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

One day soon after, I’m answering some emails and come across an invitation to speak at a conference in April. When I open my calendar, I realize that I’m scheduling my first event for after I get back to Earth.

ON MONDAY, December 21, I wake up early, diaper up, and get into my liquid cooling garment for the third time. Tim Kopra and I start our prebreathe of pure oxygen, then an hour later Tim Peake helps us get into our spacesuits. This spacewalk will be shorter than the previous ones—we will get the CETA cart and the mobile transporter unstuck, then do a couple more tasks we know will need to be done at some point (called get-ahead tasks) so as to make the best use of the time and resources it takes just to get suited up and get out the door. Tim Peake does a great job as IV—as he moves through the checklist to get us ready (with the help of Sergey), any concern I might have had about whether he was prepared to take on this role after only being up here for six days dissolves. He works efficiently and confidently, and soon we are in the airlock and doing our leak checks.

I’m wearing the spacesuit with red stripes again, EV1. When the airlock is fully depressurized, Tim Kopra and I switch our suits to battery power and the spacewalk has officially begun. This is Tim’s second spacewalk, but his first was in 2009, so it’s been a while. Once we are outside and have completed our buddy checks, I translate to the CETA cart. When I reach the cart, I try moving it along the truss and, sure enough, it’s stuck. I release the brake handle, then move it freely in both directions. The ground is satisfied.

It feels odd to have accomplished our main objective only forty-five minutes in. We finish up some of the tasks that Kjell and I had to leave undone the last time we were out here, mostly routing cables to locations where they can later be connected with future hardware. We come back inside after three hours and fifteen minutes, and while I’m far from the exhaustion I felt at the end of my earlier spacewalks, I’m still tired and sore. My fatigue level is more like what I used to feel after the training runs we did in the pool in Houston. Much easier, but still not easy.

After I come back in, I speak with Amiko and then check my email. There is one from Kjell, telling me he had watched the spacewalk on NASA TV. It’s strange to imagine him in Houston, watching in the predawn early morning, sitting in a chair of some kind, gravity holding him there. “You guys crushed it!” his email reads. He asks about what we did and what the experience was like with the specificity and enthusiasm of someone who had just been there. In my response I tell him it was less than half as long as our shorter spacewalk but required only about a fifth the effort. I tell him either the time versus perceived effort is exponential or else those were just exceptionally tough spacewalks he and I did.

“How’s Earth?” I type to end my message. “Starting to forget what space is like yet? Merry Christmas!”

For the rest of my mission, I occasionally look out the window and catch sight of the area at the end of the truss where Kjell and I worked on that second spacewalk. It looks far away, farther than home, and it gives me a strange feeling of nostalgia, like the feeling I get when I visit my old neighborhood in New Jersey. Not just a place I’ve spent time, but a place imbued with strong emotions, a place familiar yet at the same time distant, now unreachable.

December 24, 2015

Dreamed I met with General David Petraeus and he was trying to warn me of something. Some kind of trouble I would experience on this flight. Then I was on a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean off of Oman. We heard there was a hurricane coming with two-hundred-mile-per-hour winds, and soon after it came out of nowhere and capsized the aircraft carrier. Then the crew rebelled against the officers.

TODAY IS Christmas Eve, my third in space. This isn’t a number anyone would envy, especially a parent with kids: a holiday that celebrates family togetherness can be the toughest time to be away. On top of that, the last two weeks have overextended us. The previous crew leaving, the new guys arriving, helping them get acclimated, preparing for and executing the emergency spacewalk—these have all been demanding, and they have come one right after the other. I have worked nearly two weeks without a day off, so my mood going into Christmas is less than festive.

Holiday or not, today is just another workday on the schedule, one that becomes more difficult when the resistive exercise device breaks down. This is more urgent than it might seem, because exercise is nearly as important to our well-being as oxygen and food. When we skip even one exercise session, we can feel it physically, as if our muscles are atrophying, and it’s not a good feeling. Tim Kopra and I take nearly half the day to fix the machine—a broken damper, like a shock absorber, is the culprit. Because of this, we don’t wrap up our workday until eight p.m., by which time I’ve missed both my exercise sessions, which only adds to my crappy mood.

I call Amiko before heading over to the Russian segment for dinner. I’ve felt like something has been bothering her for the past few days, and I’m starting to get the sense that I’ve done something to upset her. Maybe it has taken me longer than it should have to figure this out, since it doesn’t seem like there is much I can do to annoy her from space.

I reach her on a checkout line at the grocery store. Not ideal for an emotionally honest conversation, but we don’t have much time left on this comm pass, so we have no choice.

“I get the sense that something has maybe been bothering you,” I say. “Have I done something to upset you?”

She thinks for a moment, then gives a long sigh. She sounds exhausted.

“I feel like when you get back we will have to reconnect,” she says.

Of course we will have to reconnect, I think—I will have been away for a year. “What does that mean?” I ask. “You feel—disconnected?”

Amiko explains that the holidays are tough because she is missing not only me but my daughters. She is carrying a heavy load watching over my father and her own sons, taking care of our house and the many things I can’t be there to help her with. Her already demanding job has become more stressful—she is being edged out of her social media management position, and her supervisors have made clear that she cannot help me with my social media on work time—a counterproductive policy when I have over a million Twitter followers and similar numbers on other social media platforms. She is forced to use her own time or take annual leave to conduct interviews about my mission or even just to walk over to the astronaut office to drop off items to be included in my care packages. All of her hard work and sacrifice go completely unrecognized by her management. (By contrast, my colleagues in the astronaut office have been unfailingly supportive of Amiko as my partner, for which I’ve been grateful.)

The strain of all these pressures has been taking a toll, and Amiko has hidden it from me. She enjoys working with me on my social media campaign and takes pride in how successful it’s been, but lately many of our conversations revolve around things I need her to do to the exclusion of everything else. At times she can feel like my coworker rather than my partner. Worse, she tells me it’s starting to bother her that she no longer remembers how I feel or smell, what it’s actually like to be with me face-to-face. She says she is craving real human touch. Then the satellite drops out and I lose her in midsentence.