A lot of people think it must be lonely on the ISS, so far from Earth. But we had multiple links to the ground, ranging from ham radio to VHF to the Internet; our laptops communicated with a server in Houston via satellite relay, thus we could jump online. We had that data link about half the time; though it was slower than dial-up, and streaming videos severely tested our patience, it was fine for email. Far from feeling out of touch, we made a deliberate effort to stay on top of current events. On the day of the Boston Marathon bombings, for example, I actually knew more about what had happened than the CAPCOM I’d called. There was no shortage of people to talk to on Earth: Mission Control was omnipresent, and family and friends back home were just a phone call away.
In fact, at the beginning of our expedition I was calling my kids once a day, until Kyle finally said, “Dad, why do you keep calling? We get it: you’re safe!” Apparently the thrill of a phone call from space had worn off. The two-second delay on the line, that irritating echo, didn’t help matters. On Earth, my family doesn’t typically talk very much on the phone because the kids are so far-flung, but we do communicate constantly via a family Skype chat room: Kristin is at university in Ireland, Kyle lives in China and Evan was, until recently, at university in Germany. I couldn’t easily access the site on orbit, though, so instead I got into the habit of phoning and emailing with Helene daily, and primarily emailing with Kristin and Evan. Kyle, though, still had to put up with some phone calls because he’s not a good emailer. He’s a professional poker player, so we’d talk about his results, how he liked Wuhan, the city he’d recently moved to, and what he’d done with friends lately—I wanted to hear about his life, not talk about my own. I was already doing plenty of that via videoconferences with schools and reporters. Kyle has a quick wit and an offbeat view of things, and talking to him always made me feel connected to Earth.
I missed my children, but no more than I do on the ground, where I don’t see enough of them either. And I missed Helene, though we actually spoke quite a bit more than we normally do when I’m on the road. But I wasn’t lonely. Loneliness, I think, has very little to do with location. It’s a state of mind. In the center of every big, bustling city are some of the loneliest people in the world. I’ve never felt that way in space. If anything, because our whole planet was on display just outside the window, I felt even more aware of and connected to the seven billion other people who call it home.
I felt connected, too, to my crewmates. On the ISS, cosmonauts and astronauts are scheduled separately, and the two segments of the spaceship are separate, so you have to make a deliberate effort to see each other. We did that during our five months there, sometimes just by floating over to hang out together after dinner for 15 minutes or so. Mealtimes are very important opportunities to socialize, especially when there are just three of you on board. After Kevin’s crew left, Roman was all alone in the Russian segment, so we encouraged him to come have meals with us whenever he could, and often he, Tom and I would wind up talking afterward and listening to music—Roman had a mind-boggling selection on his iPad.
Preparing meals is not laborious on a space station. All liquids, including coffee and tea, come in pouches; most are powdered, and we simply add water, then sip through a straw. The majority of the food on board is dehydrated, so again, we just inject hot or cold water directly into the packages using a kind of needle, then cut open the packages and dig in. There’s a lot of sticky stuff like oatmeal, pudding and cooked spinach, because it clumps and is therefore easier to trap on a spoon and get into our mouths without having to chase it all over the place. We had fresh fruit and vegetables only about once a month, when a resupply vehicle or another Soyuz arrived. Once, we got a fresh, crunchy green apple and an orange apiece. Another time, it was a banana, two tomatoes and two oranges. One time, a whole onion each!
Despite the absence of a refrigerator, which is a limiting factor, space food is, for the most part, tastier than you might expect. There’s quite a bit of variety: a mixture of Russian food—beef stew, steamed salmon—and American dishes, plus specialty items from other countries. I also got bonus containers of Canadian treats like smoked salmon, buffalo jerky, a tube of maple syrup—even Tim Hortons coffee, the preferred caffeinated beverage on board (Roman took to calling everything else “deputy coffee”—second-best).
