I get dressed while I skim over the procedures for the Dragon capture again. We all trained for this thoroughly before launch, capturing many imaginary Dragons using a simulator, so I’m just refreshing my recollection. Getting dressed is a bit of a hassle when you can’t sit or stand, but I’ve gotten used to it. The most challenging thing is putting on my socks without gravity to help me bend over. It’s not a challenge to figure out what to wear, since I wear the same thing every day: a pair of khaki pants with lots of pockets and strips of Velcro across the thighs, crucial when I can’t put anything down. I have decided to experiment with how long I can make my clothes last, the idea of going to Mars in the back of my mind. Can a pair of underwear be worn four days instead of two? Can a pair of socks last a month? Can a pair of pants last six months? I aim to find out. I put on my favorite black T-shirt and a sweatshirt that, because it’s flying with me for the third time, has to be one of the most traveled pieces of clothing in the history of clothing.
Dressed and ready for breakfast, I open the door to my CQ. As I push against the back wall to float myself out, I accidentally kick loose a paperback book: Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing. I brought this book with me on my previous flight as well, and sometimes I flip through it after a long day and reflect on what these explorers went through almost exactly a hundred years before. They were stranded on ice floes for months at a time, forced to kill their dogs for food, and nearly froze to death in the biting cold. They hiked across mountains that had been considered impassable by explorers who were better equipped and not half starved. Remarkably, not a single member of the expedition was lost.
When I try to put myself in their place, I think the uncertainty must have been the worst thing. The doubt about their survival would be worse than the hunger and the cold. When I read about their experiences, I think about how much harder they had it than I do. Sometimes I’ll pick up the book specifically for that reason. If I’m inclined to feel sorry for myself because I miss my family or because I had a frustrating day or because the isolation is getting to me, reading a few pages about the Shackleton expedition reminds me that even if I have it hard up here in some ways, I’m certainly not going through what they did.
Out in Node 1, the module that serves largely as our kitchen and living room, I open a food container attached to the wall and fish out a pouch of dehydrated coffee with cream and sugar. I float over to the hot water dispenser in the ceiling of the lab, which works by inserting a needle into a nozzle on the bag. When the bag is full, I replace the needle with a drinking straw equipped with a valve to pinch it closed. It was oddly unsatisfying at first to drink coffee from a plastic bag sipped through a straw, but now I’m not bothered by it. I flip through the breakfast options, looking for a packet of the granola I like. Unfortunately, everyone else seems to like it too. I choose some dehydrated eggs instead and reconstitute them with the same hot water dispenser, then warm up some irradiated sausage links in the food warmer box, which resembles a metal briefcase. I cut the bag open, then clean the scissors by licking them, since we have no sink (we each have our own scissors). I spoon the eggs out of the bag onto a tortilla—conveniently, surface tension holds them in place—add the sausage and some hot sauce, roll it up, and eat the burrito while catching up with the morning’s news on CNN. All the while I’m holding myself in place with my right big toe tucked ever so slightly under a handrail on the floor. Handrails are placed on the walls, floors, and ceilings of every module and at the hatches where modules connect, allowing us to propel ourselves through the modules or to stay in place rather than drifting away.
Terry Virts and me taking a break from the workday in Node 1, our living room and dining room onboard the ISS Credit 5
There are a lot of things about living in weightlessness that are fun, but eating is not one of them. I miss being able to sit in a chair while eating a meal, relaxing and pausing to connect with other people. Eating on the space station, at my workplace, three times a day, while constantly floating and steadying myself, is hardly the same. My egg burrito will float if I let go of it, as will my spoon, egg crumbs, a squeeze bottle of mustard that came up on the last resupply rocket, and a tiny perfect sphere of coffee. The “table” we use for eating has Velcro strips and duct tape to help us keep things in place, but it’s still a challenge to manage all these potentially floating components. I bite the coffee sphere out of the air and swallow it before it can drift into a piece of equipment, or onto a crewmate or my pants (as they need to last six months). The biggest concern is food getting stuck on the hatch seal between modules, one of which is right by the table where we eat. We need to be able to close and seal that hatch quickly in an emergency.
As I’m eating, Terry floats in and wishes me a good morning while looking for coffee. Terry’s astronaut class of 2000 has gotten a raw deal in terms of flight opportunities, since the Columbia disaster grounded the fleet at the same time they completed their initial training and became eligible to fly. Terry didn’t get his chance on the shuttle for ten years. He served as the pilot for STS-130, the mission that delivered the last two modules to the International Space Station—Node 3 and the Cupola. Terry should have then had the chance to command a shuttle mission of his own, but the program ended soon after. He had to wait another four and a half years before flying again, on this mission.
Like me, Terry was a test pilot before joining NASA—in his case, with the Air Force. He has thick dirty-blond hair, a pleasant demeanor, and his default expression is a smile. His call sign is “Flanders,” after the lovably square character Ned Flanders on The Simpsons. Terry has the positive attributes of Ned Flanders—optimism, enthusiasm, friendliness—and none of the negative ones. He is one of a small handful of vocally religious astronauts, and while some of my colleagues are bothered by this, I’ve never had a problem with Terry on this issue or any other. I’ve found him to be consistently competent, and as a leader, he is a consensus builder rather than an authoritarian. Since I’ve been up here and have been commander, he has always been respectful of my previous experience, always open to suggestions about how to do things better without getting defensive or competitive. He loves baseball, so there’s always a game on some laptop, especially when the Astros or the Orioles are playing. I’ve gotten used to the rhythm of the nine-inning games marking time for a few hours of our workday.
Terry eats a maple muffin top while I’m finishing my egg burrito. Next, I eat a pouch of rehydrated oatmeal with raisins. The food portions are small, to discourage waste, so we often wind up eating a few different things for one meal. We are going to have a long morning, and I don’t know when we’ll be able to break for lunch.