Later, we’re driven back to the airport’s taxiway, where Roman gets on a plane to Russia, and Tom and I board a NASA G3, a small jet with two beds in the back and room for 10 passengers. Farewells are bleary and to the point, not sentimental. We don’t have it in us. We’re all ready to sink into the oblivion of sleep. It takes about 20 hours to return to Houston, and between naps, medical staff monitor our vital signs and clamor for more blood and urine samples; NASA is trying to get as much data as possible on the physiological impact of long duration space flight. While the jet refuels in Prestwick, I have a shower, sitting on a chair. It feels amazing to wash my hair, to be clean all over for the first time in nearly half a year.
When I get off the plane in Houston, bone-tired and not yet steady on my feet, a small group is there to greet me. I kiss Helene, hold her for a moment. Being able to talk to her without a two-second delay, as we had on the ISS phone, feels like both a decadent luxury and a familiar comfort. Family and friends have come, people I know and like and have thought of over the past five months, and I take a bit of time with each of them. It’s both pleasant and slightly stiff, like a receiving line at a wedding—a necessary ceremony marking a transition. Helene is watching, knowing I want to leave, so we go, straight to crew quarters.
It is 11:30 at night, which means, time to give 14 vials of blood then do a few sims and tests to assess our balance and ability to concentrate! Tom and I had always known we’d have to do this and also knew it was important, but of course, given the hour and how we were feeling, we felt a little grumpy about it, especially when we realized we were bombing the tests.
There was a hand-eye coordination test, similar to one I’d done 21 years earlier in Ottawa during astronaut selection: alternately using your left hand, then your right, then both, you stick pegs into a row of holes on a peg board, being evaluated for speed and accuracy. It’s like a cribbage drag race. I was clumsy after zero gravity, and had trouble grabbing just a single peg from the shallow bin without sending the rest of them flying to the ground. Then there was a computer test, where you had to try to keep a cursor inside a circle that was moving all over the screen, while simultaneously typing in numbers that showed up on another screen. The worst, though, was the motion simulator. You sit in a small round cockpit mounted on a tilting platform, responding to computer images that simulate flying a NASA T-38, driving a race car on a winding mountain track and maneuvering a bulbous rover on Mars. Even pre-flight, the visuals were provocative, but now the experience was truly sickening.
I don’t think I’ve ever been as happy to go to bed as I was that night. After months of being able to somersault effortlessly through the air, I could barely hold my head up. Bed was about all I could handle.
But I was happy that evening for another reason: I felt we’d succeeded at something difficult. Expedition 34/35 had been a success scientifically, and social media had made it an educational success, too. I knew I would never return to space; I’d finally achieved a goal I’d devoted most of my life to achieving. I didn’t feel sad about that. I felt elated: I’d done it! And I knew there was more to do, even if, at that moment, I wasn’t quite sure what, exactly. But if seeing 16 sunrises a day and all of Earth’s variety steadily on display for five months had taught me anything, it was that there are always more challenges and opportunities out there than time to experience them.
Yes, we bashed into the ground pretty hard in Kazakhstan. But I didn’t view it as the end of something. Rather, I saw it as a new beginning. And in that sense, at least, it was a soft landing.
13
CLIMBING DOWN THE LADDER
WHEN THE SHUTTLE WAS IN SERVICE, I used to fly a small plane between Houston and Cape Canaveral pretty regularly. It wasn’t a scenic route: civilian aircraft are supposed to avoid military airfields, and there are many in that part of the world, so I had to fly directly above the interstate most of the way. I followed along I-10 like any commuter, only 10,000 feet up, so I could see more of the gray ribbon of road that stretches across the flat, sandy Gulf Coast states. Nothing too exciting.
