Andrew Morgan - Vessel

The pilot laid the skids on the concrete and gave Bales a thumbs up. Bales slid open the cabin door and jumped down, waving Sally to follow. She clambered out, letting him push her head down as they both ducked underneath the thundering blades. As soon as they cleared the helicopter’s footprint, the pilot wound the engine up to full speed, sucking the metal and glass bird into the sky. Bales led the way. They turned onto what seemed to be the main boulevard, a wide strip lined with trees and tall concrete buildings whose patchy surfaces were weatherworn from many decades of harsh winters. The morning cloud had begun to break, letting in a stream of sunlight that glowed on Sally’s back. The warmth made her feel at home, like it was an early Spring morning in California, and she shut her eyes for a few seconds to let the soothing reassurance calm her nerves. Just for a moment all was well as she stepped off the mental rollercoaster that had thrown her here and there ever since the call from NASA.

They walked up to what looked like an apartment block, and Bales held the door open for her. Inside it was no different to any of the cheap motels Sally had stayed at during her student days: dirty, flaking paint, cheap fixtures, long corridors and a funny — but not unpleasant — smell.

‘Let me show you to your room,’ Bales said. He stopped at room twenty-four and opened the door. ‘Lunch is at midday in the cafeteria building opposite. Training begins straight after. We’ve got a window of three weeks before the earliest launch date, and you’ve got six months of training to get through. It’s going to be tough.’

Sally walked into the sparse room and sat on the firm, narrow bed.

‘Good luck,’ Bales said. ‘You’ll do just fine.’

And then he was gone. The one window in the room was open, and a gentle breath of air flowed through, carrying with it the mysterious silence of the centre.

Over two thousand miles due South-East, in a remote patch in the middle of the hot, acrid desert of rural Baikonur, Kazakhstan, a flurry of activity was taking place under the watchful eye of the Cosmodrome Director. Although the parched landscape stretched out for many hundreds of miles in every direction, visible from space as a muted brown wasteland, the few square miles of his jurisdiction was the unlikely home of the space vehicle Soyuz.

Fifty metres tall, ten metres wide and three hundred tonnes, the gargantuan evolution of 1960s rocket design was not where it should have been. The Director’s schedule dictated that transport to the pad should have started four hours ago, yet the cylindrical craft remained prone in its folded gantry inside the MIK preparation building. Many anxious-faced engineers and scientists swarmed around it, working at a furious pace.

Watching as the fragile, insect-like cargo was removed from its metal cocoon, it struck the Director — as it did every time he saw it — how incredible it was that such a tiny and delicate object required over one hundred and fifty tonnes of fuel to lift it just two hundred and fifty miles upwards. In the dust-free workshop, its shrink-wrapped foil carcass exposed, it seemed defenceless and frail against an atmosphere it wasn’t designed for, a silvery fish rendered useless on dry land. Excess was not a word used in the design of these modules; anything that could be pared back was, leaving only a delicate skeleton behind.

The Director didn’t have much time for his muses, though. Following a last minute instruction from NASA via the RFSA, the cargo was to be modified. The Soyuz rocket usually carried one of two capsules: the first, also called Soyuz, was a seven-metre-long transport ship made of three sections. At the front was a pressurized sphere two-and-a-half metres in diameter, used as a docking module and storage space for a small amount of cargo. The middle section, shaped like an egg with a flattened bottom, was home to a maximum of three crew for the short journey to the ISS, and was also capable of withstanding the destructive friction of the atmosphere during re-entry. The rearmost section contained instrumentation and propulsion, including two folding solar panels that stretched out on either side like wings.

The capsule he had been instructed to dismantle was called Progress, an unmanned, automated tug that simply acted as a cargo transport to and from the ISS. It was not designed to cater for life on its trip; it acted as a hollow space to hold the supplies and equipment needed by the station and its crew, lacking the vital middle section of the Soyuz craft in favour of an additional fuel tank for refuelling the ISS.

As a Soyuz capsule was not ready for immediate replacement, the best possible solution was to reconfigure the Progress craft by replacing the second module. The silver sheath was retracted, and the craft deconstructed, ready for its adaptation. The Director reported that the additional workload would delay the launch by two weeks and four days, pushing it back to three weeks from now. It was going to be tough, but he knew his team could do it.

‘What we intend to do,’ the instructor said through a treacle-thick Russian accent, ‘is train you in three weeks, what most mission specialists learn in two years.’

‘I thought it was normally a six-month course?’ Sally asked.

‘Six months is the intensive course.’

Sitting at her desk in the musty classroom, Sally said nothing further, waiting for her new mentor to continue. All of a sudden, the weight of her burden seemed a whole lot heavier.

‘This, as you may realise, is an impossibility. We can only teach you what is necessary. You must be prepared.’

The first day was easy: she was taken on a tour of an ISS mock-up and shown the basic emergency medical and fire procedures. Then they showed her how the facilities worked, from the bathroom to the galley to the gym. A brief tour of her soon-to-be workplace, the Columbus module, followed. She hoovered up the knowledge and by the time evening rolled in, she was feeling confident about her ability to become space-ready in such a short amount of time.

The next day was physical training, and with it an early start. Still groggy from sleep, she slipped on one of the provided tracksuits, then left the dormitory. Wandering down the deserted main strip, guided by the first few glimmers of morning, she headed for the gym, building up a quick pace to fight off the chill.

‘Have you had breakfast?’ That was the first thing her instructor asked her as she entered the gym.

‘No…’ she said. ‘Breakfast doesn’t agree with me this early in the morning.’

‘You need to eat,’ the instructor said, hands on hips. ‘You need your strength.’

They warmed up and went for a run around the centre. Within a hundred metres Sally’s lungs felt full of molten lead, and after a hundred more her tracksuit was thick with sweat. Fifteen minutes later, they were back at the gym and Sally collapsed onto a bench, gasping for breath. She wasn’t given long to recover before weight training began.

‘Space may seem serene and pleasant on television,’ the instructor told her as she forced out another repetition, ‘but it has a terrible effect on your body. Muscles, bones, your internal organs — they all need exercise to stay healthy and strong.’

Sally wasn’t sure how she made it back to her dormitory by the time the day was done, late into the night. Between setting her alarm for the next day — an hour earlier this time, she was starving — and waking up again, it seemed like a mere blink. A week and a half more of strength and fitness training followed, and at the end she almost whooped with joy when she saw that the first activity on the next day was not until noon. There was a note alongside the entry that told her to have breakfast, but to avoid lunch. She was so tired she didn’t give it a second thought.