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

I was surprised by how dizzy I felt being back in Earth’s gravity. When I tried to unstrap myself from my seat and get up, I found I nearly couldn’t move. I felt like I weighed a thousand pounds. We climbed from the space shuttle to a converted motor home where we could change out of our launch-and-entry suits and get a brief medical examination. Trying to get out of the suit worsened my dizziness, and the world spun up like a carnival ride.

Some of my crewmates were worse off than others, their faces pale and clammy. We were taken back to the crew quarters at Kennedy, where we were able to shower before meeting up with our families and friends. I went out that night to Fishlips, a seafood restaurant in Port Canaveral, with everyone who had come for my landing, and it was a bit surreal, sitting at a long table drinking beer and enjoying fish tacos, when just a few hours earlier I had been hurtling toward the Earth at a blistering speed in a 3,000-degree fireball. We threw a party for our Houston friends when we returned home the next night, and a couple of days later I was back in the office, a real astronaut.

September 4, 2015

Dreamed the new people came up here, bringing our total to nine. We were so overcrowded we had to share our CQs. I was sharing mine with some guy I didn’t know, and he was cooking meth inside. I had to sleep with a respirator on. The other crew members were getting suspicious of the yellow cloud of smoke coming from under the door, and for some reason I worked to hide it. My roommate kept saying he was going to stop, but he wouldn’t. Eventually I tricked him into the airlock, closed the hatch, and spaced him.

IT’S A RARE OCCASION for a Soyuz to dock without another one having left recently. The Soyuz that comes up today is the one that will be my ride back to Earth six months from now, and its crew will bring our total to nine. I’m looking forward to having some new faces up here, but I’m also concerned about how the Seedra will stand up to nine people exhaling rather than six, as well as the strain on the toilets and other crucial equipment. The overall activity level is going to take some getting used to.

Our new crewmates will be Andreas Mogensen (Andy), Aidyn Aimbetov, and Sergey Volkov. Sergey will be here through the end of my mission and will command the Soyuz that he, Misha, and I will go home on in March, but Andy and Aidyn are here for only ten days, flying this short increment that had been meant for Sarah Brightman. When she withdrew from the flight very late in her preparations to go, her seat was taken by Aidyn, a Kazakh cosmonaut. The Russian space agency has been promising to send a Kazakh to ISS for a long time, as a gesture in exchange for the use of Baikonur as their launch operations center (in addition to $115 million a year). Aidyn is the third Kazakh to go to space but the first to fly under his country’s flag rather than the Russian flag.

When the new guys arrive, Sergey Volkov floats through the hatch first. I know him well from being in the same era of space flyers—I was selected in NASA’s 1996 class, and he was selected in Roscosmos’s 1997 class, so we were peers. At one point, Sergey had been assigned to the STS-121 crew with my brother, and in preparation for that flight they went on a National Outdoor Leadership School trip. They spent a week in a tent in horrible weather in Wyoming, which cemented a lifelong friendship. I got to know Sergey more when we trained together for our Soyuz descent, but because that was so far in the future, we left most of the training for in flight. Sergey was Misha’s backup for the yearlong mission, so when we were in Baikonur preparing for launch, Sergey was there with us too. Sergey says to me regularly, “Please say hi to Mark for me.”

Then Andy floats through the hatch. He’s an ESA astronaut from Denmark whom I’ve known for years, a friendly guy with blond hair and a perpetual smile. He grew up all over the world and went to high school and college in the United States. His wife jokes that his English is better than his Danish.

When Aidyn comes floating through last, I’m watching with interest. He pauses in the hatch to give a heroic Superman pose to the camera, Gennady and Oleg holding his sides to steady him. He looks a lot like the people I’ve known in Kazakhstan, more Asian than European. He is younger than me, forty-three, but seems older (maybe it’s the zero g). He started his career as a military pilot, rising to the role of flying the Soviet Su-27 Flanker. Then he was selected as part of the first official Kazakh cosmonaut class in 2002. For all these years he’s been waiting to fly, sometimes assigned to missions that fell through, sometimes on hiatus when Kazakhstan could not fund his training and flight. I imagine everyone who has flown in space has felt it was a long journey to get here—it’s not unusual for American astronauts to wait many years to fly even after completing astronaut training—but Aidyn truly waited a long time.

From the start, Aidyn seems disoriented up here. He gets lost trying to find his way to the Soyuz and ends up in the U.S. lab module; the next day, he can’t locate the Japanese module. I find him looking for the 3-D printer in the U.S. segment, and we try to talk about it. But he has no English, and Russian is a second language for both of us, so our discussion is pretty rudimentary.

TODAY WE HOLD the change-of-command ceremony, so I am now officially the commander of the International Space Station. The capcom on the ground congratulates me on taking over for the next six months, and her words hit me—six months is a long time. I try not to dwell on how long I have to go. I’ve been up here for so long, and I’m only halfway through.

This morning, I showed Andy the view of the Bahamas from the Cupola. Later in the day, he comes to ask me whether the window shutters need to stay closed. At first I’m confused by his question, because I thought the shutters were open. We go to the Cupola, and it’s dark outside, a deep, deep black. I explain to him that we happen to be passing over the Pacific during orbital night with no moon and the lights outside the space station turned off for some reason.

In the morning, Gennady greets me, “Good morning, Comrade Commander,” with great affection in his voice. I’m going to miss him next week when he’s gone—he has been a great commander, and I have learned a lot from him.

Today is Friday, and because there are so many of us we eat Friday dinner in Node 1 rather than trying to cram into the snug Russian service module. Andy has brought us some corned beef and cabbage, which hits the spot; I’ve been craving a corned beef sandwich from the Carnegie Deli in New York for a long time. After we’re done eating, Andy hands each of us a Danish chocolate, an unexpected treat. When we start opening the chocolates, we find that each of them contains a message from someone we know—my chocolate has a poem from Amiko. It was a great idea of Andy’s and a really thoughtful gesture.

On Sunday we have a traditional Kazakh meal, irradiated and packaged into space-food servings: horse meat soup, cheese made of horse milk, and horse milk to drink. The horse meat is a little gamey, but I eat all of it. The cheese is really salty, which is actually a nice change from the low-sodium food we generally have. I comment that the horse milk is really sweet—as commander, I feel like as a gesture of goodwill I should try everything—and Aidyn tells me that it’s closest in taste to human breast milk. That does it for me. Now my concern is what to do with a nearly full bag of unpasteurized horse milk. I tell Aidyn I’m going to put it in the small fridge along with the condiments and some science experiments and drink it in the morning with my breakfast. When he isn’t looking, I triple-bag it and dispose of it in a spot reserved for the smelliest items.