Up here, we talk about what it will mean for us if Progress is lost. We go over the supplies we have on board—food, clean clothes, oxygen, water, and replacement parts. Another resupply rocket exploded on the launchpad last October, this one built by the American company Orbital ATK, which means we are already behind on supplies. The Russians will run low on food and clothing, which means we will share ours with them and eventually run low ourselves. Misha, Gennady, and Anton keep us updated throughout the day, each time looking more and more concerned. Each of the cosmonauts had some personal items on board Progress, and sometimes those packages contain jewelry and similar irreplaceable items. Misha confides in me about some of the items that are on board, his wide blue eyes showing his anxiety.
“Maybe they’ll regain control of it,” I tell him with a pat on the shoulder, though we both know this is becoming less likely by the minute. I would like to spend more time talking over the problem with my crewmates, but I have a half-assembled toilet to fix. I’m disconnecting and capping the connections where our urine flows into the assembly on one end and where the liquid by-products left over, brine and a kind of graywater, come out. Every few days we pump the brine out of the holding tank and into Russian tanks that will later be pumped into empty water tanks on Progress, which will eventually undock and burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere. The graywater will be processed into drinking water.
I pull out the broken distillation assembly, double-bag it, label it, then store it in the PMM (Permanent Multipurpose Module, sort of a storage closet off Node 3) until it can be returned to Earth on a SpaceX. Engineers on the ground will examine it and, if they can, repair it to be sent up again. The next step is to fit the new assembly in place and torque it to a specific value. I start hooking up the fluid lines again very carefully, making sure not to combine clean water and urine lines, then connect the electrical cables. I am taking pictures of all of my work so the ground can later verify I did everything properly.
As I’m working, the ground tells us Progress has officially been declared lost. With a sinking feeling, I float over to the Russian segment to confer. Misha meets me in the service module, and it’s clear he’s heard the bad news.
“We’ll give you guys anything you need,” I say.
“Thank you, Scott,” Misha says. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such despair on another man’s face. We don’t normally worry about shortages, but losing Progress suddenly makes us think about how much we depend on a steady stream of successful resupply missions. We can afford one or two failures, but then we will have to start rationing.
Even more than our concern about supplies, though, is concern for our colleagues who will be launching soon: the rocket that doomed Progress is the same rocket that launches the manned Soyuz. Our three new crewmates, due up in a little less than a month on May 26, are about to trust their lives to the same hardware and software. The Russian space agency must investigate what went wrong and make sure there won’t be a recurrence. That will interfere with our schedule up here, but no one wants to fly on a Soyuz that’s going to do the same thing this Progress did. It would make for a horrible death, spinning out of control in low Earth orbit knowing you will soon be dead from CO2 asphyxiation or oxygen deprivation, after which our corpses would orbit the Earth until they burn up in the atmosphere months later.
I finish making all the connections on the urine processor. Some of the cargo that was lost on Progress was fresh water, and unless we can make our own, the six of us won’t last long. I double-check all the connections, then ask the ground to power it up. It works. The ground congratulates me, and I thank them for their help.
Because the next Soyuz launch is delayed, that means Terry, Samantha, and Anton will be delayed in their return as well. They have each assured their space agencies that they are willing to stay on station as long as necessary, which I think reflects well on them, even if it’s also true they have no choice. I know this must be stressful for them—we each know how long we’ll be here and pace ourselves accordingly. I can’t imagine having to call my family and tell them I’m not coming back when I’d said I would, and that I have no idea when I’ll return. I can only sympathize with my crewmates. Outwardly, they all appear professional and upbeat. Terry tells me he sees this as a positive thing: it’s a privilege to live in space, and now he gets to stay longer and complete more of the things he wanted to do, like taking pictures of specific places on Earth and filming an IMAX movie he had a particular fondness for. Samantha’s attitude is more casual. “What are you going to do?” she asks, then points out that she will likely exceed the world record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman, 195 days.
When I finally finish the huge job of changing out the urine processor, it is satisfying knowing that we will be able to process urine and make clean water. But it’s also strangely unsatisfying in that all I’ve done is put everything back the way it usually is. I reinstall the kabin, making sure all the tools are stowed properly, downlink the photos, then run on the treadmill for half an hour.
While I’m running, a smoke alarm annunciates loudly. The treadmill under my feet stops automatically. The emergency signals are designed to get our attention, and they do. Even as I’m unhooking my running harness and scrambling to respond to the alarm, I’m pretty sure I know what caused it—as I was running I probably liberated some dust from the treadmill or maybe caused the motor to smoke a bit by pushing against the treadmill in an effort to get my heart rate up. The fire alarm also automatically shuts down ventilation in Node 3, and that shuts down our Seedra. After we’re fully recovered from the alarm, the ground informs us that they can’t restart the Seedra and aren’t sure why. I’m less than thrilled by the prospects of rising CO2 until we can get it running again.
I’ve been looking forward to my videoconference with Amiko all day. Once a week we get to see as well as hear each other, for a length of time varying from forty-five minutes to an hour and a half. We have developed a ritual at the end of each videoconference: Amiko picks up her iPad and carries it around the house so I can see inside each room. It makes me feel connected to home to see our sofa, our bed, the pool, the kitchen—all of it flooded with sunlight, each of the objects held down by gravity. Once, in the kitchen, I noticed a warning light on the fridge—the water filter needed to be changed. I pointed it out to Amiko so she could have clean water too.
Today, I can see Amiko sitting on our sofa with light streaming in the window to her right. We talk about how each of our days has gone so far, then she reminds me about next week’s videoconference: she has offered to have some of my friends over to our house so I can visit with them. She mentions that in the course of preparing for guests, she discovered that the speakers by our pool aren’t working, and she hasn’t been able to troubleshoot the problem on her own yet.
“I’ll figure it out before Saturday,” she says.
“Let’s just fix it now,” I suggest, and within minutes she’s pointing the iPad camera at the web of cords on the back of the stereo components in the closet while I squint at the fuzzy image on my screen, trying to figure out which connection isn’t working.
“Push that button on the left,” I suggest. She tries to comply. “No, not that one, the one next to it.”