I’m not scared for my departing crewmates, any more than I’m scared for myself, but seeing the hatch close behind them gives me a strange sense of isolation, even abandonment. If I have to work on the Seedra again, I’ll have to do it without Terry’s help. If I get into a discussion with the Russians about literature, I’ll have to do it without Samantha’s help. I’m looking forward to having the U.S. segment to myself, though, and I try to focus on that.
I float off toward the U.S. lab, and the Russians float off to their segment, and then all is silent. It’s just me and the fan noise. No talk from Terry, whose upbeat commentary has punctuated everything I’ve done since I’ve been up here. No quiet humming from Samantha. For the moment, I don’t even hear any voices from the ground.
I look around the junk on the walls in the U.S. lab, which suddenly feels much larger. I have the strange feeling I meant to say something more to Terry or Samantha, that I wanted to remind them about something, but I can’t think what.
Then I hear Terry’s voice, breaking in midsentence, as if he were here with me: “…pills for the fluid loading protocol, Anton? Or did you leave them on station?”
“I’ve got them,” Anton answers, then rattles off a series of numbers in rapid-fire Russian to their control center. Now that the communications on the Soyuz are set up, I can hear through our intercom system every word my former crewmates say as if I were in there with them. I join the space-to-ground channel to warn Terry that his mic is hot and that everyone with an internet connection or tuned to NASA TV can hear every word he says. I wouldn’t want one of them to inadvertently drop an F-bomb and then have to hear about it when he or she gets back to Earth. (Since inadvertently dropping the F-bomb to Earth myself, I am sensitive to the nuances of our comm system. On my second shuttle flight, I said “Fuck” while struggling with a piece of hardware in the airlock. My crewmate Tracy Caldwell called out, “Hot mic!” from the flight deck to let me know I could be heard on NASA TV. “Shit!” I said in response, making two FCC violations in ten seconds.)
I go through the rest of the afternoon listening to Terry, Anton, and Samantha’s voices. As I work on a physics experiment, I can hear Samantha humming absentmindedly. A couple of times I turn around to say something to her, then remember where she is.
When the Soyuz is ready to detach and push away from station, three hours after we closed the hatch, I watch its departure on a laptop screen on NASA TV, just as many people on Earth are doing. I grab a mic.
“Fair winds and following seas, guys,” I say. “It was a real pleasure spending time up here with you, and good luck on your landing.”
Terry answers, “Thanks, Scott, we miss you guys already.”
Gennady adds from the Russian segment, “Samantha, I think you forgot your sweater.”
I hear them talking to one another this way, trading idle work chat and calling out numbers to the control center, almost all the way to the ground. If I didn’t know what they were doing—falling like a meteor at supersonic speed toward the planet’s surface—I could never have guessed.
Several hours later, they are on the ground safely in Kazakhstan. They had been here with me twenty-four hours a day for months, and now they are as far and unreachable as everyone else on Earth, as Amiko and my daughters and the 7 billion other humans.
That night, when I turn out the lights and climb into my sleeping bag, I’m aware of the quiet. There is no rustling in the other crew quarters or quiet talking as crewmates communicate with the ground or say good night to their families on the phone. If this were a normal six-month flight I would already be halfway done, but instead I feel I have as long as I did when I first got up here. Nine months. I don’t often let these kinds of thoughts into my head, but when they do it’s hard to get them out again. What have I gotten myself into?
—
SUNDAY RARELY FEELS like a Sunday on the space station, but today might be an exception. Yesterday I did both my weekly cleaning and my exercise, so today I actually have the entire day off. When I wake, I read the daily summary that was sent to us overnight and see that today Gennady sets the world record for the most days in space: 803. By the time he leaves, he will have 879, a record I expect to stand for a long time. I sleep late, eat breakfast, read a bit, then decide to clean out my email inbox. But when I open my laptop, there is no internet connection. This has been an ongoing problem: on Saturday nights the ground reboots the laptops remotely, and no one notices that the internet connection has been dropped. When I call down to ask for it to be fixed on Sunday morning, I’m told that the only person who knows how to do it doesn’t come in until later in the day.
There is a SpaceX launch scheduled today for 2:20 p.m. our time (10:20 a.m. in Florida), and I had looked forward to watching it live, but my internet connection won’t be fixed by then. SpaceX is carrying a lot of things we are looking forward to getting, most important being an International Docking Adapter, a $100 million mechanism that will convert docking ports built for the space shuttle to a new international docking standard, agreed to in 2010 by NASA, ESA, Roscosmos, the Japanese space agency, and the Canadians. (Ultimately it could even be used by China or other nations.) Without these adapters in place, we wouldn’t be able to bring people up on SpaceX or the Boeing spacecraft still under development.
Also on board SpaceX: food (the Russians are still running low); water; clothing for American astronaut Kjell (pronounced “Chell”) Lindgren and Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui, who will both arrive next month; spacewalk equipment for Kjell, who will be my spacewalking partner in the fall; filtration beds for removing contaminants from our water (which is close to undrinkable with increasing levels of organic compounds, since the last set of beds, which we badly needed, blew up on Orbital); experiments designed by schoolchildren (some of the kids who saw their experiments blow up on Orbital are being given a second chance to see their work go to space today).
Personally, I’m looking forward to an extra set of running shoes, another harness for the treadmill, clean clothes, medications, and crew care packages that my friends and family chose for me.
Launch time comes and goes. Shortly after, my laptop’s internet starts working again. I look up the video for the SpaceX launch, but the connection isn’t strong enough to stream the video. I get a jerky, frozen image. Then my eye stops on a headline: “SpaceX Rocket Explodes During Cargo Launch to Space Station.”
You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.
The flight director gets on a privatized space-to-ground channel and tells us the rocket has been lost.