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MY SECOND CRUISE on the Empire State V, the summer between my sophomore and junior years, offered me better work assignments and more authority. Our first night in port in Alicante, Spain, my classmates and I threw a party in our room. Drinking was not allowed on the ship, but as long as we didn’t cause any problems we hoped not to get in any trouble. Within a few hours we were pretty lit. I finished off a bottle of vodka, the last of the alcohol we had on board, and I thought I should mark the occasion by throwing the bottle against the bulkhead to smash it. But instead of breaking, the bottle bounced off the wall and struck one of my classmates on the back of the head. She was nearly knocked out, and we probably should have sought medical attention for her, but instead we thought it was hysterical, including her.
Intent on continuing our party, we came up with a great plan: we decided to get a Jacob’s ladder (a hanging ladder made of heavy rope and wood planks) and throw it over the back of the ship. Then we could climb down, swim to the dock, and sneak off to a nearby bar. We dispatched a couple of people to the forward part of the ship to find the ladder and haul it back. When they reached the rest of us, waiting for them at the stern of the ship, they were dragging the ladder, which weighed nearly a hundred pounds. As we were putting it into place, I got into an argument with a classmate about which of us would go down the ladder first. We were yelling and screaming, neither of us backing down, and nearly came to blows. I finally convinced him of my superior qualifications for the job and triumphantly climbed over the railing to test how securely the ladder was fastened. In fact, it wasn’t tied down at all. I fell, along with one hundred pounds of rope and wood, thirty feet into the dark water below. I remember hitting the hard, cold water as if hitting a sheet of pavement and reflecting with surprise that I had remained conscious. I quickly sank, pulled down by the heavy ladder, which I was now tangled in. It took a huge effort to swim back up to the surface. I was able to struggle over to the engineering side port, used for loading supplies while the ship was docked, and some of the engineering cadets were already there waiting to pull me back in. I was completely limp from the shock of hitting the water so hard, as well as from the vodka, but eventually a classmate pulled me in through the access door. I made it back to the aft part of the ship undetected, and our superiors never learned of our adventures. I surely would have been expelled if they had, and that would have cost me the one chance I had managed to create for myself.
5
April 3, 2015
Dreamed I was working in a Soviet-era car refurbishment plant with Soviet soldiers, wearing their olive-green full-length wool coats and their Russian hats. The plant took old crappy Soviet cars and cleaned them up, maybe for resale and maybe for some other nefarious purpose. I wasn’t sure. I was responsible for cleaning the engines with a big steamer. Each time I sprayed, engine oil splattered all over the room, and I worried that I was somehow doing it wrong. I wondered how the room would be cleaned.
MY GOAL FOR most of my adult life has been to pilot aircraft and spacecraft. So it sometimes strikes me as odd that the International Space Station doesn’t need to be piloted at all. When I try to explain this to people who don’t know much about the station, I tell them it’s more like a ship traveling the world’s oceans than like an airplane. Something like the USS La Jolla, a submarine I served on for a few days as a midshipman while still in college, which was self-contained and self-powering. We don’t fly the space station—it’s controlled by software, and even if human intervention is needed, it is controlled by laptops on board or on the ground. We live in the space station, the way you live in a building. We work in it, the way scientists work in a laboratory, and we also work on it, the way mechanics work on a boat, if the boat were adrift in international waters and the Coast Guard had no way to reach it.
I sometimes see the station described as an object: “The International Space Station is the most expensive object ever created.” “The ISS is the only object whose components were manufactured by different countries and assembled in space.” That much is true. But when you live inside the station for months, it doesn’t feel like an object. It feels like a place, a very specific place with its own personality and its own unique characteristics. It has an inside and an outside and rooms upon rooms, each of which serve different purposes, its own equipment and hardware, and its own feeling and smell, distinct from the others. Each module has its own story and its own quirks.
I’ve been on station for a week now. I’m getting better at knowing where I am when I first wake up. If I have a headache, I know it’s because I’ve drifted too far from the vent blowing clean air at my face. I’m often still disoriented about how my body is positioned—I’ll wake up convinced that I’m upside down, because in the dark and without gravity, my inner ear just takes a random guess as to how my body is positioned in the small space. When I turn on a light, I have a sort of visual illusion that the room is rotating rapidly as it reorients itself around me, though I know it’s actually my brain readjusting in response to new sensory input.
The light in my crew quarters takes a minute to warm up to full brightness. The space is just barely big enough for me and my sleeping bag, two laptops, some clothes, toiletries, photos of Amiko and my daughters, a few paperback books. Without getting out of my sleeping bag, I wake up one of the two computers attached to the wall and write down what I remember of my dreams. After my last flight, people were interested in my descriptions of the vivid and surreal dreams I had in space, but I forgot most of them, so I’m making a point of keeping a more consistent dream journal this time.
Then I look at my schedule for today. I click through new emails, stretch and yawn, then fish around in my toiletries bag, attached to the wall down by my left knee, for my toothpaste and toothbrush. I brush, still in my sleeping bag, then swallow the toothpaste and chase it with a sip of water out of a bag with a straw. There isn’t really a good way to spit in space. I spend a few minutes looking over the daily summary sent up by the Mission Control Center in Houston, an electronic document that shows the state of the space station and its systems, asks us questions they came up with overnight, and includes important notes for the plan we’re going to execute that day. There’s also a cartoon at the end, often making fun of either us or themselves. Today’s daily summary shows it’s going to be a challenging day, and these are the days I look forward to.
My crew quarters on board the ISS, a place to sleep but also my personal private space. My home in our home away from home for a year Credit 3