The front of the plane is reserved for the prime crew (my two Russian crewmates and me) and a number of VIPs. Occasionally I wander toward the back, where I’ve flown on previous trips to Baikonur. Everyone has been drinking since we left Star City this morning, and the junior Russian personnel have their own party going on back here. Russians never drink without eating, so in addition to vodka and cognac they are serving tomatoes, cheese, sausage, pickled cucumbers, dried salty fish chips, and slices of salted pork fat called salo. On my first trip to Kazakhstan, in 2000, I was making my way through the party at the back of the plane to find the bathroom when I was stopped and forced to drink shots of samogon, Russian moonshine. The junior guys were so drunk they were stumbling around from the turbulence and alcohol, spilling the stuff on themselves and on the floor of the plane, all while chain-smoking. We were lucky to have made it to Kazakhstan without exploding into a giant fireball of moonshine and jet fuel.
Today everyone is drinking heavily again, and we are pretty well fueled by the time we plunge from the clouds over the flat, frozen desert and touch down on Baikonur’s single runway. We climb out, blinking in the cold, and encounter a welcoming party: officials from Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, and Energia, the company that builds the Soyuz spacecraft, one of which will take us into orbit to dock with the International Space Station. The mayor of Baikonur is here, as well as other local dignitaries. My Russian crewmate Gennady Padalka strides forward and speaks sternly to them as we stand at semi-attention, “My gotovy k sleduyushchim shagam nashey podgotovki.” (“We are ready for the next steps of our preparation.”)
This is a ritual, like so many in spaceflight. We Americans have similar staged moments at similar points of launch preparation. There is a fine line between ritual and superstition, and in a life-threatening business such as spaceflight, superstition can be comforting even to the nonbeliever.
We see a strange but welcoming sight at the edge of the tarmac: a group of Kazakh kids, little ambassadors from the end of the Earth. They are round cheeked, black haired, mostly Asian in appearance, wearing bright, dusty clothes and holding balloons. The Russian flight doctor has warned us to stay away from them: there has been concern about a measles outbreak in this region, and if one of us were to be infected it would bring serious consequences. We have all been vaccinated, but the Russian flight surgeons are very cautious; no one wants to go to space with measles. Normally we do what the doctor says, especially since he has the power to ground us. But Gennady walks confidently forward anyway.
“We must say hello to the children,” he says firmly in English.
I’ve known both Gennady and our third crewmate, Mikhail Kornienko (“Misha”), since 2000, when I started traveling to Russia to work on the joint space station program between our two countries. Gennady has a thick head of silver hair and a sharp gaze that doesn’t miss much. He is fifty-six and is the commander of our Soyuz. He’s a natural leader, gruffly shouting out orders when necessary but listening carefully when one of his crew has another perspective. He’s a person I trust implicitly. Once, in Moscow, near the Kremlin, I saw him break away from his fellow cosmonauts to pay his respects at the site where an opposition politician had been murdered, possibly by surrogates of Vladimir Putin. For a cosmonaut, an employee of Putin’s government, that gesture was risky. The other Russians with us seemed to be reluctant even to discuss the murder, but not Gennady.
Misha, who will be my fellow traveler for a year, is fifty-four and is very different from Gennady—casual, quiet, and contemplative. Misha’s father was a military helicopter pilot working with the cosmonaut rescue forces, and when Misha was only five, his father died in a helicopter crash. His early dreams of flying in space were only reinforced by this unfathomable loss. After serving in the military as a paratrooper, Misha needed to get a degree in engineering from the Moscow Aviation Institute to qualify as a flight engineer. He couldn’t get in, because he wasn’t a resident of the Moscow region, so he became a Moscow police officer to establish residency and was then able to study at the institute. He was selected as a cosmonaut in 1998.
When Misha stares at you with his light blue eyes, it feels like nothing is more important to him than fully comprehending what you are saying. He is more open with his feelings than the other Russians I know. If he were American, I could picture him as a Birkenstock-wearing hippie living in Vermont.
We approach the Kazakh kids gathered to welcome us. We greet them, shake hands, and accept flowers that for all I know are covered with measles. Gennady chats with the children happily, his face lit up with his signature smile.
The entire party—prime crew, backup crew, and support staff—boards two buses for the ride to the quarantine facility where we will spend the next two weeks. (The prime crew and backup crew always travel separately, for the same reason the president and vice president do.) As we are boarding, for a laugh, Gennady sits in the driver’s seat of our bus, and we all take pictures of him with our phones. Many years ago, crews used to travel to Baikonur, spend one day here checking out the Soyuz spacecraft, then travel back to Star City to wait out the two weeks until launch. Now, cutbacks require that we make only one trip, so we will be stuck here for the duration. I take a window seat, pop in my earbuds, and rest my head against the window, hoping to become sleepy enough to take a nap before we get to our hotel-like quarantine facility. This road is in terrible shape—it always has been, and it only gets worse—and the rutted and patched asphalt rattles my head against the window enough to keep me awake.
We pass dilapidated Soviet-era apartment complexes, huge rusted satellite dishes communicating with Russian spacecraft, mounds of garbage randomly strewn about, the occasional camel. It’s a clear, sunny day. We pass Baikonur’s own statue of Yuri Gagarin, this one with his arms raised—not in the triumphant V of a gymnast celebrating a perfect dismount, but the joyful straight-up gesture of a kid about to try a somersault. In this statue, he’s smiling.
Far over the horizon a launch tower rises above the same deteriorating concrete pad from which Yuri first rocketed off Earth, the same pad from which nearly every Russian cosmonaut has left Earth, the same pad from which I will leave Earth two weeks from now. The Russians sometimes seem to care more about tradition than they do about appearance or function. This launchpad, which they call Gagarinsky Start (Gagarin’s Launchpad), is imbued with the successes of the past, and they have no plans to replace it.
Misha’s and my mission to spend a year on ISS is unprecedented. A normal mission to the space station lasts five to six months, so scientists have a good deal of data about what happens to the human body in space for that length of time. But very little is known about what happens after month six. The symptoms might get precipitously worse in the ninth month, for instance, or they might level off. We don’t know, and there is only one way to find out.