There is no good way to engage in a Twitter debate with an American hero, so I don’t. In my mind, I reflect on the fact that the crew of Apollo 11 spent eight days in space, traveling half a million miles; by the time I’m done I will have spent a total of 520 days in space and will have traveled over two hundred million miles, the equivalent of going to Mars and back. Only later, when the Twitter chat is over, do I have the chance to reflect that I just experienced being trolled, in space, by the second man on the moon, while also engaging in a Twitter conversation with the president.
A few days later, it’s time to harvest the lettuce we’ve been growing. Kjell, Kimiya, and I gather in the European module to eat it with some oil and vinegar, and it’s surprisingly good. This is the first time American astronauts have eaten a crop grown in space, though the Russians have grown and eaten leafy greens on previous missions. As often happens, the public reaction to the space lettuce surprises me—people seem to be fascinated by the idea of growing and eating plants in orbit, while at the same time Misha and Gennady are outside doing a spacewalk that gets no attention in the United States whatsoever. Kimiya confides in me later that he had to force himself to eat the lettuce for the camera—he grew up on a lettuce farm, and in the summer he had to get up in the middle of the night to harvest it, so since then he’s hated lettuce.
That evening, we bring the Russians some lettuce to sample for Friday dinner. The main topic of discussion is the Soyuz that will be coming up soon, bringing our total to nine. We talk about the new guys—Sergey, Andy, and Aidyn—and I mention that I’ve never met Aidyn and don’t even have an idea of what he looks like. That’s incredibly unusual: before flying in space with someone, even someone from another country, you normally train with him or her, if only a little.
Gennady offers to show me a picture. I decide it will be fun if I have no idea what he looks like until he comes floating through the hatch. Oleg and Gennady agree this will be entertaining.
At about one a.m. I’m awakened from a dead sleep by the failure of one of our power channels. The outage takes down half the power in Node 3, which is where we keep most of our environmental control equipment—our O2 generator, one of the Seedras (the one I hate), and all the equipment that processes our urine into water, including the toilet itself. It takes a couple of hours working with the ground to get things under control, at which point I tell the rest of the crew to go back to sleep. I stay up another hour and a half myself as the ground attempts to regain ventilation and smoke detection capability. The culprit turned out to be a power regulator way out on the truss. By the time I get back to my CQ, I know I’ll only get a couple of hours of sleep at most.
Later, when I talk to Amiko, she tells me she was in mission control when the power went down. It hadn’t occurred to me that she might have been there on console, watching the displays light up like a Christmas tree with our power failure. We haven’t talked much about the fact that her job at NASA could potentially put her in the strange position of watching live while some disaster threatens her partner’s life.
“I bet that was scary,” I say.
“Yeah, it was a bit scary,” she says. “But I stayed on console until I could see that everything was okay.” She tells me that soon after, the lead flight director Mike Lammers came by her console to see how she was doing. Mike was also the lead flight director for the second half of my previous mission to ISS; he is someone I trust, the person I always think of as my space station flight director. He has also set himself apart from many of the other flight directors in mission control by checking on Amiko, congratulating her on the accomplishments of the mission so far, and supporting her as my partner.
The next day, I talk to Charlotte on the phone. She’s still not much of a phone person, and as usual she seems to be distracted by something, maybe the TV. She’s never rude or unfriendly, but her answers are brief and vague. After a while I run out of topics and start wrapping up the conversation.
“Okay, I should get going,” I say. “Just wanted to check to see how you were doing.”
I expect her to answer with a good-bye, but instead there is a pause. For a second, I wonder whether we have lost our connection.
“Tell me how you’re doing, Dad,” Charlotte says. She suddenly seems to be giving me her full attention, speaking to me in a more adult tone.
I tell her about the power failure last night and how we dealt with it. She sounds interested and asks questions. I tell her more about my new crewmates and how they’re settling in. I tell her about some of the experiments I’ve been working on and about how the clouds and airplane contrails over Europe looked while I was drinking my morning coffee. By the time we get off the phone, I feel as though I’ve observed a milestone of growth in Charlotte, like watching her take her first step or say her first word. She seems as though she’s matured by years within the space of a short phone call. It’s another milestone I’ve spent away from Earth.
—
ON THE WEEKENDS, I don’t set an alarm, letting myself wake up naturally, maybe an hour later than usual. One Sunday morning in mid-August as I’m slowly waking up, I start to become aware of a welcome sound I haven’t heard for many years. Maybe I’m dreaming about the weekend mornings when I was growing up in New Jersey, when the bagpipers would play at the nearby high school football field. The sound would drift into my room and wake me in a pleasant way, unlike the sounds of my parents fighting that sometimes woke me in the night.
Fully awake, I know I’m in my sleeping bag in my CQ, not in my childhood bed on Greenwood Avenue. But I’m still sure that I’m hearing bagpipes: “Amazing Grace.” I make my way out of Node 2 and follow the sound to find an unexpected sight: Kjell floating at the far end of the Japanese module, playing the bagpipes. Astronauts have been bringing instruments to space for decades—at least as far back as 1965, when astronauts played “Jingle Bells” on the harmonica. As far as I know, Kjell is the first bagpiper in space.
“Sorry, did I wake you?” says Kjell.
“No, it’s great,” I said. “Play anytime you like.”
Today, Gennady, Misha, and I are moving a Soyuz, the one Gennady will go home in, to the aft of ISS in a complex shell game designed to most efficiently utilize the docking ports. Gennady could move the Soyuz by himself, but Misha and I must come along for the ride because this Soyuz is our lifeboat, and once it undocks it’s never guaranteed we will be able to get back aboard the station.