The rest of our days in quarantine were full but tranquil. We did not-so-taxing things like packing the personal items we wanted to take to space. That didn’t take long, because the Soyuz is so small that weight and balance affect how it flies; the designated bag is the size of a small shaving kit. I managed to cram in a new wedding ring for Helene, some commemorative jewelry, a watch for my daughter, Kristin (I flew a watch each for my two sons on previous flights), a full family photo for my mom and dad, and some guitar picks emblazoned with our Expedition 35 emblem—all things I could later give to people as “flown” gifts.
In quarantine we also worked out, though carefully, particularly after one Russian manager blew out his Achilles tendon playing indoor badminton. I knew that if that happened to me, I’d be headed for Houston, not the ISS. At this point, my departure wouldn’t be such a huge problem for NASA, because my replacement was just down the hall at the Cosmonaut Hotel; the backup crew does everything the prime crew does, right up to the final hours before launch. To guarantee that the show could go on even if disaster struck, the two crews travel to Baikonur in separate vehicles. Just in case.
Training never stops in our business, not even when we’re on the ISS, but it does slow down considerably in the days leading up to launch. We’d already been deemed fully competent to fly—we had completed “final quals” and signed the traditional pre-launch book in Yuri Gagarin’s old office in November. So in Baikonur we just took some refresher classes: reviewing the lessons learned during recent missions, for example, and practicing docking the Soyuz on a portable simulator. Overall, the workload was light and included things like media interviews (at a safe, germ-unfriendly distance). We also signed endless stacks of crew photos, enough for each citizen of Russia, it seemed.
While the backup crew toured local museums (cautiously, treating other people as walking disease vectors), we remained cloistered, reading books and taking advantage of the Wi-Fi (on the ISS, the Internet is dial-up-era slow). In the evenings we’d reunite and, along with our instructors and support staff, head to the banya, the Russian version of a sauna. Afterward, we often played guitar and sipped single malt, a group of friends from all over the world, united by our mission.
Everyday routines and stressors had been stripped away to encourage us to focus—emotionally, intellectually and physically—on our mission. At first I felt a little unmoored: after years of studying and rehearsing, suddenly there were very few formal demands on us and no difficult challenges to face. But pretty quickly, I adjusted to a simplified existence. Freed from everyday responsibilities such as making my own meals and doing my own laundry—as all astronauts do at least in Star City and on the road, if not in their own homes—I took it easy and had a chance to gather my thoughts. Tom, Roman and I were about to go away for quite a few months and take quite a few big risks. The best thing we could do for ourselves was to let that reality dominate our mental landscape until seriousness of purpose met buoyant certainty: yes, we’re ready to do this thing.
As our time in quarantine drew to a close, I felt more confident and focused every day. I doubt I would have had the same sense of readiness if someone had told me, “Okay, show up in Baikonur on Wednesday morning, you’re going to space at noon.” I’d probably have spent the previous day running around doing all the things everyone does before a trip: packing, paying bills, picking up dry cleaning. Even if you’re highly competent, when you’re careening full-speed toward a deadline or a destination, you usually arrive breathless, still mentally scanning your to-do list and not fully focused on the task ahead. You may achieve impressive results anyway, but you’re likely to deliver less than you would if you didn’t feel harried. For me, anyway, going into a high-pressure situation feeling calm and fully prepared has another benefit, too: I’m able to live more fully in the moment, absorbed and engaged in it, and better able to appreciate it as it unfolds rather than in retrospect.
Of course, that kind of single-mindedness takes a village—other people have to pick up the slack when you’re unavailable, literally or figuratively. If you fail to recognize that fact and behave accordingly, you can count on creating exactly the kinds of distractions and conflicts you should be trying to avoid when you’re facing a major challenge. People around you will let you know in no uncertain terms that your single-minded dedication bears a striking resemblance to pigheaded selfishness.
During our first few years in Houston, I’d volunteer for anything and everything at NASA and the CSA, so I was on the road a lot. After a while I started to notice that when I got home, there was no longer a hero’s welcome. The kids didn’t leap up and rush joyfully to the door to greet me. Sometimes they even seemed a tad annoyed to see me, particularly if I reminded them of my expectations in the way of manners, rules and comportment. Helene was delighted to explain this puzzling phenomenon. She informed me in the most diplomatic fashion possible that I’d been away so much that my family had learned to live without me, and she and the kids had developed their own ways of doing things and didn’t really appreciate my attempts to turn back the clock. In other words, I was now effectively a visitor in my own home and would have to put in some serious time before picking up the threads of fatherhood. She went on to say that she’d wondered if maybe I wasn’t going just a wee bit overboard with the extra work assignments. Were they really getting me closer to my professional goals? Or had I simply got in the habit of saying yes at work and no to my family?
