My crewmates and I converge in the U.S. lab for the daily planning conference with mission control in Houston, people at other NASA sites, and their counterparts in Russia, Japan, and Europe. I find I’m adapting to being up here quicker than last time, both physically—in terms of living in weightlessness—and in terms of following the routines, using the equipment, doing the work. I have a different outlook this time knowing that I’m going to be here so long. I’m running a marathon rather than a sprint. As I pace myself for a year’s stay, I have to constantly remind myself that for certain things, better can be the enemy of good enough.
The conference generally starts at 7:30 a.m. our time. I say good morning to Samantha, who is already there; Gennady, Misha, and Anton will take part in the conference from the Russian segment. Once we are all assembled, Terry grabs the microphone from its position Velcroed to the wall.
“Houston, station on Space to Ground One, we are ready for the DPC.”
Mission control answers with a bright “Good morning, station!” even though it’s 2:30 a.m. in Houston. We go over the day’s plans for a few minutes, mostly about the details of the Dragon capture. We’d been given a general timeline, but now we nail down exactly what time we need to get started with the procedure, the status of Dragon, whether it’s behaving as expected, and when it will be in certain positions relative to the station. When we are done with Houston, they hand us over to the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Then Huntsville hands us over to Munich so we can coordinate with the European Space Agency. Then we talk to “J-COM” in the Japanese mission control in Tsukuba, Japan. Then it’s time to talk to Russia: Terry turns it over to the cosmonauts by saying “Dobroye utro, Tsup va Moskvy, Anton pozhaluysta.” (“Good morning, Control Center Moscow. Anton, please.”) Then Anton takes over the mic because he’s in charge in the Russian segment, and he leads the planning meeting with the Russians. Their meeting style is very different from ours—the ground asks the cosmonauts how they are feeling, which seems like a waste of time because they never say anything other than “khorosho”—good. At times I’ve dared them to say “not great,” “just okay,” or even “I feel like shit,” but they refuse to take me up on it even when I offer them money.
The cosmonauts report on the atmospheric pressure of the station, information their flight controllers can see plainly on their own consoles. Next, they have to read back a list of deorbit parameters that, again, the ground already has—they sent them up to us. I find this waste of time maddening, but maybe it’s an excuse to talk to the crew and gauge their moods and frustration levels.
The Russian space agency has a much different system for compensating their cosmonauts than we do: Their base salaries are much lower, but they get paid bonuses for each day they fly in space. (I get only five dollars per diem, but my base salary is much better.) However, their bonuses are decreased whenever they make “mistakes,” those mistakes defined rather arbitrarily. I suspect that complaining, even making very legitimate complaints, can be defined as a mistake, costing them money and, potentially, the chance to fly in space again. As a result, everything is always “khorosho.”
All of this coordinating with sites all over the world might sound time-consuming, and it can be, but no one would ever suggest changing it. With so many space agencies cooperating, it’s important that everyone knows what everyone else is doing. Plans can change quickly, and a misunderstanding could be costly, or deadly. We do this whole circuit of control centers both morning and evening, five days a week. I’ve chosen not to think about how many times I’ll do these before I come back to Earth.
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DRAGON IS in its orbit ten kilometers away from us, matching our speed of 17,500 miles per hour. We can see its light blinking at us on the external cameras. Soon, SpaceX mission control in Hawthorne, California, will move it to within two kilometers. Then authority transfers to mission control in Houston. There are stopping points along the way, at 350 meters, then 250 meters, then 30 meters, and finally the capture point at 10 meters. At each stopping point, teams on the ground will check Dragon’s systems and evaluate its position before calling “go” or “no go” to move on to the next stage. Inside 250 meters, we will get involved by making sure the vehicle stays within a safe corridor, that it is behaving as expected, and that we are ready to abort if required. Once Dragon is close enough, Samantha will capture it with one of the station’s robot arms. This is a glacially slow and deliberate process—one of the many things that’s very different between movies and real life. In the films Interstellar and 2001: A Space Odyssey, a visiting spacecraft zips up to a space station and locks onto it, a hatch pops open, and people pass through, all over the course of a few minutes. In reality, we operate with the knowledge that one spacecraft is always a potentially fatal threat to another—a bigger threat the closer it gets—and so we move very slowly and deliberately.
Samantha is going to operate the robot arm from the robotics workstation in the Cupola today (the robot arm’s official name is Canadarm2 because it was made by the Canadian Space Agency). Terry will be her backup, and I will be helping out with the approach and rendezvous procedures. Terry and I squeeze in with her, watching the data screen over her shoulder that shows the speed and position of Dragon.
Samantha Cristoforetti is one of the few women to have served as a fighter pilot in the Italian Air Force, and she is unfailingly competent. She is also friendly and quick to laugh, and among her many other qualifications to fly in space, she has a rare talent for language. She has a native-level fluency in English and Russian, the two official languages of the ISS—she sometimes acts as an interpreter between cosmonauts and astronauts if we have to talk about something nuanced or complicated. She also speaks French, German, and her native Italian, and she’s also working on learning Chinese. For some people who hope to fly in space, language can be a challenge. We all have to be able to speak at least one second language (I’ve been studying Russian for years, and my cosmonaut crewmates speak my language much better than I speak theirs), but the European and Japanese astronauts have the added burden of learning two languages if they don’t already speak English or Russian.