Really, we had practiced doing everything so thoroughly—and had thought so much about what could kill (or just maim) us next—that we felt, heading into launch, prepared for just about anything. We had had countless opportunities to zero in on our weaknesses and try to improve in those areas, as well as countless opportunities to develop and practice new skills. The mental and emotional toughness necessary to handle the pressure and stress of launch had developed during that slow, arduous process. Our core skill, the one that made us astronauts—the ability to parse and solve complex problems rapidly, with incomplete information, in a hostile environment—was not something any of us had been born with. But by this point, we all had it. We’d developed it on the job.
Being well prepared didn’t mean we were jaded, though. For me, as for anyone who’s embarking on any kind of hard-earned mission, launch felt both daunting and wildly exhilarating. My first time, I’d felt pent-up excitement mixed with a rookie’s earnest desire to prove myself. My second launch had been different; then, I’d been gripped by an intense sense of purpose, knowing that the correct installation of Canadarm2 was crucial for the future of the ISS. Before this third launch, the last of my career, I felt I was dancing with the devil I knew, confident in myself, my crew and our spaceship. It was a strange combination of feeling peaceful and rueful, almost, about what it had taken to get to this point. I was determined to make the most of every moment of this incredible journey, to engrave its details on my memory. I would have to. I’d never get another chance.
The Soyuz is so small that it makes the Shuttle seem almost cavernous. A Dodge Caravan has about 163 cubic feet of space; the Soyuz has 265 cubic feet of living space—theoretically. In reality, a lot of that space is taken up by cargo and gear that’s been lashed down and secured for launch. In any event, it’s not a lot of space for three full-grown adults to share for a few days. But during launch, we have even less elbow room because we are confined to the re-entry module, which is also the only part of the Soyuz that survives the return to Earth. On our way home we jettison the other two: the service module, which houses the instruments and engines, and the orbital module, which provides additional living space once we are on orbit.
When Tom, Roman and I reached the top of the stairs, a technician hustled us into a smallish elevator that whirred and clunked as it ascended, then deposited us into a cramped booth with a hole in the side, reminiscent of an igloo. We took off our white padding and then, one at a time, crawled on our hands and knees through the hole and into the orbital module. I was the left-seater, the pilot, so I went first because my seat was the least accessible. After launch, the orbital module becomes our living room, essentially, but it was startling to see that it had already been filled almost to the ceiling with a hodgepodge of equipment and supplies. It looked like a station wagon jammed to the roof for a long cross-country trip. I noticed my checklists perched on top of a 3-foot-high tower of stuff, but I was already focused on lowering myself carefully into the re-entry module, where we sit for launch and landing. I didn’t want the big regulator valve on the front of my Sokhol to scratch up the hatch.
Once I was in my seat, which had been custom-molded to my body in order to absorb the shock of landing, our strap-in technician, Sasha, climbed in to help me get belted in tightly. You might think that in such a tiny vehicle the tech would have to be small and wiry, but Sasha was a beefy guy with the build of a nightclub bouncer. After he got me wedged in securely, I thought to ask him to hand me my checklists. He said he would, then went back up to the waiting room without giving them to me.
My job was to start checking the systems, to make sure everything was working, but … I needed those checklists. I called up but no one responded because they were busy helping Tom. Great. I’d have to start up the Soyuz from memory. No. Bad idea. After Tom got settled into his seat and Sasha came down to strap him in, I reminded him that I needed my data file. Sasha said, “Oh, the guy up there says you don’t need it yet.” What guy? And the file didn’t belong to “the guy,” whoever he was. It was mine. But I couldn’t move. By the time Roman got in, the re-entry capsule was so jammed that Sasha couldn’t assist him, so Tom and I did, and then Roman looked around and wondered where his checklists were. Finally, at that point, they passed them down to us. They wanted to wait, I guess, until someone really trustworthy—a commander, not just a garden-variety astronaut—was in place.
