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

“So now Expedition Forty-three is in the history books, and we turn it over to a new chapter and Expedition Forty-four.” With that, he hands the microphone to Gennady, who checks to see if it is still on.

“No matter how many flights you have,” Gennady says, “it’s always like a new station, always like first flight.”

This makes everyone smile, because Gennady has more spaceflights than any of us (this is his fifth), and he will soon set a record for most days in space of any human. Gennady wishes Terry, Anton, and Samantha a “soft, safe landing and the best return home.” Terry tells the control center that this concludes the handover ceremony, and another milestone of my mission is crossed off. The next handover ceremony will be in September when Gennady leaves and I become commander.

Later that night, Terry asks me what landing is like in the Soyuz. He’s trained for this, of course, and he has been told what to expect by Anton and by the training team at Star City; still, he is curious to hear my experience. I think of how to set him up for what to expect without scaring him too much.

We call Samantha over so she can hear it too, and I describe what my experience had been last time: As we slammed into the atmosphere, the capsule was engulfed in a bright orange plasma, which is a little disconcerting, sort of like having your face a few inches away from a window while on the other side someone is trying to get at you with a blowtorch. Then, when the parachute deployed, the capsule spun and twisted and turned violently in every direction. If you can get in the right frame of mind, if you can experience it like an adventure ride, this can be great fun. On the other hand, some astronauts and cosmonauts, after their first Soyuz landing, have said that they were being thrown around so violently they became convinced something had gone wrong and they were going to die. There can be a fine line between terror and fun, and I want to give Terry and Samantha the right mind-set.

Terry has experienced the ride back to Earth on the space shuttle, and I tell him the Soyuz reentry is much steeper. “The shuttle reentry feels like cruising down Park Avenue in a Rolls-Royce,” I tell him. “Riding the Soyuz is more like riding a Soviet beater car down an unpaved street that leads off a cliff.”

They both think this analogy is funny, but they also appear a little worried.

“As soon as you realize you aren’t going to die, it’s the most fun you’ll ever have,” I tell them. “I’ll tell you the truth—the ride is so much fun, I would sign up for another long-duration mission just to get to take that ride again.” Terry and Samantha look skeptical, but it’s true.

OUR CREWMATES ARE leaving today. There is a ceremony for the hatch closing, seen live on NASA TV, as they depart. It starts out a bit awkwardly, since all six of us are crammed into the narrow Russian module where their Soyuz is docked. I snap some pictures of Anton, Samantha, and Terry posing in the open hatch. Then those who are staying wish them good luck and a soft landing. Anton hugs Gennady, whom he looks up to so much. Then he hugs Misha. Then he hugs me. Samantha hugs Gennady, then Misha, then me. It seems to me that Samantha gives me an extra-big hug, and after she has disappeared I realize that I won’t be in the physical presence of a woman again for nine months. The three of them float into the Soyuz and give one last wave while we take their pictures.

Anton and Gennady wipe down the hatch seal in the vestibule, to make sure that no foreign objects keep the hatch from sealing properly. Gennady closes the hatch on our side while Anton is closing it from their side. And that’s it. It reminds me of seeing off Charlotte at the airport at the end of a visit—after spending so much time together, I give her a hug, watch her walk down the jetway, and after a final wave, she disappears. It’s a weird thing: I’ve spent so much time with these people, but with a few good-byes and hugs, our shared experience is over in an instant.

I’m not scared for my departing crewmates, any more than I’m scared for myself, but seeing the hatch close behind them gives me a strange sense of isolation, even abandonment. If I have to work on the Seedra again, I’ll have to do it without Terry’s help. If I get into a discussion with the Russians about literature, I’ll have to do it without Samantha’s help. I’m looking forward to having the U.S. segment to myself, though, and I try to focus on that.

I float off toward the U.S. lab, and the Russians float off to their segment, and then all is silent. It’s just me and the fan noise. No talk from Terry, whose upbeat commentary has punctuated everything I’ve done since I’ve been up here. No quiet humming from Samantha. For the moment, I don’t even hear any voices from the ground.

I look around the junk on the walls in the U.S. lab, which suddenly feels much larger. I have the strange feeling I meant to say something more to Terry or Samantha, that I wanted to remind them about something, but I can’t think what.

Then I hear Terry’s voice, breaking in midsentence, as if he were here with me: “…pills for the fluid loading protocol, Anton? Or did you leave them on station?”

“I’ve got them,” Anton answers, then rattles off a series of numbers in rapid-fire Russian to their control center. Now that the communications on the Soyuz are set up, I can hear through our intercom system every word my former crewmates say as if I were in there with them. I join the space-to-ground channel to warn Terry that his mic is hot and that everyone with an internet connection or tuned to NASA TV can hear every word he says. I wouldn’t want one of them to inadvertently drop an F-bomb and then have to hear about it when he or she gets back to Earth. (Since inadvertently dropping the F-bomb to Earth myself, I am sensitive to the nuances of our comm system. On my second shuttle flight, I said “Fuck” while struggling with a piece of hardware in the airlock. My crewmate Tracy Caldwell called out, “Hot mic!” from the flight deck to let me know I could be heard on NASA TV. “Shit!” I said in response, making two FCC violations in ten seconds.)

I go through the rest of the afternoon listening to Terry, Anton, and Samantha’s voices. As I work on a physics experiment, I can hear Samantha humming absentmindedly. A couple of times I turn around to say something to her, then remember where she is.

When the Soyuz is ready to detach and push away from station, three hours after we closed the hatch, I watch its departure on a laptop screen on NASA TV, just as many people on Earth are doing. I grab a mic.

“Fair winds and following seas, guys,” I say. “It was a real pleasure spending time up here with you, and good luck on your landing.”

Terry answers, “Thanks, Scott, we miss you guys already.”

Gennady adds from the Russian segment, “Samantha, I think you forgot your sweater.”

I hear them talking to one another this way, trading idle work chat and calling out numbers to the control center, almost all the way to the ground. If I didn’t know what they were doing—falling like a meteor at supersonic speed toward the planet’s surface—I could never have guessed.

Several hours later, they are on the ground safely in Kazakhstan. They had been here with me twenty-four hours a day for months, and now they are as far and unreachable as everyone else on Earth, as Amiko and my daughters and the 7 billion other humans.

That night, when I turn out the lights and climb into my sleeping bag, I’m aware of the quiet. There is no rustling in the other crew quarters or quiet talking as crewmates communicate with the ground or say good night to their families on the phone. If this were a normal six-month flight I would already be halfway done, but instead I feel I have as long as I did when I first got up here. Nine months. I don’t often let these kinds of thoughts into my head, but when they do it’s hard to get them out again. What have I gotten myself into?