Many astronauts, myself included, crave spicy foods after a while, because the congestion that comes with weightlessness means that things taste pretty much the way they do when you have a head cold. Everything is just a bit more bland. My favorite dish was a bag of shrimp cocktail with horseradish sauce, which not only tasted good but had a kick that helped clear my sinuses.
Sometimes we did get a little ambitious and whip up something special for ourselves, like, say, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. There’s no bread on board—crumbs would be a real problem—so we used specially packaged, mold-resistant tortillas. Other times, we planned a special meal, like a breakfast to celebrate the Russian EVA in April. We collected waffles and maple syrup—strange breakfast items for Russians—Brie cheese, smoothies and dehydrated strawberries. All six of us lingered a long time that Sunday morning, floating around what felt like a windowless rec room, having one cup of non–deputy coffee after another, talking and laughing and feeling we were the luckiest people off Earth.
The fact is that even the least eventful day in space is the stuff of dreams. In some ways, of course, it’s the improbability of being there at all that makes the experience so transcendent. But fundamentally, life off Earth is in two important respects not at all unworldly: You can choose to focus on the surprises and pleasures, or the frustrations. And you can choose to appreciate the smallest scraps of experience, the everyday moments, or to value only the grandest, most stirring ones. Ultimately, the real question is whether you want to be happy. I didn’t need to leave the planet to find the right answer. But knowing what it was definitely helped me love life off Earth. My main source of frustration, in fact, was that I ever had to sleep. It just seemed like a waste of space, where there was so much more left to do and see and feel.
11
SQUARE ASTRONAUT, ROUND HOLE
WHEN I WAS 10 YEARS OLD all I wanted for Christmas was a camera. I loved National Geographic and I had this idea: if the astronaut thing didn’t pan out, photography would be my fallback career. I was thrilled when I woke up on Christmas morning and there, under the tree, was a Kodak Instamatic. I lost no time setting up moody shots involving my model car collection and some mirrors, then sent the rolls of film off to be developed. The photos that came back were poorly lit and uninspired. So I took some more. But after spending most of my pocket money to get those developed, I had an epiphany: I was never going to be a professional photographer. My pictures were god-awful. I put the camera away.
Years later, as a wedding present, Helene and I were given a serious camera, a heavy, bulky 35mm Canon, which was almost like lugging around a child. I did learn to take somewhat better pictures by fiddling around with the lenses and settings, but no one would confuse my family photos with art. Once in a while I’d get a good shot, but that had everything to do with luck, not talent.
In space, though, I needed to be able to take decent pictures a little more reliably than that. Fortunately or not, I wasn’t the only artistically challenged astronaut, and NASA actually brought in professional photographers to teach us, but it was an uphill battle. Imagine an instructor waxing lyrical about shutter speeds while a bunch of fighter pilots are saying, “Just tell me which button to push again,” and you have a fair idea what was going on in the classroom. A few astronauts are extremely talented photographers, like my friend Don Pettit, who knew enough to ask for modified cameras and lenses when he went up to the ISS. His sequential stills of the northern lights created a whole new way of seeing the world. But I was nowhere near that level. When I got to the ISS in 2012, I could point and shoot, but that was about it.
Two years before, the Cupola, an observat
ory module built by the European Space Agency, had been installed on the Station. From the outside, it looks like a hexagonal wart on the belly of Node 3; from the inside, it is a thing of beauty, a 360-degree dome of windows on the world. There are trapezoidal windows on all six sides and, on the top, directly facing Earth, a round, 31-inch window, the largest ever on a spaceship. It’s the ultimate room with a view, but highly functional, too: its command and control workstations let us guide operations outside the Station, including controlling the robotic arm.
To enter the Cupola, you have to scoot past the toilet and exercise machine, as though you’re diving to the bottom of a pool, then pull yourself in. Suddenly your whole frame of reference changes: when you look up, you can see the whole world. The Cupola is small, less than 10 feet in diameter at its widest point, and when you’re in there, your feet dangle out the end, because it’s less than 5 feet high. But none of this matters, because you’re inside your own personal planetarium. Visually, it’s the closest thing there is to a spacewalk: you can no longer see the ISS—you’ve escaped, mentally, and are now surrounded by the grandeur of the universe.
