Charlotte is a quiet and thoughtful person by nature, and self-reliant for her age. We connect well in person, but it can be hard to have a phone conversation. During the time I’ve been here, I’ve struggled to connect with her. When I ask her, “How was school today?” I get “Fine.” When I ask her, “How’s your mom?” I get “Good.” “How’s the weather?” “Okay.” She also hasn’t been great about answering emails, even though she is a good writer. It’s disconcerting to reach out to her and never hear back. If she was hurt or unwell or depressed, would she or someone else tell me? In our videoconference she is much more responsive and engaging, true to form. I’ve never been to the apartment she shares with her mother in Virginia Beach, so this is my first glance inside. I can see a small living room, a sofa, a bookshelf. In the background, Leslie walks back and forth with a laundry basket.
I spend an hour showing Charlotte around the station. She saw it in videoconferences when I was here before, but she was just seven then. I float around with my laptop, pointing its camera around inside the modules where I’ve been working and living, introduce her to my crewmates as they happen to float by, and give her an overview of what I’ve been working on (leaving out the rodent we euthanized). She seems genuinely interested, leaning forward and smiling and asking questions. It’s great to see her animated and engaged. The Cupola is the last stop on our tour, and I time our arrival there to coincide with the station flying over the Bahamas. Charlotte is impressed. While we are talking I snap a few pictures with the camera to email her later. I know she’s seen many pictures of the Earth taken from space, but I hope she’ll enjoy receiving one taken especially for her.
After saying good-bye to Charlotte, I start getting ready for a birthday dinner for Samantha Cristoforetti. Birthdays are important in Russian culture too, and we make a point of celebrating them up here. This one is especially significant because soon Samantha, Terry, and Anton will be leaving us. As much as I will miss them all, I’m looking forward to breathing some good air (with half as many people exhaling, CO2 levels will come down). I know the dropping CO2 will likely cause the ground to act as though the problem has resolved itself, and I will be upset if that happens.
When I was packing the few personal belongings I could bring for this year, I included some wrapping paper because I knew I would be giving crewmates gifts on special days. Today I have some chocolate wrapped up nicely for Samantha’s thirty-eighth. As we often do at these dinners, we get to talking about language, specifically the nuances between curse words in English and Russian. Tonight we reach a point of confusion about the multiple ways of using the Russian word for “whore” and decide to call one of our Russian language instructors in Houston. Waslaw tries to explain to us in a combination of Russian and English the difference between blyad and blya. (He and I became friends on a St. Patrick’s Day years ago when a Moldovan drunk started a bar fight with the NASA folks in Star City, Russia.) Then he catches us up with what’s happening in Houston, and we fill him in on what life is like up here. By then it’s pretty late. For a little while, it almost felt like an earthbound Saturday night. It was nice to forget for a while that I will continue to be at work up here for weeks and months and seasons.
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ESSENTIAL TO getting to Mars, or anywhere else in space, is a working toilet, and ours does more than just store waste—our urine processor distills our urine into drinking water. A system like this is necessary to interplanetary missions, since bringing thousands of gallons of drinking water to Mars simply wouldn’t be possible. On the International Space Station, our water system is nearly a closed loop with only occasional need for fresh water. Some of the water we purify to make oxygen.
We are sent fresh water on resupply rockets, but we don’t need it often. The Russians get fresh water from the ground, which they drink and turn into pee, which they give to us to process into water. Cosmonaut urine is one of the commodities in an ongoing barter system of goods and services between the Russians and the Americans. They give us their pee, we share the electricity our solar cells have generated. They use their engines to reboost the station into the proper orbit, we help them when they are short on supplies.
Our urine processor, though, has been broken for about a week, so our urine is simply filling a holding tank. When it’s full—it takes only a few days—a light will come on. In my experience, the light tends to show itself in the middle of the night. Replacing the tank is a pain in the ass, especially for a half-asleep handyman, but it’s not an option to leave it for the morning. The first person to get up won’t be able to pee, which isn’t good space station etiquette. When you float in there in the middle of the night to find that light illuminated, it really sucks.
Now, in the light of day, I need to swap out the broken part, the distillation assembly. I’ve consulted with the ground, and they concur. If everything goes right, the repair will take half the day. I’ve removed the “kabin” (the walls and the door) from the toilet in Node 3 so I can get at the machinery underneath. (The spelling is attributed to a transliteration error between Russian and English that stuck.) The kabin gets pretty gross, even though we try to clean it regularly. I float the kabin to Node 1, where it will clog up this space for other people until I move it back again, another incentive to get the job done efficiently.
While I’m cleaning and then moving the kabin, the ground is taking care of “safing” the equipment, which means making sure everything I will be working on is powered down correctly so I don’t electrocute myself or cause an electrical short. (The risk of electrocution is ever present on the space station, especially on the U.S. side. We use 120-volt power, which is more dangerous than the 28 volts used on the Russian segment. We train for the possibility of electrocution and often practice advanced cardiac life support on board, using a defibrillator and heart medications meant to be injected into the shinbone.) Once I get word from the ground that I can go ahead, I remove the electrical connectors on the distillation assembly, put caps on the connectors to protect them, and undo all the bolts. The distillation assembly is a large silver drum that works like a still, evaporating water from the urine. This is our only backup, so I have to be careful not to damage it.
Another resupply rocket launched today from Baikonur, a Russian Progress. My Russian crewmates on station followed the launch closely, getting updates from Russian mission control, and Anton floated down to let us know when it had reached orbit successfully. But now, less than ten minutes later, mission control in Moscow reports that a major malfunction has occurred and that the spacecraft is in a wild out-of-control spin. None of the workarounds they try correct the problem.