled bomb, if she’s aware of the many types of peril I will face before I get to hug her again a year from now, she doesn’t show it. Then she’s down on the asphalt again, standing with the rest of them and waving. I see Amiko smiling, though I can also see tears in her eyes. I see Samantha, who is twenty. Her wide smile betrays her apprehension for what is to come. And then the bus’s brakes release with a hissing scream, and we are gone.

I SIT ON a cheap leather couch waiting to suit up in Building 254, a thirty-minute drive from Saddam’s Palace. A flat-screen in the corner shows a silly Russian TV show that none of us pay attention to. There is some food laid out—cold chicken, meat pies, juice, and tea—and though it isn’t what I would have chosen as my last earthly meal for a year, I eat a bit.

First Gennady is called into an adjacent room to strip down and put on his diaper, cardiac electrodes, and a fresh pair of white long underwear (meant to absorb sweat and shield us from the rubber of the Sokol suit). When Gennady returns, Misha goes in to diaper up. Then I go. Whenever I do this, I chuckle to myself that I wouldn’t have thought I’d be in diapers again until much later in life. It’s now time to get our Sokol suits on. We have white-coated, surgical-masked Russian specialists to help us get dressed. They expertly close the openings in our suits with a series of folds and the peculiar rubber bands.

The three of us walk into another room, which is divided by a sheet of glass. On the other side are our families, managers from the Russian space agency (Roscosmos), NASA leaders, and members of the media, sitting in rows of seats facing us. I know the closest analogy should be a NASA press conference, but this moment has always made me feel like a gorilla in the zoo instead.

I immediately spot Amiko, Mark, and my daughters in the front row. Amiko and the girls have been here for a few days, but Mark only just arrived. They all smile at me and wave. Not for the first time, I’m grateful that my brother is there for them. As an experienced astronaut himself, and someone who knows me better than anyone else, he can help them understand what will be going on, and reassure them when necessary, better than anyone else could.

Amiko smiles happily and points to the pendant I had made for her before I left Houston, a silver version of the Year in Space mission patch. Samantha and Charlotte wear the silver pendants too. I will bring a second version of the pendants, in gold with sapphires set into them, with me to give the three of them when I return. Amiko’s smile is sincere and happy, but because I know her so well I can also see that she is tired, not only from jet lag but also from the strain. This is Amiko’s second time going through the process of preparing for a long-duration mission with me, so she’s known what to expect, though I’m not sure that makes it any easier. She also works for NASA, in the public affairs office, so she knows better than most astronauts’ partners what I am facing on this mission. In some instances this knowledge will be comforting, but more often than not—including today—it would have been less stressful to know less.

Amiko was an acquaintance for a long time. She’d worked closely with my brother on a project and also shared mutual friends with my ex-wife, Leslie. In early 2009, Amiko and I both filed for divorce, each unbeknownst to the other, and by coincidence we ran into each other a few times many months later. Amiko says she remembers one of those nights being impressed that though I had jokingly acknowledged she was attractive, I’d turned down a chance to get in the hot tub with her and some other people in favor of going to bed early for a training event in the morning. A few weeks later, I saw her again at a party, and this time I did wind up in the hot tub with her. We talked all night, but again she was impressed that I didn’t make any advances. Anyone who has seen Amiko knows that she has to deal with a lot of attention from men, and I guess I stood out for trying to get to know her as a person. But I’m not an idiot—I did make sure to get her phone number that night.

I’m always curious about how people end up doing what they do, especially when they seem to be especially good at it, as Amiko is. She struck me as different from a lot of the people who work for NASA public affairs, some of whom can be conservative about new ideas and resistant to change. I asked her about how she came to her career, and though she told me only a bit of her history it was pretty compelling. Kicked out of her house at fifteen for standing up to her mother’s physical abuse, with nothing but the clothes on her back, married at eighteen, and with two kids by twenty-three, she got a job as a NASA secretary. From the moment she was hired, she began working toward getting into the agency’s competitive employee education program, in which NASA pays for promising employees to take college classes. Once Amiko was chosen, she began taking the maximum credits possible every semester while working full-time and raising her two small boys. She finished her degree in communications with a perfect GPA and every honor given to undergraduates. I had known she was smart and capable, but the more I learned about her life story, the more impressed I was with her. Her two sons, by that point in high school, were doing well, and she continued to set new challenges for herself. Most people would not have gotten past the setbacks she’d faced, but through intelligence, grit, and fierce determination, she had made the life for herself that she wanted. I could tell she wouldn’t easily change that life for any man, even for an astronaut being as charming as he could.

