Early on, and aided considerably by the fact that suffering in silence is not considered a virtue by any member of my immediate family, I recognized that the only fair way to deal with the imbalances my job created was to anticipate crunch times at work and try to make it up to my family well in advance. Every year, when the kids were young, for instance, I took them on vacation by myself for 10 days—to Europe, the Grand Canyon, scuba diving in the Florida Keys—so that we could bond and Helene could have a break. Usually she just stayed at home and went to work, but she still says these “one-dish-in-the-sink” breaks were among the best of her life. And when I had a PR tour in an exotic destination, where I’d be giving speeches about the space program and explaining to media what we do and why it matters, we’d plan carefully so that at least one of the kids could come along and sightsee while I worked; in the evenings we’d have dinner together. Most PR tours are grueling: it’s one interview and talk after another—six or seven events in a single day isn’t unusual—then working on the plane on the way home. We did a few of these together, too, and that wound up being good for our family because afterward everyone really understood that when I traveled, I wasn’t having a grand old time while they were stuck at home. A PR blitz is only fun if you make it fun, and in my experience that’s hard to do without Helene and/or our kids there. Unfortunately, after a while, they caught on and demanded to see the itinerary and schedule before they’d agree to come.
My point, though, is that saying thank you every once in a while just isn’t enough when you’re demanding that other people make real sacrifices so you can pursue your goals. It’s not only the fun, showy things like vacations that get the message across. You also have to be willing to do what you can to create the conditions that allow your partner the freedom to focus single-mindedly at times. It’s not easy but it is possible with careful planning, regardless of the scope of your ambition or the demands of your job. Some astronauts wind up marrying other astronauts, after all, and starting families—and somehow, between stints in space, they’re able to find a way to make it work.
When you have great backup, as I have always had, you can start to take it for granted or become selfish and just expect that your needs will take precedence. I’ve tried to guard against that by making sure that when I have any wiggle room in my schedule, Helene is the one who sets the agenda, whether it includes me or not. I also make a point of actively looking for opportunities to spend time together. On Sunday mornings, for instance, no matter what else is going on, Helene and I try to walk the dogs, then go get coffee and do the New York Times crossword puzzle together. Prioritizing family time—making it mandatory, in the same way that a meeting at work is mandatory—helps show the people who are most important to me that they are, in fact, important to me.
And it’s not exactly unpleasant for me, either.
Time-honored astronaut traditions make us feel we’re part of the tribe, and there were plenty of them during our final hours in quarantine. Some were less picturesque than others. The night before we launched, we gave ourselves an enema, followed, after a suitable interval, by another one. While this did not feel like my finest hour in space exploration, it was definitely preferable to soiling my diaper the next day. Afterward, a doctor took swabs of all parts of my body—behind my ears, my tongue, my crotch—to see if I had any infections, then rubbed me down with alcohol just in case I did.
On December 19, I put on my blue flight suit and headed to my final breakfast on Earth in 2012. This was more of a ritual than a meal. Tom, Roman and I restricted ourselves to clear fluids and a bit of gruel, eaten with sardonic awareness that we might see it all again in a few hours—post-launch nausea is common—and that we wouldn’t have access to a private toilet until we got to the ISS two days hence. A bit later on, we went to a small room for a private toast with our spouses and a senior representative from each of the space agencies involved in our flight: the CSA, NASA and Roscosmos. We all said a few words, which those of us who would be flying a Soyuz toasted with ginger ale, not champagne, then everyone in the room sat down for a minute of silence. It’s what Russians do before any voyage, whether they’re going to space or to a friend’s dacha, just a way of honoring the significance of the moment.
We were almost ready to leave the building we’d lived in for nearly two weeks. By way of farewell we signed the door of quarantine, adding our names to so many others, then walked down the hall toward the exit. Waiting there was a Russian Orthodox priest, dressed head to toe in black, and a helper, armed with a bucket of water. We stood in front of the priest, the backup crew right behind us, and he dipped something that looked a great deal like a horse’s tail into the bucket, then flung water on us. Doused us, really, while he was blessing us.