As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. We had plenty of time to work through our lists and verify that everything was functioning as it should be. From all our sims, it felt very familiar: same sort of seats, same sort of tasks, same sort of checklists. Even the same voice was coming through our headphones: that of Yuri Vasilyevich Cherkashin, our instructor. Everything looked and felt just about as it always had, all the times we’d practiced—right up until Roman threw the big lever and the little lock, closing the re-entry hatch from our side, and Sasha closed it from his, saying, “Schastlivovo puti.” Bon voyage.
Or, to put it another way: time to wait some more. There was still a lot to do before we could lift off, pressure checks being the most crucial. We had to be sure the seals on our vehicle were tight. They were. Then we had to check that our Sokhols were still hermetically sealed and, in the event of a leak in the Soyuz, could essentially become our own individual spacecraft and buy us time to get back to Earth. Without them, we’d die quickly but not painlessly, starved of oxygen. First we closed and locked our helmets, reminding each other that we needed to hear dva zaschelkami—two clicks—then we clamped down on our regulators until our Sokhols inflated like balloons. It’s not the best feeling in the world—it’s hard to keep your ears clear—but within about 25 seconds we knew we could trust our spacesuits in an emergency. We waited the full, prescribed three minutes for the ground to be satisfied as well, then popped our helmets open and I turned off the oxygen supply. We already had plenty in the capsule—no need to increase the risk of fire.
I carefully tried all the displays—there are about 50, covering everything from speed/altitude to the ship’s oxygen system to the mathematical summaries of orbital targets—to be sure they worked the way they had in the sim. They did. We had controlled everything we could control. Our vehicle was healthy. We’d done everything on our checklists. Our suits worked. I’d been sitting in the Soyuz about two hours now, knees crunched up almost to my chest. The backs of my knees did ache a bit from the last pressure check, and my lower ribs were reminding me where I’d broken them years ago, water-skiing at Pax River. But other than that, I felt good. Normal. Hungry in fact, as did Roman and Tom. It was almost dinnertime, after all, and we’d eaten almost nothing all day. We’d have to wait a few more hours.
Outside they were moving the gantry—the portable structure with the stairs, elevator and ingress room—away from our rocket ship. Forty minutes or so to go. Yuri had asked us to choose some songs we’d like to hear while we were waiting, and he’d also chosen a few for us. He knows us well. As the music began to play, we were smiling, explaining the particular significance of each song to one another. For Tom, there was classical guitar—he’s a good guitarist and was planning to practice on Station. For me, my brother Dave’s song “Big Smoke,” linking family, history, music and my own current location, atop what would soon enough become a major smokestack. For Roman, the youngest of us, some rock music, the bouncy kind that makes you want to dance in your seat, even when you’re strapped in so tightly that it’s difficult to move. I’d asked for “If You Could Read My Mind,” my favorite Gordon Lightfoot song; thoughtful and soaring, it always brings me peace. And since, according to the Mayan calendar, we were just two days away from the end of the world, I’d also picked Great Big Sea’s high-speed rendition of “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine).” We heard U2’s “Beautiful Day” and Depeche Mode’s “World in My Eyes,” which starts, “Let me take you on a trip / Around the world and back / And you won’t have to move / You just sit still.”
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Sit still and remain calm is exactly what we were trying to do as the minutes ticked by and the sun sank lower in the sky. We were scheduled to lift off right after sunset. We didn’t want our hearts to start racing with excitement five minutes before launch. Underneath the Sokhol we wear something like a training bra that has electrodes to transmit medical data to the ground. None of us wanted to give the team of doctors who were monitoring our every heartbeat anything at all to worry about. Especially not me, not now, not after what I’d gone through to be cleared to fly. On my ascent checklist I’d actually penciled in a reminder: “Be calm. Medical parameters.”
Sweat the small stuff. Without letting anyone see you sweat.
A few minutes before launch, with the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” playing, we turned to the launch page: there was just one, covering everything from ignition to cut-off. Incredible, really, for such a complex series of events, but we needed to be watching our displays, hawking it. Anyway, it was a given that we knew the boldface cold. “Miakoi posadki,” Yuri said, by way of farewell. “Soft landings.” It’s what we wished for, too.