But one time, flying in a twin-engine Beechcraft Baron with Russ Wilson, a friend of mine who’s a firefighter, I was coming over the Panhandle when something brushed lightly against my leg—my bare leg: it was a blistering summer day, so we were wearing shorts. Figuring it was probably an electrical cord dangling underneath the pilot’s seat, I shifted around in my seat to get away from it. A moment later, though, there it was again, touching my leg. Weird. I looked down and what I saw, rising up from the floor, was a black snake. Not a garter snake and not a python, either, but certainly the biggest reptile I’ve ever seen in a cockpit. I instinctively jerked my feet up onto my seat, which caused Russ to look down and spot the snake. For a few long seconds we stayed like that, frozen in disbelief.
If a flight has been particularly challenging, fighter pilots like to say they’ve been busy “killing snakes and putting out fires.” But this really was a snake, and trying to kill it at 10,000 feet seemed ill-advised. A failed attempt on its life was not going to make it any more kindly disposed toward us. Russ didn’t wait: he grabbed the clipboard that held our checklists and used it to pin the snake down on the floor. Then he grasped the thing in the approved manner, just behind its head, and yanked it out from under my seat.
Which was the snake’s cue to start whipping the rest of its body around, frantically trying to escape, while I tried to keep flying the plane as though nothing at all unusual was happening. What next?
Without a whole lot of discussion, we decided to open the window on my side. It was small, just big enough to let smoke escape from the cockpit if there was a fire, but we were going 200 miles per hour, so suddenly it was like we were in the middle of a hurricane. The noise was wicked, our ears were popping from the drop in cabin pressure, there was an ornery serpent lashing all over the place. But firefighters are good in a crisis. Russ calmly leaned over me, stuck his hand out the window and somehow forced most of the snake out there too, then let go. Poof. It was gone. We quickly closed the window, and then we thought to look around: Any more snakes in here? How did that one get in, anyway? Did that really just happen?
A blast of nervous, post-adrenaline laughter. Already the episode felt unbelievable and had acquired the sheen of an anecdote. Then I wondered, “Where is that snake now?” When I pictured the scene below—a black snake writhing in free fall, confused and disoriented, smashing onto the windshield of a car—I stopped laughing, because I had a pretty good idea how that would feel.
Coming back to Earth from space, I felt as though I was being rudely flung down from the heavens, and then, splat! An hour before, I’d had the powers of a superhero—I could fly. Now I was so weak I could barely hobble around unassisted. My body, spoiled by the luxury of weightlessness, aggressively protested the return to gravity. I was nauseated and exhausted; my limbs felt leaden, my coordination was shot.
And I was a bit irritable when, at post-flight press conferences, a reporter invariably asked how I felt “now that it’s all over.” In fact, it wasn’t over: every flight is followed by months of rehabilitation, medical testing and exhaustive debriefing with everyone from the top administrators at NASA to the people who resupply the ISS. But the reason the question bothered me was the implication that space flight was the last worthwhile experience I’d ever have, and sadly, from here on in, it was all downhill. I don’t look at myself or the world that way. I view each mission as just one thread in the overall fabric of my life—which is, I hope, nowhere near over.
If you start thinking that only your biggest and shiniest moments count, you’re setting yourself up to feel like a failure most of the time. Personally, I’d rather feel good most of the time, so to me everything counts: the small moments, the medium ones, the successes that make the papers and also the ones that no one knows about but me. The challenge is avoiding being derailed by the big, shiny moments that turn other people’s heads. You have to figure out for yo
urself how to enjoy and celebrate them, and then move on.
Astronauts who’ve just returned from space get a lot of help from NASA with the “moving on” part. When you report back to the Astronaut Office at JSC, there’s no hero’s welcome. Rather, you get a brisk acknowledgment—“Good job”—before being unceremoniously booted off the top rung of the organizational ladder, at least in terms of visibility and prestige. Astronauts fresh off the Soyuz are reabsorbed back into the support team as middle-of-the-pack players, essential but not glorified.