We started seeing each other that fall, and things between us had become serious by the time I went to space in October 2010. This was my first long-duration mission to the International Space Station and her first mission as the partner left behind. It was an unusual challenge for a new relationship. We were both surprised to find that the separation only brought us closer. I could depend on her as my partner on the ground, and we enjoyed being able to give each other our undivided attention for the hour or so a day we could talk on the phone. I came back more confident than ever that we belonged together. I know some of our friends wonder why we haven’t gotten married—we’ve been together now for five and a half years and have lived together for much of that time. I’ve been there for her sons when necessary, and she is always there for my daughters. We are as committed as any married couple, but because both of us have been married before, and neither of us is especially traditional, we don’t seem to see the point in it. The media sometimes refer to Amiko as my “longtime partner,” and that seems right to both of us.

Sitting next to Amiko is Samantha. I’d been surprised to see her new look when she showed up in Baikonur, her long curls dyed black, thick black eyeliner, dark red lipstick, and nothing but black clothes. Since her mother and I divorced, my relationship with Samantha has been rocky, and in many ways it’s still recovering from the fallout. She was fifteen when Leslie moved the girls against my wishes from Houston to Virginia Beach, an especially tough age to deal with that kind of upheaval. Samantha blames me for the divorce and for many of the problems that have come since. When I look at her today through the glass, her blue eyes sparkling under the heavy eyeliner, I still see her the way she looked the first time I saw her, in 1994, in the maternity ward of the Patuxent River naval air station, where I was a test pilot. Leslie went through a long, difficult labor, and when Samantha was finally delivered it was by emergency cesarean section. When I first saw her tiny pink face with one eye shut and the other eye open, I felt an unbelievable urge to protect her. Though she’s an adult now, I still feel the same way.

Charlotte was born when Samantha was almost nine, an age gap that has made it easy for them to get along. Samantha seems to enjoy having an adoring sidekick, and Charlotte has had the freedom to go anywhere her older sister is willing to take her—including to Baikonur. Charlotte’s birth was even more difficult than Samantha’s; I remember standing in the operating room and hearing the doctor calling an emergency code. When they finally got Charlotte out, she was limp and unresponsive. I still remember the sight of her tiny, blue, lifeless arm hanging out of the incision. The doctors warned us she might have cerebral palsy, but she has grown up to be healthy, bright, strong, and a generous-spirited person. I know she must be experiencing extremes of emotion today, but she seems happy and calm, sitting next to her sister and brushing her light brown bangs out of her eyes to smile at me. I feel grateful that my daughters are able to lean on Amiko for reassurance and to follow her lead in how to deal with the stresses of this week.

I also spot Spanky—Mike Fincke, a friend and colleague from my astronaut class—who has been in charge of helping out my family while I’ve been in quarantine. Between missions, astronauts can be assigned to take on all kinds of earthbound responsibilities, and Spanky, who has been to ISS himself and will probably go back, has been fantastic with my family—answering questions, fulfilling special requests, communicating their preferences to NASA whenever possible. This is the second time Spanky has done this job for me.

On our side of the glass is a mock-up of the Soyuz seat, and one by one, Gennady, Misha, and I get into it, lying on our backs. Technicians check our suits for leaks. I lie there for fifteen minutes with my helmet closed and my knees pressed up to my chest while a large room full of people, some of whom I don’t know, watch politely. Why we need to do this for an audience I’ve never been sure—another ritual. Afterward we sit in a row of chairs before the glass to have a last talk, through microphones, with our families.