Then we opened the door to walk out to the bus that would take us toward our spacesuits, our rocket, our next chapter. All our launch guests were lined up, waving flags and cheering, calling out goodbyes, stamping their feet. It was a bright, sunny day but bitterly cold, -25° or so. Lingering outside with wet heads seemed like an inherently bad idea, so after standing and waving for a minute outside the bus, we climbed inside and resumed waving. Through the window, I searched out my children, my wife, memorizing them, hoping they could see gratitude and love in my eyes, while the bus, heated to the point of stuffiness, slowly started rolling toward the compound’s exit gate.
We were on our way.
8
HOW TO GET BLASTED (AND FEEL GOOD THE NEXT DAY)
BAIKONUR WINTERS ARE NEVER MILD, but 2011 was particularly brutal. During the ceremonial events before the December launch that year, snow was blowing all over the place and an icy wind easily pierced the cloth, rubber and metal layers of the crew’s spacesuits. By the time they reached their Soyuz, they were numb with cold. So for our own launch in December 2012, the Russians decided to take preemptive measures. They crafted pillowy white snowsuits for us, complicated multi-piece affairs that snapped on over our other gear like armor. Tom, Roman and I were a little dubious when we saw them. The diapers were bad enough. Now we had to wear giant duvets?
We were in the suit-up facility, a nondescript, industrial-looking building en route to the pad, and suit technicians had already helped us get into our Sokhols. In Russian, sokhol means “falcon,” but these particular falcons can only fly inside a spaceship; like our bright orange Shuttle spacesuits, they are worn only to protect us during launch and landing, not for spacewalks. After pressure checks confirmed that our spacesuits had no leaks and could therefore keep us alive if the Soyuz depressurized in space, the suit techs began bundling us into our snowsuits. If nothing else, they provided comic relief. When we finally waddled out a side door of the building, we looked like Michelin men, overstuffed and big of rear end. To complete the picture, all three of us were clutching what looked like large aluminum lunch boxes, containing our ventilators.
It felt a bit as though we were still pretending to be astronauts en route to space, just as we had for years. But there was the bus, waiting to take us to the launch pad. And there were our families, friends and various officials from the Canadian, American and Russian space programs, waiting behind a rope for a glimpse of fully suited, honest-to-goodness, going-to-space-any-minute-now astronauts. The sky was cloudless and the sun shone brightly, but the air had a sharp bite. I heard my name being called and turned, catching momentary flashes of familiar faces in the crowd, then we were on the bus, waving goodbye. This time, it really was goodbye. We would not be seeing these people again anytime soon. Or perhaps ever. It was an inescapable fact that we were about to do something that’s a whole lot riskier than getting on a plane. I was pretty sure I’d survive the day but still I didn’t want to leave anyone with a last image that was either too somber or too flippant. Waving as the bus slowly pulled away, I hoped I looked exactly the way I felt: happy to be on my way, confident that I was ready to do my part, fully prepared for any outcome.
I knew for sure that I looked warm. After
we’d been driving for 15 minutes or so, the windows had fogged up and the bus verged on unbearably hot. When the driver pulled over to the side of the deserted road, Roman, Tom and I were delighted to get out and breathe some fresh air. We also had a mission: to pee on the rear right tire of the bus, as Yuri Gagarin apparently had. Much is made of this as a tradition, but really, if you’re going to be locked in a rocket ship, unable to leave your seat for quite a few hours, it’s just common sense. However, we had a problem that previous crews had not: we had to figure out how to get out of our suits of downy armor. In the end the suit techs on board had to help us undo all the tricky fasteners they’d painstakingly closed not an hour before, so we were able to urinate manfully on the tire without spoiling our plumage. Female astronauts who bring little bottles of their pee to splash on the tire may feel just as self-conscious, but I doubt it.
Afterward, our backup crew came over from their bus—even this late in the day they traveled in a separate vehicle—to say goodbye. Hugs all around. They were happy to see us go: once we were off Earth, they’d move one big step closer to being prime crew. It would be their turn in six months.