We’d had a similar discussion back in Bagotville, when we had three kids under the age of 5 and I was spending quite a few of my days off taking part in optional military exercises. Helene had asked, point blank, “Do you want to have a family or just a career? I’ll happily give you the space to have both, and I’m willing to carry 90 percent of the burden here at home until I get a paying job again, but I can’t carry 99 percent.” She was all for me volunteering—but she encouraged me in the strongest possible terms to start evaluating on a case-by-case basis whether a given volunteer opportunity was something I needed to do for professional growth, or just something I wanted to do. I did try to prioritize differently after that and to be more conscious of the effects my decisions had on her and on my own relationship with our kids.
I had to recalibrate again in Houston. The reality of an astronaut’s life is that you travel 70 percent of the time and you don’t have much say over your own schedule—so when you do have leeway, you have to make choices that clearly communicate gratitude to your family and a desire to see them, on their terms, every once in a while.
In quarantine, however, there’s no pretense of trying to balance work and personal life—your domestic responsibilities go right out the window and family life is pushed to the margin. That’s the whole point. In Baikonur my family and Tom Marshburn’s arrived along with a CSA/NASA contingent three days before launch, and stayed in a hotel just a stone’s throw away from the crew quarters. We were allowed visits from our spouses and children, but only during strictly scheduled and relatively brief time slots and only after they had been checked by a doctor (even so, we were encouraged to keep them at arm’s length). Extensive negotiations were required to get my brother Dave into crew quarters for 30 minutes so we could play guitar together and record a song—sitting clear across the room from one another, to be on the safe side. Tom’s daughter, Grace, who was then 10 years old, didn’t even get to be in the same room with her dad. Kids under 12 are considered too infection-prone and rambunctious for the monastic environment of quarantine, and can only interact with quarantined astronauts via phone, behind soundproof glass.
Although quarantine is designed to protect astronauts, it’s certainly not painless for our families. For starters, they have to come to us, and Kazakhstan is not easy to get to unless you live in Kyrgyzstan. Then, not only are they at the mercy of our schedule, but they are required to take part in “fun” traditions that may not strike them as especially entertaining. A day or two before launch, for instance, we always watch
White Sun of the Desert, a Russian movie with a Lawrence of Arabia–esque hero, with our crewmates and relatives (who may be considerably less amused than we are by the overacting).
For those of us who are going to space, rituals like this impose a reassuring, predictable structure on the days leading up to launch. For our families, though, these rituals may feel more like additional obligations when they’re already carrying an extra load. Not only have we shrugged off all domestic duties, but our spouses are responsible for hosting the friends and relatives who’ve come to see us off. By the time we head to the launch pad, serenely focused on our mission, our spouses tend to be feeling pretty stressed. As my colleague Mike Fossum says, “Let’s face it—our dreams become their nightmare.”
It was even more stressful when the Shuttle was still flying. For my first space flight in 1995, Helene and I invited just about everyone we knew, along with everyone they knew, and wound up with more than 700 guests. Hey, a Florida holiday that includes a rocket launch and a VIP badge from NASA? Sold! About a week before the big day a horde of family and friends descended eagerly on Cocoa Beach, Florida. Even the name evoked a holiday feeling and they had a great time, golfing and going to Disney World, frolicking on the beach and painting the town, while their astronaut friend/relative was in lock-up. Of course, we wanted all of them to have a great time, but my role in ensuring that was pretty much limited to not dying. Helene, on the other hand, arranged a party, hosted endless breakfasts, luncheons, dinners and other events, and gave media interview after media interview (“Yes, I’m so proud!”). Non-stop mingling was the order of the day; people were understandably celebratory and in the mood to socialize, and they all wanted as much access as possible to the immediate family. She was basically run off her feet.
The launch from Baikonur in December 2012 was a slightly different story. I was allowed just 15 guests total, including immediate family, and it was wildly expensive to get there, via Russia, right before Christmas. Our closest friends and family, plus Tom’s closest friends and family, plus a cadre of CSA and NASA people took over a hotel in Moscow. Helene and Tom’s wife, Ann, helped arrange walking tours, provided restaurant recommendations and answered countless questions about what to wear, how to get to the subway station and when the bus to the airport was leaving. Helene told me it was like hosting a destination wedding. The only thing missing was the groom.
When after a few days the party relocated to Kazakhstan on an ancient plane chartered by NASA, the mood became even more festive. Jet lag, frigid temperatures that shocked even Canadians and a complete absence of language skills were apparently remedied with wild nights in various Baikonur “hot spots.” When Helene and the kids trooped over from the hotel to see me for the hour or two we were allotted to be together each day, they brought increasingly colorful stories about sensible, hard-working relatives and friends who had, the night before, morphed into vodka-loving party animals with a taste for wearing other people’s bras draped on their heads like berets.
Everyone had great fun, including Helene, but for her there was also the stress that comes with managing the logistics of a week-long reunion while worrying that something might happen to delay the launch. She was not, however, worrying about me, not even when we reviewed my will. She was counting on me to sweat the small stuff during launch and afterward, too. Also, she’s a realist: she knows that exploration is risky, some explorers will die, and worrying won’t change that fact. Some spouses are nervous to the point of nausea before launch, but mine was increasingly excited the closer we got to liftoff, and not just because my dream was coming true. There was pride and joy that I’d made it, but relief, too. She was ready to get back to her real life and her own adventures.