The smaller, outer engines started lighting about 30 seconds before liftoff, so that Ground Control could really be sure everything was up and running properly before lighting the engines that had enough power to push us off the Earth. It was a way of hedging their bets and, for me and Tom, a gentle initiation to the Soyuz. We felt a rumbling sensation but, unlike the Shuttle, no twangs, no swaying. The Shuttle engines stuck out to one side, so when they lit, their force pulled and bent the spaceship. The Soyuz engines, however, are symmetrical, firing up through the vehicle’s center of gravity, so while there’s a steadily mounting vibration, there’s no off-center motion, no sudden, explosive announcement that you are leaving the planet.
The rumble of power just got stronger and more insistent as we heard the countdown in Russian through our headsets and then, “Pusk.” Liftoff. It was a very different sensation than my two Shuttle launches, much more gradual and linear as the vehicle burned off enough fuel to lighten for liftoff. The initial acceleration didn’t feel all that different from just sitting on the ground. We knew we were leaving the pad more because of the clock than the sensation of speed.
From the viewpoint of those watching in the stands, those first 10 seconds of the launch were agonizingly slow. Kristin later admitted she’d been terrified, so much so that she hadn’t wanted to take any photos or take her eyes off the Soyuz for a second. Compared to a Shuttle launch, the rocket ship seemed to hover above the pad just a little too long. One guest likened it to the ultimate bench press, saying it looked as though an unseen weight lifter was standing underneath, straining mightily to push the vehicle off the ground, but failure was always an option.
Inside the vehicle, however, we were full of anticipation, not dread: ready for this machine to do its work. It was like being a passenger in a big locomotive, but one who can throw the emergency hand brake if necessary. We had some degree of control. The challenge was knowing if and when to assert it. Within a minute, we were pushed down in our seats more and more heavily. Initial ascent felt purposeful but smooth, a little like being on a broomstick that an invisible hand was calmly steering a bit to the left, then a bit to the right, back and forth. The rocket ship was self-correcting its attitude as we ascended and the wind and jet stream changed.
The ride got less smooth as it went on, though. As our first-stage engines cut off and the boosters exploded off the side, there was a noticeable change in vibration and a decrease in acceleration—not speed, that was always increasing. We were thrown forward and then steadily pushed back again as the Soyuz, lightened, roared upward. This tail-off, lurch-forward motion was repeated when the second-stage engines separated, and as the third-stage engines lit, the ones that would take us to orbital speed, we were slammed back even more definitively. But that was a very good thing to feel, because a year before, the third stage hadn’t lit on an unmanned Progress resupply vehicle and it had crashed in a sparsely populated region of the Himalayas. If that happened to us and the Soyuz parachutes deployed, it would be days before anyone found us. We’d all done winter survival training in remote areas to be prepared for just such a scenario, so we had a good idea just how miserable those days would be. At this point in the year, we’d no doubt wish we still had our Michelin Man suits.
The whole way up, we breathed a little easier as each important milestone passed. But it was not a nerve-wracking process. Approaching certain thresholds we knew it was possible that something really bad might happen, but we also had a plan for what each of us would do. We were wide awake and ready to take action. If anything went drastically wrong, like the engines didn’t cut off on time, I would throw a switch and press two emergency buttons to fire the explosive bolts that would blast our capsule away from the rocket. I would have five seconds to assess what had gone wrong and take the appropriate actions. The three of us had gone over who was going to do what, with whose permission, again and again. We had agreement that if X didn’t happen within Y seconds, I was going to activate contact separation. The left-seater is the only person who can even reach those buttons. I had raised the lids that normally cover them so I was ready to press at any moment, and it was a wonderful moment when I could close those lids.
Nine minutes had passed. Our third-stage engines had cut off, the Soyuz had separated, and its antennae and solar panels had deployed. Flight control was about to switch from Baikonur to the Russian Mission Control Center in Korolev, a suburb of Moscow.