The things we want to say to our loved ones before we might be about to die in a fireball above Kazakhstan are not the things we would want to say while the assembled press from a number of countries listen from rows of chairs and write down our every word. Adding to the awkwardness, we are all sharing one audio system, so each family has to wait their turn to avoid talking over one another. Still, I wouldn’t want my daughters’ last image to be of me speaking a few terse words into a microphone, so I try to split the difference by saying little but trying to communicate much in other ways, figuring that simple gestures can say a lot. I give Amiko and the girls the “I’ve got my eyes on you” gesture, pointing back and forth from my eyes to their eyes. It makes them smile.

When we finish this ritual and go outside, it’s dark and freezing cold. Floodlights blind us as we walk into the parking lot, flanked by rows of media and spectators we can barely make out. The Sokol suits are designed for sitting in the fetal position while launching in the Soyuz, not for walking, so the three of us waddle along like hunched penguins with as much dignity as we can. We are carrying cooling fans that blow air into our pressure suits, like the Apollo astronauts in the old NASA footage. We are all wearing two pairs of thin white gloves that are meant to keep us from bringing germs to space (at least, that’s the idea). We will remove the top layer right before we get into the Soyuz.

The bus taking us to the launchpad is idling nearby, its billowing exhaust silhouetted by the floodlights. The three of us walk up to three small white squares that have been painted on the asphalt, labeled with our positions on the Soyuz: commander for Gennady, flight engineer for Misha, flight engineer 2 for me. We step into our little boxes and wait for the head of the Russian space agency to ask us each in turn, again, if we are ready for our flight. It’s sort of like getting married, except whenever you’re asked a question you say, “We are ready for the flight” instead of “I do.” I’m sure the American rituals would seem just as alien to the Russians: before flying on the space shuttle, we would get suited up in our orange launch-and-entry suits, stand around a table in the Operations and Checkout Building, and then play a very specific version of lowball poker. We couldn’t go out to the launchpad until the commander had lost a round (by getting the highest hand), using up his or her bad luck for the day. No one remembers exactly how this tradition got started. Probably some crew did it first and came back alive, so everyone else had to do it too.

We board the bus—the prime crew, our flight surgeons, the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center managers, and a few suit technicians. We sit on the side facing all the lights and clamoring people. I catch sight of my family one last time and give them a wave. The bus slowly pulls away, and they are gone.

Soon, we are moving, the motion lulling us into a contemplative trance. After a while, the bus slows, then comes to a stop well before the launchpad. We nod at one another, step off, and take up our positions. We’ve all undone the rubber-band seals that had been so carefully and publicly leak-checked just an hour before. I center myself in front of the right rear tire and reach into my Sokol suit. I don’t really have to pee, but it’s a tradition: When Yuri Gagarin was on his way to the launchpad for his historic first spaceflight, he asked to pull over—right about here—and peed on the right rear tire of the bus. Then he went to space and came back alive. So now we all must do the same. The tradition is so well respected that women space travelers bring a bottle of urine or water to splash on the tire rather than getting entirely out of their suits.

This ritual satisfactorily observed, we get back into the bus and resume the last leg of our journey. A few minutes later, the bus makes another stop to let the train pass that has just fueled our rocket. The bus door opens and an unexpected face appears: my brother.

This is a breach of quarantine: my brother, having been on a series of germ-infested planes from the United States to Moscow to Baikonur just yesterday, could be carrying all manner of terrible illnesses. Dr. No has been saying “Nyet” all week, and now, suddenly, he sees my brother and says “Da.” The Russians enforce the quarantine with an iron fist, then let my brother break it for sentimental reasons; they make a ritual of sealing up our suits, then let us open them to pee on a tire. At times, their inconsistencies drive me nuts, but this gesture, letting me see my brother again when I least expect to, means the world to me. Mark and I don’t exchange many words as we ride together for the few minutes out to the launchpad. Here we are, two boys from blue-collar New Jersey who somehow made it such a long way from home.