Back on the bus, only a few minutes from the pad, our suit techs got busy cheerfully and efficiently lacing, buttoning and zipping us back into our snowsuits and checking our Sokhols; by undoing them to relieve ourselves on the bus tire, we had invalidated all the previous pressure checks. We were once again good to go by the time we pulled up to the pad for the farewell ceremony with the highest-ranking people in the Russian space industry. There were probably 50 technicians and officials waiting for us, including the head of Roscosmos and the head of Energia, the corporation responsible for building Russian spacecraft.
Roman got off the bus first. Naturally, as this was his country and he was commander of our Soyuz, he was the center of attention, which suited Tom and me perfectly. One of our goals was for Roman to emerge from our mission as a shoo-in to be commander of the ISS the next time he flew, so we took the attitude, “Don’t mind us, we’re with Roman.” We followed him across the tarmac to our marks, where we stood and formally saluted the head of Roscosmos, Vladimir Aleksandrovich Popovkin. Next, the six highest-ranked dignitaries had the honor of escorting us to the steep stairs leading up to the rocket ship, each gripping one astronaut arm. The pair who’d won the coin toss proudly hung onto Roman, while the others, a little less proudly, helped me and Tom. Of course we didn’t really need any assistance, but it was a nice symbolic gesture of support and, like the rest of the Russian rituals, imparted a sense of occasion to the proceedings.
This was the first time we’d seen our Soyuz vertical and ready for liftoff; the Russians consider it bad luck for a crew to see its own rocket ship on the pad any earlier than launch day. So two days before, only our families, friends and the backup crew had gathered before sunrise for rollout, which is a ceremonial unveiling of sorts: the Soyuz is transported from the vehicle assembly building to the pad by a humble low-tech train that labors down the tracks, seemingly in slow motion, while hypothermic onlookers cheer its placid progress. Kristin later told me that our guests’ enthusiasm for the pre-dawn grandeur of rollout was only matched by their enthusiasm to get back on their heated bus. Once the sun had risen and temperatures had climbed to merely mind-numbing, they watched the rocket being lifted up from its horizontal position on the train and efficiently positioned on the pad by what looked like huge construction clamps. It was a good opportunity for them to see the Soyuz up close; on launch day, they watch from a viewing stand about a mile away—a safe distance, should anything go wrong, but close enough that the ground beneath their feet still trembles during liftoff.
As I was being escorted to the stairs I noticed that our rocket was encased in a thick sheath of ice, like an old-fashioned freezer in need of defrosting. Nothing to be concerned about, fortunately. Some version of the Soyuz has been flying for more than 45 years. As rocket ships go, it’s one of the most reliable and durable in the world, and can safely launch in just about any weather.
I was the first one up the stairs and as I climbed, the chief of Energia gave my rear end a swift, friendly kick—the Russian equivalent of “break a leg.” It’s the symbolic push-off to launch and not at all unpleasant when you’re as well padded as I was. Partway up, I stopped and turned, as did Tom and Roman, to wave one last time. It was a Kodak moment—three guys, off on an amazing adventure!—and one we decided, by unspoken agreement, to keep mercifully brief. We had somewhere to go.
Fifty percent of the risk of a catastrophic failure during a long-duration space mission occurs in the first 10 minutes after liftoff. Per second, it’s the most dangerous phase of space flight. So many complex systems are interacting that changing a single variable can have a huge ripple effect, which is why we train so long and hard for launch: you have to know how the dominoes might fall, and be ready to do the right thing, in all different kinds of scenarios. Often you have only a few seconds to react. You feel the pressure even during training. No one wants to die in the sim—it doesn’t look good.
