Much of the management Seedra demands can be done from the ground, which is true for a lot of the hardware up here. Mission control can send a signal to the equipment, using the same satellites we use for email and phone calls. But at times, more serious hands-on maintenance by astronauts is required. The repair process isn’t simple. Seedra has to be powered down and allowed to cool. Then all the electrical connectors, water-cooling lines, and vacuum lines at the bottom of the rack the Seedra sits in have to be removed. All of the bolts holding it in place must be removed so it can slide out. On my previous mission, when I gave Seedra a good tug, it didn’t budge. It felt as if it were welded in place. I had to call to the ground for help, and they had no clue. Many meetings were called over the next few days at the Johnson Space Center while specialists tried to work through the problem.
In that instance, I went over all the bolts again and found one just hanging by a single thread. Problem solved. I pulled the beast out and eventually had to remove all the insulation to expose more electrical connectors, more water lines, and Hydro Flow connectors, which are notoriously tricky to mate. Working on a complex piece of hardware in space is infinitely harder than it would be on Earth, where I could put down tools and parts and they’d stay put. And there are so many complex pieces of hardware up here—NASA estimates that we spend a quarter of our time on maintenance and repairs. The hardest part of repairing the Seedra is replacing all the insulation, sort of like doing a huge 3-D puzzle with all the pieces floating. When we started it up again, it worked. Kelly 1, Seedra 0. I had no idea what it still had in store for me.
On this mission, the two Seedras have been giving us new issues to deal with. The one we use most, in Node 3, has been shutting down when its air selector valves, which are moving parts, get gummed up with zeolite and stick in the wrong position. The Seedra in the lab has an intermittent electrical short that we can’t quite pin down. Sometimes, over the course of a day, the CO2 level will slowly start to rise, especially when someone is exercising. As the day goes on, I’ll feel congested, with burning eyes and a mild headache. I’ve been using Sudafed and Afrin to fight the symptoms, but these are temporary fixes, and I will quickly develop tolerances. A few days ago, I asked Terry and Samantha how they have been feeling, and they both said they had noticed that when the CO2 was high they didn’t feel especially sharp cognitively. I’m frustrated that we can’t seem to get any urgency on this issue from the ground.
Part of my annoyance has to do with the fact that even though we have two Seedras on board, the ground allows us to run only one of them, keeping the other in reserve as a backup. We use the one in Node 3 because it works relatively consistently; only if it goes out, or if we have more than six people on board (as will happen in September), will we be authorized to use both. Our CO2 level could come down to a much more tolerable level with the flip of a switch in Houston, and yet we can’t convince them to do this. I can’t help but to sometimes suspect the second Seedra is kept shut off to avoid the hassle of maintaining it from the ground. It’s hard to work up sympathy for flight controllers who make this decision while breathing relatively clean Earth air. A level of six millimeters of mercury seems unconscionably high to me. The Russian managers claim that the CO2 should be kept high deliberately because it helps to protect the crew from harmful effects of radiation. If there is any scientific basis for this claim, I have yet to see it. And because (I suspect) the cosmonauts are docked pay for complaining, they don’t complain.
If we are going to get to Mars, we are going to need a much better way to deal with CO2. Using our current finicky system, a Mars crew would be in significant danger.
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THE LAST PLANNING CONFERENCE of the day will be held at 7:30 p.m., and dinnertime is shortly after that. As it’s a Friday, we are looking forward to sharing a group dinner in the Russian segment, as always. Misha is usually the first one ready to start the weekend, and he floats over to the U.S. side in the afternoon to make a plan.
“What time should we start dinner, my brother?” he asks, his blue eyes wide and eager.
“How about eight?” I ask.
“Let’s make it seven forty-five,” he responds.
I agree.
After finishing up the DPC that evening and checking on an experiment, I give Amiko a quick call. “I’m heading over to Boondoggles,” I tell her, jokingly referring to the Russian segment as our neighborhood bar in Houston. She understands what I mean. I start gathering things to bring to Friday dinner in a big ziplock bag. I pack my own spoon and my own scissors for opening food bags. I pack foods to share, stuff from the bonus food container I brought up with me: canned trout, some irradiated Mexican meat, and a processed cheese similar to Cheez Whiz that Gennady loves. The Russians always share some tarry black caviar, for which I’ve developed a real taste, as well as some canned lobster meat. Samantha always brings good snacks, too—the Europeans have the best food.
With my goodie bag under my arm, I float into Node 1, then pass through the pressurized mating adapter (PMA-1), sort of a short, dark entryway between the U.S. and Russian segments. This entryway is not beautiful or spacious; it’s about six feet long and canted up at a steep angle. It’s quite narrow by design, and it’s made even narrower by the cargo we store there in white fabric bags. I pass through the Russian module called the FGB (funktsionalno-gruzovoy blok, functional cargo block), then into the service module. There I find Gennady and Samantha watching a movie on a laptop while Anton floats horizontally to them, finishing up an experiment on the wall. On the laptop, a young woman’s face flickers across the screen, a look of apprehension wrinkling her brow, while a man’s voice speaks sternly in Russian.
“Hey, what are you guys watching?” I ask.
“It’s Fifty Shades of Grey,” Samantha answers, “dubbed into Russian.” In English, Gennady welcomes me and thanks me for the food I’ve brought, then in Russian tries to convince Samantha that Fifty Shades is a great literary work.