Every crew brings its own small, tethered “g meter,” a toy or figurine we hang in front of us so we know when we are weightless. Ours was Klyopa, a small knitted doll based on a character in a Russian children’s television program, courtesy of Anastasia, Roman’s 9-year-old daughter. When the string that was holding her suddenly slackened and she began to drift upward, I had a feeling I’d never felt before in space: I’d come home.
The life of an astronaut is one of simulating, practicing and anticipating, trying to build the necessary skills and create the correct mind-set. But ultimately, it’s all pretend. It’s only when the engines shut off and you check that you’re pointed the right way and going fast enough that you can acknowledge, “Hey, we made it. We’re in space.” Maybe it’s not unlike childbirth in that the end result has been in your head all along; you’ve read the books and seen the pictures, you’ve prepared the baby’s room and taken the Lamaze classes, you’ve got a plan and think you know what you’re doing—and then, suddenly, you’re confronted with a squalling infant, and it’s wildly different.
In 1995, I was the only rookie on our crew. I didn’t want to show up in space with that lost, first-day-on-the-job feeling of, “Well, now what am I supposed to do?” We were only going to be up there for eight days, total. I didn’t want to spend any of them feeling—and being—useless. So while I was still on Earth, I thought through, sequentially and in detail, exactly what would happen as soon as we reached orbital speed, and I came up with a list of things I ought to do. I’m not talking about big, vague goals like “demonstrate leadership abilities.” I’m talking about real nuts-and-bolts stuff, like putting my gloves and checklists into the mesh helmet bag, then collecting the foam head supports from everyone’s launch seats and putting them in the “Bones Bag” for items unneeded on the return flight.
Having a plan of action, even really mundane action, was a huge benefit in terms of adaptation to a radically new environment. I’d never experienced zero gravity before, for instance. I “knew” exactly what it would feel like, from all my training and studying—only, I didn’t really know at all. I was accustomed to being pulled down to the floor by gravity, but now felt I was being pulled up to the ceiling. It was one thing to sit in my seat and watch stuff float around, but quite another to get up and try to move around myself. It was a profoundly disorienting form of culture shock, literally dizzying. If I moved my head too quickly, my stomach flipped, sickeningly. My to
-do list gave me something to focus on aside from my own disorientation. When I did the first thing on my list and it worked, and then the second and third things worked, it really helped me find my footing. I developed some momentum; I didn’t feel so lost.
It’s obvious that you have to plan for a major life event like a launch. You can’t just wing it. What’s less obvious, perhaps, is that it makes sense to come up with an equally detailed plan for how to adapt afterward. Physical and psychological adaptation to a new environment, whether on Earth or in space, isn’t instantaneous. There’s always a bit of a lag between arriving and feeling comfortable. Having a plan that breaks down what you’re going to do into small, concrete steps is the best way I know to bridge that gap.
On the Soyuz, we didn’t have to rack our brains to come up with a list. There were a lot of practical housekeeping matters to take care of as soon as we were on orbit, and the confined space forced us to choreograph them carefully. First and most important: checking the pressure. Once we were certain the automatic systems were working and the maneuvering thrusters’ fuel lines were full, we shut off the oxygen supply and measured the pressure in the re-entry and orbital capsules for an hour. If it fell even a little we’d have to turn around and head for one of the backup landing sites around the world—or, depending on the severity of the situation, head for anywhere at all and hope we wouldn’t crash down in someone’s backyard.
But our ship was airtight, so Roman opened the hatch to the orbital module and floated up to get out of his Sokhol. We had to take turns: there just isn’t enough room in the Soyuz for three adults to climb out of their spacesuits at the same time. Getting out is easier than getting in, but it’s still awkward, not least because the inside of the Sokhol is, by this point in the journey, distinctly clammy and feels the way a rubber glove does after you’ve been wearing it for a while. You actually have to attach the suit to a ventilator for a few hours until it dries out.