Fortunately, some smart person at NASA recognized long ago how difficult launch is for spouses and came up with the idea of family escorts: you choose two astronauts who aren’t currently training for a mission, one to look after the immediate family and one who’s in charge of extended family and friends at launch. Essentially, the family escort is a surrogate spouse: someone who’s available to help out on Earth not only during launch but later, when life has returned to normal but the mission is ongoing. I’ve been a family escort a bunch of times, and the job includes running back to the hotel to get the access badge someone forgot, carting home the uncle who got bombed at the party, grabbing sandwiches, counting heads on the tour bus, dealing with complaints about hotel rooms that are too hot or too cold—you’re essentially a dogsbody, but that never bothered me, not least because I knew I’d need someone else to do this stuff for my family if I ever went to space again. In 2012, that was Jeremy Hansen, a decorated fighter pilot and Canadian astronaut, who spent the days before Christmas herding my guests onto buses and in and out of museums, hauling their luggage from one place to the next, helping them exchange money and making sure they woke at 4:00 a.m. to catch their flights home—all with seasonal good cheer.
When you’re choosing your family escort, you don’t just consider which astronaut is most likely to be able to smile and nod when Aunt Ruby gets going on one of her political rants. Mostly, you think about which astronaut you’d want standing next to your spouse if someone you loved died while you were in space—or if your own rocket blew up, in which case the family escort would need to stand there for months or even years. For my second launch in 2001, Rick Husband was one of my escorts, and he did a lot of helpful things for my family. Next time he flew, his own family escorts, who included CSA astronaut Steve MacLean, had to step in and support his wife through the hardest experience imaginable: Rick was the commander of Columbia, the Shuttle that disintegrated on re-entry. Agreeing to be an escort, you know that you may wind up helping a spouse not only during a rowdy launch party but at a funeral and long afterwards, doing things like helping set up educational trust funds for the kids and advocating for the family during the accident investigation. I’ve never had to do any of that, thankfully, but you know it’s a possibility when you agree to be a family escort. It’s a huge responsibility.
But it’s one we should take on, not just for altruistic reasons but for self-interested ones, too. Taking guests’ orders for a Starbucks run and making sure someone else’s grandpa has his preferred brand of gluten-free bread is a highly effective ego check. And there’s something else: being an escort forced me to see the world through the eyes of the family of an astronaut. My own family had let me know on one or two occasions that being the child or spouse of an astronaut isn’t always easy. Kristin puts it this way: “When your dad is an astronaut, the most interesting thing about you, growing up, doesn’t have much to do with you, and it’s nothing you control or influence. The fact that your dad is an astronaut trumps everything else people see when they look at you.” My children dealt with and overcame this challenge in different ways; all three are now accomplished adults with full lives and many interests. But my career choice made that more difficult in some respects, and being a family escort helped me understand that many of the difficulties were situational rather than specific to our family. Helping colleagues’ families during a launch, you become keenly aware of the ways that all families are forced to juggle and sacrifice—not just while their dad or mom or spouse is in space, but for years beforehand.
From 2007 onward, I spent about six months a year in Star City and also trained in the U.S., Japan, Germany, Canada and Kazakhstan. I was only home about 15 weeks a year and I missed a lot of birthdays and holidays. Inevitably my schedule created hardships for everyone who’s close to me. There was no way around that, but I did try to anticipate potentially negative consequences so I could figure out how to prevent them. Long before heading into quarantine, I tried to figure out ways to acknowledge the costs to the people around me, ways to compensate them and ways to include them in any success I had.
For my second Shuttle flight I was in quarantine for my son Evan’s 16th birthday. That’s a big day in a teenager’s life, a turning point when he could get a driver?
??s license and was officially on his way to being considered an adult. But the hoopla surrounding the launch was overshadowing his birthday, and Evan was resoundingly unhappy about that. In quarantine, I was nicely isolated from his black cloud, so Helene was bearing the brunt. She did have visiting privileges, though, and did not hesitate to let me know.
Frankly, I just hadn’t thought through the consequences of the timing in detail. At this late date, my only option was to try to make his birthday special in any way I could despite being holed up in quarantine. So I announced in some of the many phone interviews I did that we would be lighting the world’s biggest candles—the Shuttle’s rocket engines—to celebrate Evan’s birthday. That made the news, so he heard it, as did everyone else who knew him. And just before we crawled into Endeavour, I held up a handwritten sign that said, “Happy Birthday, Evan!” Thankfully, the media noticed the gesture and ran with it as a nice family story. Evan was happy, or at least happier.
I learned my lesson. Before my last mission, I sat down with the calendar and planned: Okay, I won’t be around for Valentine’s Day, so I’d better organize a card and get a gift right now, when I can plan and execute properly, so everything is in place on the actual day. Forward planning was an easy way to show the people who made it possible for me to do my job that I didn’t take them for granted. Making a flowery toast afterward, thanking your nearest and dearest for all their support, just won’t cut it if, again and again, you’ve passed up opportunities to show appreciation in real time.