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

“Misha, shto ty delayesh ?” What are you doing? Gennady doesn’t yell much, so when he raises his voice you can be sure you have likely screwed up. In this case, I look over at the pressure gauge, which is not supposed to go past 55. Misha has it down to 80, the maximum negative pressure.

Fortunately neither I nor the equipment sustains any permanent damage, and we are able to go on with the experiment. I stay in the pants for a couple of hours, doing various medical tests like measuring blood pressure and taking ultrasound images of my heart, neck, eyeball, and a blood vessel just behind my temple. This is where my space tattoos come in handy. Shortly before my launch, I visited a Houston tattoo parlor and had some black dots placed on the most-used ultrasound sites (on my neck, biceps, thigh, and calf) so I wouldn’t have to locate the exact spot each time. It’s saved me a huge amount of trouble already. We measure my cochlear fluid pressure (by sticking an instrument in my ear) and my intraocular pressure (by tapping a pressure sensor on my anesthetized eyeball). We scan my eyeball with a laser, which can register changes like choroidal folds and optic nerve swelling.

During the time we’re doing this, I feel as good as I’ve felt in space. The constant pressure in my head clears, and I’m sorry when it’s time to shed the pants and shut the experiment down.

Later in the day, I’m sitting in the Waste and Hygiene Compartment. I’ve been sitting for a while, in fact—sometimes this process takes a while in the absence of gravity. Samantha is brushing her teeth just outside the kabin, which is like a stall in a public restroom—and I can hear her humming to herself, as she often does while she works. I can see her socked feet under the wall, hooked under a handrail to keep her steady. Her toes are close enough that I could reach out and tickle them, but I decide against it.

This scene probably sounds a bit odd to those who haven’t experienced the loss of privacy on a space station, but we get used to it. I’ve just been reading about how the men on the Shackleton expedition had to hunker down behind snow drifts and had only chunks of ice to clean themselves with, so I count myself lucky. Because I have nothing else to do while I sit, I watch Samantha’s feet hooked under the handrail, keeping her body perfectly still, and I think about the complexity of that simple task. If you showed me nothing but a foot hooked under a handrail in zero gravity, I could estimate how long that person has been in space with a high degree of accuracy. When Samantha was new up here, she would have hooked her feet too hard, used too much force, and tired out her ankles and big toe joints unnecessarily. Now she knows exactly how little pressure she needs to apply. Her toes move with the elegance and precision of a pianist’s fingers on a keyboard.

Last night we enjoyed our final Friday dinner with Terry, Samantha, and Anton. Since the loss of the Progress, the Russians are running low on food and other supplies, and though we’ve made it clear we will share food, things won’t be the same for a while. I bring over a salami my brother sent up on the last SpaceX, and I eat some of the last of the Russian meals, a “Can of White” (chicken with white sauce), and some American “Bags of Brown” (some sort of irradiated beef thing). The Russians also have something called “the Appetizing Appetizer,” which it is not.

A few of us say we have been craving fruit recently, which is no surprise given that there has been no fresh food in our diets since shortly after Dragon arrived. Our dried, bagged, and canned fruits are not the same as the real deal. I share the fact that I recently had a craving for a cheap domestic beer in a small bar glass with warm, bitter foam like my dad used to drink. This craving is weird, because I haven’t had that kind of beer since college and would never choose to drink it on Earth. I’m more of a hoppy India pale ale kind of guy. Maybe there’s some nutrient in cheap beer I’m missing. We talk about whether we are going to get scurvy, and what it is exactly, what the symptoms are. I scratch my balls to get a laugh. Just the word “scurvy” sounds horrible, we agree. I wonder whether the members of the Shackleton expedition got scurvy; I will look at the book again tonight before I go to sleep. When the next SpaceX resupply gets here at the end of June, it will bring fresh fruits and vegetables as well as desperately needed supplies, chief among them the shit cans that are so vital to life in space. My brother has also announced he is sending me a gorilla suit on SpaceX. I asked why I needed a gorilla suit on the space station.

“Of course you need a gorilla suit,” he responded. “There’s never been a gorilla suit in space before. You’re getting a gorilla suit. There’s no stopping me.”

I’m concerned about devoting cargo space to something that seems frivolous. There are those who look for reasons to criticize NASA and any expense that appears to be excessive, and I know those people would get out their calculators to figure the cost for sending a gorilla suit into orbit. Mark tells me that after being vacuum-packed for flight in space, the gorilla suit is no bigger or heavier than a sweatshirt we might send up as a shout-out to an alma mater or an organization.

As we finish dinner, we talk about all we have accomplished on this expedition: the visiting vehicles (including the ones that didn’t make it), difficult and risky maintenance on the spacesuits, important life-science experiments, and the rodent research, which we will finish up the day after tomorrow. We also talk about our evolving relationships with the various control centers—Houston, Moscow, Europe, Japan—and how much the mutual adoration society, as I call it, has gotten out of control. It seems that no one can do anything, either in space or on the ground, without receiving a short speech of appreciation: “Thank you for all your hard work and your time on this, awesome job, we appreciate it.” Then the speech has to be repeated back: “No, thank you, you guys have been just awesome, we appreciate all your hard work,” ad nauseam. It all comes from a well-meaning place, but I think it’s a waste of time. I’ve often had the experience of finishing up some task and then moving on to the next thing, when a “thank you” speech comes back at me. This requires that I stop what I’m doing to float back to the mic, acknowledge those thanks, and return them in roughly equal proportions—multiple times a day. If you consider the cost of constructing and maintaining the space station, the mutual adoration society probably costs taxpayers millions of dollars a year. I’m already thinking about putting a stop to it when Terry, Samantha, and Anton leave.

On Wednesday, the day before the Soyuz is to leave, Terry must hand over command of the station to Gennady. There’s a little ceremony, a military tradition drawn from the Navy change-of-command ceremony, that lets everyone know clearly when responsibility for the station transfers from one person to another. The six of us float somewhat awkwardly in the U.S. lab while Terry makes a speech. He thanks the ground teams in Houston, Moscow, Japan, Europe, and Canada, as well as the science support teams in Huntsville and other places. He thanks our families for supporting us on our missions.

“I’d like to say a few words about the crew I launched with,” Terry says, “Anton and Samantha, my brother and sister.” This might sound a bit exaggerated, but I know from experience how flying in space as a crew brings people together. Terry would do anything for them, and they for him. “We got to spend two hundred days in space together, including a few bonus days, and I couldn’t have asked for a better crew.