In most lines of work there’s a steady, linear ascent up a well-defined career ladder, but astronauts continuously move up and down, rotating through different roles and ranks. From an organizational standpoint, this makes sense: it keeps the space program strong at all levels and also reinforces everyone’s commitment to teamwork in pursuit of a common goal—pushing the envelope of human knowledge and capability—that’s much bigger than we are as individuals. For astronauts, too, it makes sense, because it helps us come right back down to Earth and focus on our job, which is to support and promote human space exploration. Any inclination we might have to preen is nipped in the bud, because our status has changed overnight and we are expected to deliver in a new, less visible role, not sit around reminiscing about the good old days when we were in space.
At NASA it’s just a given that today’s star will be tomorrow’s stagehand, toiling behind the scenes in relative obscurity. For instance, Peggy Whitson, who was Chief Astronaut and ran the office in Houston for three years, is now back in the regular pool of astronauts, supporting other astronauts in orbit and hoping for an assignment with no better chances of being selected than anyone else has. One thing that makes this kind of transition easier is that the line between being a member of a crew and a member of the office is already more blurry than might be readily evident to outsiders. A CAPCOM, for instance, does some training and goes to sims with a crew, then supports them or is on call every day of their flight, and afterward, also attends debriefs. In a very real way, then, the CAPCOM is integral to that crew—as is the entire cast of people who directly support any mission.
If you’re part of that support team, you know full well that the meaning and significance of your work isn’t determined by how visible it is to outsiders. And once you’ve stood on the top rung of the ladder, where you are fully aware of how critically important the people on the ground are to the success of your mission, it’s actually easier and more meaningful, in some respects, to support other astronauts on their missions.
But I’m not going to pretend that a flat organizational structure has no drawbacks or that giving up a dream assignment is a thoroughly joyous experience. Even Pollyanna would have some mixed feelings about it. However, astronauts get so much practice swapping between lead and supporting roles that it does get easier over time.
And sooner or later you realize that it’s better for everyone, including you, if you climb down the ladder graciously. After being the Director of Operations for NASA in Russia for a few years, when I went back to Star City to train I sometimes found myself wondering, “Why is the new DOR doing X that way?” I quickly learned that as the ex-whatever, you only get so many golden opportunities to keep your mouth shut, and you should take advantage of every single one. I wasn’t in charge anymore. My role was limited to observing and—only if it seemed absolutely necessary—trying to mold the process through subtle means. Usually it wasn’t necessary. Frequently, the “issue” was simply that the other person’s managerial style was not the same as mine.
Even if you’ve been a plus one in a certain role—maybe especially if you’ve been a plus one—once your stint is over, it’s time to aim to be a zero again. This turns out to be easier than you might think right after you get back from space. At least at first, you feel so crummy, physically, that zero looks like a big step up.
The rule of thumb is that you need a day on Earth to recover from each day in space, and happily, that proved true after my first two missions. They were relatively short—8 days in 1995, 11 in 2001—so I had a few rough days right after we got back, but a week or so later, I was back to normal.
Returning from Expedition 34/35 was different. After five months in space my body hadn’t just adapted to zero gravity, it had developed a whole new set of habits. After a few steps my feet, no longer accustomed to bearing weight, felt as though I’d been walking across hot coals. Sitting down didn’t bring much relief: now my feet felt exactly the way I imagine they’d feel if someone had pounded them repeatedly with a mallet. Plus, seated, I was uncomfortably aware of my tailbone; when you’re used to resting on air, weightlessly, sitting on a chair, weightily, really does not feel good. But neither does standing. After elongating in space, my spine was now compressing again, so my lower back was constantly sore. I was surprised how long it took for these side effects to go away. Months later, my feet and back were still complaining—frequently and loudly—about what a drag gravity is.
