After a bit I say, “You know, on second thought, I don’t like this soup.”
“Yeah, I don’t like it either,” Tim says. When we finish our food, we each get back to our respective tasks. It takes me a few minutes before I realize I’m not annoyed by Tim’s repeating what I just said. It also doesn’t bother me when we lose the satellite signal and the story I’m following on CNN cuts out. It doesn’t even bother me when a tiny brown sphere of barbecue sauce propels itself onto the thigh of my pants. I feel calmer and more content with my surroundings than I have in months, maybe all year.
That evening, I tell Amiko about this strange effect of the muscle relaxant.
“You’re under a lot of stress,” she points out. “The drug will affect that.”
I tell her my flight surgeon mentioned that the drug is sometimes prescribed for mood and anxiety disorders. “I haven’t felt that stressed out,” I tell her. In fact, I’ve felt pretty normal, all things considered. But I guess just being here has been getting to me. I have to set aside stress so I can concentrate on what I need to do, but when stress is always there, it can come out in unexpected ways—like feeling annoyed by a colleague. I also have to keep in mind that I’ve been living with high CO2 for almost a year, which is known to cause irritability. At any rate, it’s nice to feel better, and I try to enjoy the positive side effect of the drug while it lasts.
That night, I read a few pages of the Shackleton book in my sleeping bag. On Christmas 1914, the first officer of the expedition wrote in his journal, “Here endeth another Christmas Day. I wonder how and under what circumstances our next one will be spent. Temperature 30 degrees.” He couldn’t have imagined how he would spend his next Christmas—camping on an ice floe with minimal provisions after their ship, the Endurance, had been crushed by ice. For all the suffering of their ordeal, the men discovered they enjoyed the self-reliance they had found. “In some ways they had come to know themselves better,” author Alfred Lansing writes. “In this lonely world of ice and emptiness, they had achieved at least a limited kind of contentment. They had been tested and found not wanting.”
I turn out the light and float for a while before falling asleep.
—
NEW YEAR’S Eve is a bigger holiday than Christmas on the space station because it’s celebrated by all nations on the same day. We gather in the Russian segment for the festivities. We all have something to eat, someone makes a toast. We continue that way on into the night. We briefly turn out the lights to see whether we can glimpse any fireworks on Earth—on my previous long-duration flight we were able to see the tiny specks of colored light, but this year we don’t see any. It is still a privilege to be spending my second New Year’s Eve in space, and I’m glad I’m still able to appreciate where I am and what I am getting to do. The next morning I get up early to call my friends and family in the United States to wish them a happy 2016—the year I will come home.
19
January 7, 2016
Dreamed Amiko and some of my astronaut colleagues arrived unexpectedly on the space station. They had come on a bus, which made sense in the dream. I went to the U.S. lab to clean up a bit and found a cigarette my dad had left smoldering. The cigarette started to catch on loose papers floating around. I shouted at everyone to evacuate, and I stayed behind to fight the fire with a garden hose, which I was surprised to find coiled on the wall along with all of the other equipment we keep in there. It didn’t work very well, though, because the space station was made of dried wood. The fire grew until there were flames all around me, and I fought it until I woke up.
TOMORROW IS the fifth anniversary of the shooting in Tucson that injured Gabby. The approach of this day has made me think about what I was doing when Gabby was shot. I was fixing the toilet, and now the same toilet is failing in the exact same way.
As weird as this is, we’ve sort of known this day was coming. We were hundreds of days beyond what was supposed to be the lifespan of the toilet’s pump separator, and I had started to see it as a challenge to keep it limping along past the point when the ground had suggested I should replace it. I should have listened to them, because if it fails catastrophically it produces an enormous sphere of urine mixed with the sulfuric acid pretreat, a gallon of nastiness I would have to clean up.
Five years ago, I was orbiting 250 miles above my family when they needed me most. So much has changed since then; yet I’m in the same place, doing the same thing, as we honor the victims of the shooting with a moment of silence.
—
TODAY, January 15, 2016, is a great day on the International Space Station because a spacewalk is going on and I’m not doing it. I will always be glad that I had the chance to experience the thrill of floating outside the station with nothing but a spacesuit between me and the cosmos, but at least for now, I am more than fine with sitting this one out. It’s also a thrill to see Tim Peake become the first official British astronaut to do a spacewalk.
Today I am serving as IV. I make sure both Tims get into their suits properly, call out the steps as they check over their tools and check their spacesuits’ functions, and operate the airlock. Tim and Tim are replacing the power regulator that failed back in September while Amiko was on console in mission control, as well as installing some new cabling. They get through those tasks and a few others successfully before Tim Kopra’s CO2 sensor malfunctions. This isn’t a big deal in itself, because he can self-monitor his CO2 levels based on his symptoms, but soon after, he reports a water bubble inside his helmet. If the bubble were small, we might have speculated that it was a drop of sweat that had broken free, but the bubble is big. Tim also reports that when he pushes his head back against the absorbent pad in his helmet, there is a squishing noise, a sign that more water than just that bubble is in his helmet.