We keep up to eight cameras in the Cupola, which is a photographer’s paradise, particularly compared to the small portholes elsewhere on Station. The brilliant orange hues of the Sahara, the blurry smear of smog over Beijing—even I felt the need to pick up a camera and try to capture these sights. My first full day on Station, I grabbed a camera with a 400mm long lens, hoping that someone else had already done the settings, since I didn’t really know how, and just started taking photos. It was like looking at the world through a straw: you could fit all of Chicago into a picture but not all of the Great Lakes.
By that point I’d been posting pictures—mostly related to my pre-flight training—on Twitter for two years, primarily because my son Evan had told me to. Evan is the communications guru in our family, savvy about the media in general and social media in particular, and he’d been coaching me for years on new ways to draw attention to the space program. He’d helped me do events on sites like Reddit, where people could and did ask me anything, ranging from technical questions about engines to general questions like whether astronauts are religious (they run the gamut from devout to atheist, but whatever the personal belief system, space flight tends to reinforce it) to personal questions about my greatest fear (something bad happening to any of my children).
Evan’s specialty is marketing, and he thought that when I got to the ISS, I should be marketing the beauty and wonder of space. It was my chance to stop telling people how inspiring the space program is, and start showing them. All I had to do was post inspiring photos I’d taken from the ISS. Twitter has the virtues of ease—it takes almost no time to write a few words to accompany a photo or answer a question—and immediacy. I could share the view from the Cupola on Twitter mere moments after seeing it myself.
All this was predicated, of course, on being able to take really good photographs. It was a classic “square astronaut, round hole” dilemma: Evan envisioned me as a messenger of celestial beauty, but when it came to cameras, I was actually Joe Fighter Pilot. I explained this when he visited me in quarantine in Baikonur, and he didn’t argue. He was, after all, familiar with my body of work as a family photographer. Actually, he mused, the wording of my tweets could also stand some improvement. They were a tad too formal—“robotic” was, if memory serves, the actual word he used. So what was the solution? He smiled and urged me simply to share the sense of wonder I felt about space.
Fine. I tweeted my first photos from the Cupola on December 22, when I had about 20,000 Twitter followers and, because we had downtime over the holidays, hours to labor over my 140-character tweets. I decided I couldn’t go wrong by naming whatever it was I’d photographed, and trying to draw an analogy of some sort, likening rivers to snakes and so forth. Two days later, I tweeted a link to a recording I’d just made of “Jewel in the Night,” a song my brother Dave wrote. It was a first take—I’d literally pressed “record” on my iPad and started strumming—so you could hear typical Station noises in the background.
Evan approved, which was an encouraging change, so much so that he decided to do me a favor and post the link on a number of different sites, to see whether it gained traction anywhere. Then he had a brainstorm: Why not record ISS sounds all on their own, with no music? No one who hadn’t been there had ever really heard them. So I made a few recordings, which I sent to him as audio files. He posted them on SoundCloud, a social network that has very little crossover with Twitter.
The only way for me to explain what happened next is that my son had some time on his hands over the holidays. For years, he’s been an avid player of video games, and this was a game with a purpose: public education. In the meantime, of course, most of the people who work in communications at NASA and the CSA also had holidays, and when they got back to the office in the new year, they were stunned and a little alarmed. On January 2, I had 42,700 Twitter followers; by January 7, there were almost 115,000. Suddenly there were articles in newspapers and magazines as well as online about the photos I’d been posting and my tweets with William Shatner and cool facts about life in space. What was going on?
