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

SUNDAY RARELY FEELS like a Sunday on the space station, but today might be an exception. Yesterday I did both my weekly cleaning and my exercise, so today I actually have the entire day off. When I wake, I read the daily summary that was sent to us overnight and see that today Gennady sets the world record for the most days in space: 803. By the time he leaves, he will have 879, a record I expect to stand for a long time. I sleep late, eat breakfast, read a bit, then decide to clean out my email inbox. But when I open my laptop, there is no internet connection. This has been an ongoing problem: on Saturday nights the ground reboots the laptops remotely, and no one notices that the internet connection has been dropped. When I call down to ask for it to be fixed on Sunday morning, I’m told that the only person who knows how to do it doesn’t come in until later in the day.

There is a SpaceX launch scheduled today for 2:20 p.m. our time (10:20 a.m. in Florida), and I had looked forward to watching it live, but my internet connection won’t be fixed by then. SpaceX is carrying a lot of things we are looking forward to getting, most important being an International Docking Adapter, a $100 million mechanism that will convert docking ports built for the space shuttle to a new international docking standard, agreed to in 2010 by NASA, ESA, Roscosmos, the Japanese space agency, and the Canadians. (Ultimately it could even be used by China or other nations.) Without these adapters in place, we wouldn’t be able to bring people up on SpaceX or the Boeing spacecraft still under development.

Also on board SpaceX: food (the Russians are still running low); water; clothing for American astronaut Kjell (pronounced “Chell”) Lindgren and Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui, who will both arrive next month; spacewalk equipment for Kjell, who will be my spacewalking partner in the fall; filtration beds for removing contaminants from our water (which is close to undrinkable with increasing levels of organic compounds, since the last set of beds, which we badly needed, blew up on Orbital); experiments designed by schoolchildren (some of the kids who saw their experiments blow up on Orbital are being given a second chance to see their work go to space today).

Personally, I’m looking forward to an extra set of running shoes, another harness for the treadmill, clean clothes, medications, and crew care packages that my friends and family chose for me.

Launch time comes and goes. Shortly after, my laptop’s internet starts working again. I look up the video for the SpaceX launch, but the connection isn’t strong enough to stream the video. I get a jerky, frozen image. Then my eye stops on a headline: “SpaceX Rocket Explodes During Cargo Launch to Space Station.”

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

The flight director gets on a privatized space-to-ground channel and tells us the rocket has been lost.

“Station copies,” I say.

I take a moment to think over all the stuff that has been lost. Kimiya’s underwear, my pills, NASA’s $100 million adapter. Schoolchildren’s science experiments. All blown to bits. I joke to Mark that the thing I’m saddest about is the gorilla suit. After having to be talked into it, I had started thinking about all the fun Space Gorilla could have up here. Now he is a burned cinder and raining into the Atlantic Ocean, like everything else on the spacecraft. As stunned as I am by the loss, as overwhelmed as I am by what this will mean for the rest of my year in space and beyond, I’m almost as annoyed that I didn’t get to watch the launch—and the explosion—live. I feel oddly left out of something that is having a huge impact on my life.

I call Amiko and she fills me in on what it looked like: two minutes after launch, the rocket reached maximum aerodynamic pressure, as it was supposed to, then it suddenly blew up in the clear Florida sky. As we talk, it starts to sink in that we have lost three resupply vehicles in the last nine months, the last two in a row. Our consumables are now down to about three months’ worth, and the Russians are much worse off than that.

It occurs to me that maybe we should delay the next crew’s launch until after the increment in September when, for a brief period, we will have nine people up here, with limited supplies and sky-high CO 2. It also occurs to me that the ground should have listened to me when I suggested Terry leave his spacesuit gloves for Gennady to use if we have to do an emergency spacewalk. New gloves are coming up on SpaceX, I was told dismissively. Now those gloves are flaming bits off the coast of Florida.

I think about the schoolchildren who saw their experiments blow up on Orbital, rebuilt them, and saw them blow up on SpaceX. I hope they will get a third chance. There is a lesson here, I guess, about risk and resilience, about endurance and trying again.

IN THE SPRING of 1988, I moved to Beeville, Texas, a small dusty town of blowing tumbleweeds halfway between Corpus Christi and San Antonio. Beeville is one of a few centers of the universe for young Navy pilots who want to fly jets, and I was thrilled to be there. I moved into a small ranch-style house on a dirt road across the street from a cattle ranch with two college classmates who were also in flight school, ready to start my training.

I began flying the T-2 Buckeye, a twin-engine jet. The first time I dressed in a G suit and oxygen mask to climb into the cockpit, I felt like I had arrived in the big leagues. The T-2 is a forgiving jet, which is why we trained on it first, but it’s a jet just the same, which is to say challenging and dangerous to fly. I had a lot to learn. A jet has a lot more power than a propeller-driven airplane. It can go faster, it can accelerate quicker, and it is more responsive to the pilot’s touch—all of which make it much easier to “get behind” the airplane (when it feels like the airplane is in control rather than the pilot) and get into trouble.

I had to get used to the feeling of wearing an oxygen mask and G suit and flying while strapped into an ejection seat. The equipment is physically restrictive, and wearing it made me more aware of potential danger. It was more intimidating than I had anticipated. At the same time, in that G suit I tended to hold my head higher, shoulders back, and walk with a spring in my step. I was becoming a tactical jet aviator and I was proud of it. There would be times in the near future, though, when my cockiness would be dealt a blow.

After I had flown that airplane for about a hundred hours, it was time to try landing on an aircraft carrier—a Navy ship with a flight deck to launch and recover airplanes. Because an aircraft carrier’s flight deck is so short, it is equipped with catapults to help the aircraft take off and arresting cables to help them stop. The landings are difficult and dangerous, even under the best of circumstances.

This is the point in training when a lot of pilots wash out. I’d known this from the start, thanks to The Right Stuff. Carrier qualifications would be flown out of Pensacola, so I flew there the day before and met my brother and some of his squadron mates at McGuire’s, the bar with the dollar bills all over the place. Mark was a year ahead of me, since I had repeated my freshman year of college. He had gone to Corpus Christi for flight training and was now finishing up qualifying to land the A-6 Intruder on the carrier. When I met him and his squadron mates at the bar, they were all celebrating because Mark and a few other guys had just qualified for both day and night landings on the ship. Now that he had qualified, Mark would soon be moving on to his fleet squadron, stationed in Japan.