“That’s ridiculous,” Samantha says, without taking her eyes off the screen. She and Gennady argue, half-jokingly, about the literary status of Fifty Shades in rapid-fire Russian as Misha emerges from the bathroom. Terry shows up with his own goodie bag and greets everyone.
Anton welcomes us. He flew MiGs in the Russian Air Force before being selected as a cosmonaut, making him one of the people I might have found myself face-to-face with in combat had geopolitics in the early 1990s played out differently. He is solid and dependable, both physically and technically. He has a goofy sense of humor and is a close talker, even for a Russian. He has a halting way of speaking English with pauses in unusual places in his sentences, but I’m sure my Russian sounds far worse. I once asked Anton what he would have done if his MiG-21 and my F-14 had been flying straight at each other on some fateful day—how would he have maneuvered his airplane to get an advantage on me? When I was training and flying as a Navy fighter pilot, these questions about MiGs and their capabilities consumed my fellow pilots and me. All we knew then was guesswork based on military intelligence. As it turns out, the same guesswork was happening on the Soviet side. From Anton and the other cosmonauts I’ve gotten the impression that they didn’t have much knowledge about our airplanes, and the training I got in dogfighting, flying against a very capable pilot in an F-16 pretending to be a MiG, was likely overkill by a wide margin. The Russian pilots are no less talented, they just had much less flight time than we did in our planes (I had more than 1,500 hours of experience in the F-14, while Anton has probably 400 hours in his MiG), presumably because their budgets were limited.
Anton and Misha acted as though Gennady were in charge as soon as he was on board, even though Anton is officially the Russian segment lead. Gennady has been, as always, awesome—things simply seem to go better when he is around, and everyone looks up to him as a natural leader. He doesn’t do anything to try to grab power, but there is something about him that makes people want to listen to him.
Misha has been great to fly with so far too. He has a true concern for other people, and when he asks me regularly how I am doing, he really wants to know. He cares about what’s going on in his friends’ lives, how they are feeling, and what he can do to help. What’s most important to him is friendship and camaraderie, and he brings esprit de corps to everything he does.
I’m often asked how well we get along with the Russians, and people never quite seem to believe me when I say there are no issues. People from our countries encounter cultural misunderstandings every day. To Russians, Americans can at first come across as na?ve and weak. To Americans, Russians can seem stony and aloof, but I’ve learned this is just one layer. (I often think of a phrase I once read describing the Russian temperament as “the brotherhood of the downtrodden,” the idea that Russians are bound by their shared history of war and disaster. I thought I read it in The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, but I’ve never been able to find it in any translation; maybe I read it in Russian and this was my own translation.) We make an effort to learn about and respect one another’s cultures, and we have agreed to carry out this huge and challenging project together, so we work to understand and see the best in one another. The crewmates I fly with are crucial to nearly every aspect of my mission. Working with the right person can make the toughest day go well, and working with the wrong person can make the simplest task excruciatingly difficult. Depending on who is up here with me, my year in space could be needlessly perilous, fraught with conflict, or saturated with the everyday annoyance of a person you can’t quite click with and also can’t get away from. So far, I’ve been very lucky.
Once we’re all gathered around the table, Gennady clears his throat and makes a solemn face that lets us know he’s about to make a toast. The Russians are very formal about their toasts, and the first one of the evening is the most important. It’s always to honor the people present and our reason for being together.
“Rebyata,” he starts—“guys”—“can you believe we are here in space? The six of us are the only people here representing planet Earth right now, and I’m honored to be here with you. This is awesome. Let us drink to us and to our friendship.”
“To us,” the rest of us chime in, and the evening has officially begun.
It’s challenging for six people to eat together in such a small space, but we look forward to this chance to have a meal as a crew. We use Velcro and duct tape to secure our dinners, but there is always some stray item—a drink bag, a spoon, a cookie—floating away from its owner and needing to be retrieved. It becomes part of the dining experience to reach out and grab someone’s drink as it floats by your head. We listen to music while we eat, usually my playlist on the iPod I brought with me—U2, Coldplay, Bruce Springsteen. The Russians especially like Depeche Mode. Sometimes I’ll sneak in some Pink Floyd or Grateful Dead. The Russians don’t seem to mind my sixties rock, but they aren’t very interested in hip-hop even though I’ve tried multiple times to introduce them to the works of Jay Z and Eminem.
We talk about how our work has gone during the week. The Russians ask about how the Dragon capture went, and we ask them about how the next Progress resupply schedule is looking. We talk about our families and catch up on current events in our respective countries. If there is significant news involving both the United States and Russia, for instance our two countries’ involvement in Syria, we’ll touch on it lightly, but no one wants to go into any detail. Sometimes the Russians will get caught up in an American news story. For instance, when two inmates escaped from a prison in upstate New York, Gennady and Misha were fascinated with them, asking me repeatedly whether they had been captured. I would find them lingering to watch updates on CNN on our projection screen whenever they had a reason to pass through Node 1.