Margaret Dean - Endurance - A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery

ESSENTIAL TO getting to Mars, or anywhere else in space, is a working toilet, and ours does more than just store waste—our urine processor distills our urine into drinking water. A system like this is necessary to interplanetary missions, since bringing thousands of gallons of drinking water to Mars simply wouldn’t be possible. On the International Space Station, our water system is nearly a closed loop with only occasional need for fresh water. Some of the water we purify to make oxygen.

We are sent fresh water on resupply rockets, but we don’t need it often. The Russians get fresh water from the ground, which they drink and turn into pee, which they give to us to process into water. Cosmonaut urine is one of the commodities in an ongoing barter system of goods and services between the Russians and the Americans. They give us their pee, we share the electricity our solar cells have generated. They use their engines to reboost the station into the proper orbit, we help them when they are short on supplies.

Our urine processor, though, has been broken for about a week, so our urine is simply filling a holding tank. When it’s full—it takes only a few days—a light will come on. In my experience, the light tends to show itself in the middle of the night. Replacing the tank is a pain in the ass, especially for a half-asleep handyman, but it’s not an option to leave it for the morning. The first person to get up won’t be able to pee, which isn’t good space station etiquette. When you float in there in the middle of the night to find that light illuminated, it really sucks.

Now, in the light of day, I need to swap out the broken part, the distillation assembly. I’ve consulted with the ground, and they concur. If everything goes right, the repair will take half the day. I’ve removed the “kabin” (the walls and the door) from the toilet in Node 3 so I can get at the machinery underneath. (The spelling is attributed to a transliteration error between Russian and English that stuck.) The kabin gets pretty gross, even though we try to clean it regularly. I float the kabin to Node 1, where it will clog up this space for other people until I move it back again, another incentive to get the job done efficiently.

While I’m cleaning and then moving the kabin, the ground is taking care of “safing” the equipment, which means making sure everything I will be working on is powered down correctly so I don’t electrocute myself or cause an electrical short. (The risk of electrocution is ever present on the space station, especially on the U.S. side. We use 120-volt power, which is more dangerous than the 28 volts used on the Russian segment. We train for the possibility of electrocution and often practice advanced cardiac life support on board, using a defibrillator and heart medications meant to be injected into the shinbone.) Once I get word from the ground that I can go ahead, I remove the electrical connectors on the distillation assembly, put caps on the connectors to protect them, and undo all the bolts. The distillation assembly is a large silver drum that works like a still, evaporating water from the urine. This is our only backup, so I have to be careful not to damage it.

Another resupply rocket launched today from Baikonur, a Russian Progress. My Russian crewmates on station followed the launch closely, getting updates from Russian mission control, and Anton floated down to let us know when it had reached orbit successfully. But now, less than ten minutes later, mission control in Moscow reports that a major malfunction has occurred and that the spacecraft is in a wild out-of-control spin. None of the workarounds they try correct the problem.

Up here, we talk about what it will mean for us if Progress is lost. We go over the supplies we have on board—food, clean clothes, oxygen, water, and replacement parts. Another resupply rocket exploded on the launchpad last October, this one built by the American company Orbital ATK, which means we are already behind on supplies. The Russians will run low on food and clothing, which means we will share ours with them and eventually run low ourselves. Misha, Gennady, and Anton keep us updated throughout the day, each time looking more and more concerned. Each of the cosmonauts had some personal items on board Progress, and sometimes those packages contain jewelry and similar irreplaceable items. Misha confides in me about some of the items that are on board, his wide blue eyes showing his anxiety.

“Maybe they’ll regain control of it,” I tell him with a pat on the shoulder, though we both know this is becoming less likely by the minute. I would like to spend more time talking over the problem with my crewmates, but I have a half-assembled toilet to fix. I’m disconnecting and capping the connections where our urine flows into the assembly on one end and where the liquid by-products left over, brine and a kind of graywater, come out. Every few days we pump the brine out of the holding tank and into Russian tanks that will later be pumped into empty water tanks on Progress, which will eventually undock and burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere. The graywater will be processed into drinking water.

I pull out the broken distillation assembly, double-bag it, label it, then store it in the PMM (Permanent Multipurpose Module, sort of a storage closet off Node 3) until it can be returned to Earth on a SpaceX. Engineers on the ground will examine it and, if they can, repair it to be sent up again. The next step is to fit the new assembly in place and torque it to a specific value. I start hooking up the fluid lines again very carefully, making sure not to combine clean water and urine lines, then connect the electrical cables. I am taking pictures of all of my work so the ground can later verify I did everything properly.

As I’m working, the ground tells us Progress has officially been declared lost. With a sinking feeling, I float over to the Russian segment to confer. Misha meets me in the service module, and it’s clear he’s heard the bad news.

“We’ll give you guys anything you need,” I say.

“Thank you, Scott,” Misha says. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such despair on another man’s face. We don’t normally worry about shortages, but losing Progress suddenly makes us think about how much we depend on a steady stream of successful resupply missions. We can afford one or two failures, but then we will have to start rationing.

Even more than our concern about supplies, though, is concern for our colleagues who will be launching soon: the rocket that doomed Progress is the same rocket that launches the manned Soyuz. Our three new crewmates, due up in a little less than a month on May 26, are about to trust their lives to the same hardware and software. The Russian space agency must investigate what went wrong and make sure there won’t be a recurrence. That will interfere with our schedule up here, but no one wants to fly on a Soyuz that’s going to do the same thing this Progress did. It would make for a horrible death, spinning out of control in low Earth orbit knowing you will soon be dead from CO 2asphyxiation or oxygen deprivation, after which our corpses would orbit the Earth until they burn up in the atmosphere months later.

I finish making all the connections on the urine processor. Some of the cargo that was lost on Progress was fresh water, and unless we can make our own, the six of us won’t last long. I double-check all the connections, then ask the ground to power it up. It works. The ground congratulates me, and I thank them for their help.

Because the next Soyuz launch is delayed, that means Terry, Samantha, and Anton will be delayed in their return as well. They have each assured their space agencies that they are willing to stay on station as long as necessary, which I think reflects well on them, even if it’s also true they have no choice. I know this must be stressful for them—we each know how long we’ll be here and pace ourselves accordingly. I can’t imagine having to call my family and tell them I’m not coming back when I’d said I would, and that I have no idea when I’ll return. I can only sympathize with my crewmates. Outwardly, they all appear professional and upbeat. Terry tells me he sees this as a positive thing: it’s a privilege to live in space, and now he gets to stay longer and complete more of the things he wanted to do, like taking pictures of specific places on Earth and filming an IMAX movie he had a particular fondness for. Samantha’s attitude is more casual. “What are you going to do?” she asks, then points out that she will likely exceed the world record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman, 195 days.