It wasn’t just that my photos were improving, though they were. I was taking 100 pictures a day and starting to develop a better eye. I was learning what to look for: weird colors and textures, discontinuities and surprising shapes, like the island off Turkey that looks, from space, like an exclamation point, or the river in Brazil that looks just like the “S” on Superman’s chest. People thought it was cool to see the world through the eyes of an astronaut, and they especially liked seeing what their own regions looked like from my vantage point. The main reason for my sudden popularity, however, was Evan’s help on the back end, re-posting things on YouTube, Tumblr, SoundCloud and other sites, and driving more traffic to the photos, the recordings and the CSA videos. To him, it had become a challenge: How many more people could he get hooked on space? In Ireland, Kristin, who is a genius at statistical analysis, was helping him by analyzing, say, the correlation between retweets and new followers (there wasn’t one).
My son was a one-man, unpaid band, drumming up excitement about and interest in the space program in a way that made me both proud and grateful. For years my kids had rolled their eyes whenever I launched into a sermon about the importance of public service. But Evan had outed himself: he was a Samaritan in cynic’s clothing.
The media exposure we were getting amazed me, but the handover ceremony on March 14, 2013, when I formally took command of the ISS, wasn’t touching because it was televised—it was moving because Kevin Ford made it so. Unbeknownst to me, he’d worked hard on a speech honoring Canada and had arranged to play our national anthem, which showed a real awareness of what this moment meant for a little country.
On a day-to-day basis, being commander wouldn’t change my life on Station all that much; if the rest of our time there was uneventful, I might never actually issue a single command. But in a crisis, I’d be ultimately responsible for the safety of the crew and the spacecraft, and that knowledge did change my experience in subtle ways, by creating both a heightened sense of vigilance and a stronger feeling of responsibility for the crew’s happiness. For the latter, I relied on a surefire, time-tested strategy: chocolate. On Easter morning, everyone woke up to find a bag of really high-quality chocolate eggs outside their sleep stations, courtesy of Helene, who’d had them shipped up far in advance. I also got in the habit of going to the Russian segment bearing chocolate bars, which met with approval from everyone but Roman, who eyed them longingly while grumbling that he was on a diet.
By now, we had three new Expedition 35 crew members on board: cosmonauts Pavel Vinogradov and Sasha Misurkin, and American astronaut Chris Cassidy. Roman was pleased to have company in the Russian segment after two weeks on his own there, and Chris, a former Navy SEAL who has the work ethic you’d expect with that background, was a welcome addition to the Am
erican segment.
We were a happy crew and, not coincidentally, a highly productive one. On Expedition 35, which officially started on March 15, we completed record amounts of science, and yet we still had time to play our bubble wrap racing games. To liven things up, every once in a while one of us would have a videoconference with a famous person. Several years ago, NASA and the other space agencies began organizing these calls to introduce a frisson of social excitement into long-duration flights. Many months before launch, each of us had been asked whether there were any people we’d like to talk to from the ISS. I’d asked for calls with a number of Canadian musicians such as Bryan Adams and Sarah McLachlan; Tom requested a call with Peter Jackson, director of the Lord of the Rings films. You’d spend about an hour chatting, long enough to get some real sense of one another’s interests and lives.
All of us enjoyed these calls a lot, not least for the surreal thrills they offered. I’ll never forget talking to Neil Young, who was in the backseat of his 1959 Lincoln Continental, recently converted into a hybrid; each of us leaned forward, peering curiously into one another’s strange vehicles and lives. I asked him for advice on song writing, and he said, “I never write songs, I just write them down,” adding that if the song isn’t flowing through you of its own accord, it might be a good idea to wait until it is. He also said that he is careful not to judge a song until it’s finished, “so that it doesn’t get poisoned or stunted.” Every time I’m writing a song now, I think about Neil’s advice.
As it happened, while I was in space I had a great opportunity to perform a song I had written on Earth with Ed Robertson of the Barenaked Ladies: “I.S.S. (Is Someone Singing?)” We did this for Music Monday, a televised event organized by the Coalition for Music Education, where simultaneously, nearly a million kids all over the world sang along while I sang my part, floating in the Japanese laboratory on the ISS. Coordinating that took a lot of planning, but to have all those kids thinking and singing about the ISS, both inspired and motivated, made every minute of planning worthwhile. I still get a little emotional watching that video, to be honest.