My heart also developed new habits in space. By the time I returned to Earth, it had forgotten how to pump blood all the way up to my head, so simply standing up required it to work strenuously. After a few minutes on my feet, my heart rate edged up to 130. Meanwhile, my blood pressure was dropping, so I felt faint. To help my circulation, I wore a g-suit for a few days to keep steady pressure on my calves, thighs and gut. It’s a lot like squeezing the bottom of a balloon to force air upward; the g-suit doesn’t hurt, it just feels like something heavy is pressing on your lower body. But even so, I felt incredibly dizzy if I stood up quickly, which made me wary of bathrooms; in the first few days post-flight, there’s a real danger of keeling over and cracking your head open on a tiled floor (one astronaut I know did pass out when he got up to pee). That’s why, in post-flight quarantine, there’s a chair in the shower in crew quarters. Although the vertigo became less acute, I continued to experience it for a long time and learned to stand still after I got up and let the dizziness pass before attempting something rash, like walking across the living room.
Part of the problem was that my vestibular system—the mechanism in the inner ear that controls balance—was totally bewildered post-flight. On the ISS, it got used to responding only to my body’s own rotations and accelerations, because up was down and down was up. Back on Earth, though, gravity was suddenly pulling me down and the floor was now holding me up, trapping my inner ear in what felt like a constant acceleration that, inexplicably, my eyes couldn’t perceive. It’s extremely nauseating, worse than the most sickening ride at the fair. My body reacted as though the symptoms were being caused by a neural poison, and urged me both to purge it and to lie down, so that I’d metabolize the poison more slowly. I took anti-nausea meds on and off for about 10 days after landing; sometimes I felt just fine, but other times, I looked and felt green.
My stomach recovered faster than my sense of balance. At first, walking was difficult, a drunk’s stagger, but as I re-adapted I got better at it (so long as I kept my eyes wide open). Still, for at least the first week, I over-corrected, swinging wide on turns, bumping into things and tilting forward as though I was walking into gale-force winds. All of this meant it wasn’t safe to drive for a couple of weeks, which was just fine with me, because I was profoundly, almost unbelievably, tired, like an invalid recovering from a debilitating illness.
I slept heavily and peacefully, which was an unexpected plus; for the first few days after my Shuttle flights, I’d had the weird sensation that I was floating above my bed (I’d been away such a short time, my body was probably thoroughly confused). This time, I had no such trouble. My bed was where I felt most comfortable, physically, and I craved sleep so much that I was sneaking several catnaps a day.
Fortunately, NASA has top-notch personal trainers who work with us and our doctors from initial assignment through recovery: Astronaut Strength, Conditioning and Rehabilitation specialists (ASCRs). My first day back in Houston, they asked me to lift my arms over my head and then to lie
down on the ground and try to lift up my legs. I could do both things but just barely. Lying on the mat, I felt as though two people were sitting on top of me, pinning me to the floor. After the empowering environment of space, where I could move a refrigerator with one fingertip, it seemed … well, unfair. Despite exercising two hours a day on the ISS, I was, back on Earth, a weakling.
A lot of what happens to the human body in space is really similar to what happens during the aging process. In post-flight quarantine, in fact, Tom and I tottered around like two old duffers, getting a preview of what life might be like if we made it to 90. Our blood vessels had hardened; our cardiovascular systems had changed. We had shed calcium and minerals in space, so our bones were weaker; so were our muscles, because for 22 hours a day, they’d encountered no resistance whatsoever.
On the plus side, with the help of the rehab specialists, we could reverse most of the damage, and in the meantime, doctors could poke and prod us to gain insight into physical changes related to aging. For the first few months back, astronauts are essentially outsized lab rats.
We even run mazes, of a sort. Scientists want to know more about the aftereffects of long-duration space flight, so they repeatedly administer the types of tests we were given that first night in quarantine, as well as a few new ones. There was, for instance, a form of hopscotch: a long rope ladder was laid out on the ground and I had to jump, hop and skip the length of it, in patterns ranging from ones you’d see on the playground to Saturday Night Fever-type moves. There were timed sprints too, where I had to weave around cones while running forward, backward and sideways. I’d done all of this pre-flight too, so my baseline results could be compared to my post-flight scores. Not surprisingly, my agility and reaction times were, in the first few weeks after landing, quite a bit less impressive.