Sometimes the clues that something is going wrong are very subtle. On the Shuttle, for instance, four computers, all running the same software simultaneously, controlled the vehicle. Regular laptops on Earth occasionally freeze or have software glitches, but the odds of computer problems significantly increase in space, thanks to the stresses of launch: vibration, acceleration, changing electrical current and fluctuating heat. That’s one reason these four computers were linked, so they could constantly compare what they were doing. If one did something dumb, the other three could overrule it and shut it down. But if even a tiny timing error developed, two of the four could split off and go rogue—giving the vehicle directions that contradicted what the other two computers were instructing it to do—with no one to break the tie and vote on which pair was right. The main way to figure out if we had a “two-on-two set split” was to monitor the pattern of some lights on an overhead panel, while we were trying to do a million other things, too. But it wasn’t a task we could afford to overlook. If the Shuttle responded to conflicting directions by turning suddenly during launch, say, the vehicle could simply break up midflight, unable to withstand the structural stress caused by rapid changes in aerodynamic flow. To avert catastrophe, we’d have had to recognize a bad set split instantly and respond within seconds. Both the pilot and the commander would, simultaneously, have had to override the four main computers and activate the backup computer, which was relatively primitive but could, in an emergency, get the Shuttle back to Earth.
During a Shuttle launch, we also needed to recalculate, constantly, how and when to shut the engines down manually in case of an emergency. You couldn’t just turn them off abruptly while accelerating; picture sailing down the highway at 80 miles an hour, then suddenly shutting off your motor—it wouldn’t be a good idea for the car. Or for you. Well, the risk is exponentially greater when you’re traveling 8,000 miles an hour and huge turbo pumps, powerful enough to drain a swimming pool in less than 30 seconds, are pushing fuel into the motor. If a Shuttle engine wasn’t shut down gracefully and gradually, it would blow up. So during launch, we spent a lot of time working a hypothetical problem: how, if something went wrong, we’d throttle back. In fact, on two separate Shuttle missions, the crews did have to shut down an engine. But because they’d been trained so well to think through interconnected webs of problems very quickly and calmly, those shutdowns were nonevents and both flights continued as planned. That’s why, in all likelihood, you’ve never heard of them until now.
The Soyuz is a much simpler vehicle to operate and it is automated: if something goes terribly wrong, the chances of survival are much better than they were on the Shuttle because the re-entry capsule where the crew sits during launch automatically separates and is thrown clear. This is what happened in 1983, two seconds before a Soyuz exploded on the pad during the final countdown; the crew survived. In 1975, after a serious booster malfunction partway through asce
nt, pyrotechnics automatically fired to blast the crew’s capsule free of the rocket; as it fell back to Earth, its parachutes deployed properly, right on schedule. However, that Soyuz crash-landed in a hilly, remote area and promptly began to roll down a snowy slope, coming to a stop at the edge of a steep cliff only because the parachute snagged on some vegetation. The crew lived to tell the tale. Only once has a parachute failed: on the very first Soyuz flight, in 1967. Vladimir Komarov, the cosmonaut on board—he was the only one; it was a test flight—was killed, the first inflight fatality in the history of human space exploration. Since then, thankfully, both the vehicle and its parachutes have been eminently reliable.
Our crew felt confident that even in the case of an engine failure, we’d almost certainly survive. However, not all engine failures are equal, not even on a highly automated rocket ship. On the Soyuz, one of the worst times for this to happen would be just after the first two minutes in flight, when the vehicle is way up high but not yet going all that fast. You’d fall straight back down. If the Soyuz comes back to Earth horizontally, it bumps along the atmosphere, like a stone skipping across the surface of a pond, slowing down before coming to a stop. But if it’s plummeting vertically, it’s like a stone being dropped into a pond from a great height. The rocket ship would hit the thick air of the atmosphere all at once, creating deceleration forces up to 24 g—survivable, but extremely punishing for both humans and spacecraft. The Soyuz commander would have about four seconds to make a crucial difference: by pushing buttons on the manual control handle, it’s possible to override some of the automatics and roll the re-entry capsule to an orientation that reduces the g-load by as much as 8 or 10 g. While 14 or 16 g is still a wicked load, it is a whole lot better than 24. So Roman practiced doing this in the sim and we all talked about it every time, just in case.