As much time as I have spent in the Soyuz simulators in Star City, I’m still amazed by how difficult it is to wedge myself and my pressure suit into my seat. Each time, I have a moment of doubt whether I’m going to fit. But then I do—just barely. If I were to sit up out of the seat liner, my head would smash against the wall. I wonder how my taller colleagues do it. Once we’re strapped in, we practice using the hardware, reaching out for buttons, reading data off screens, grabbing our checklists. We discuss what we might want to have customized for us, down to details such as where we want our timers (used for timing engine burns), where we want our pencils, and where we want the bits of Velcro that will allow us to put things “down” in space.
When we finish, we clamber back out of the hatch and look around the dusty hangar. The next Progress resupply vehicle is here; it looks very similar to the Soyuz, because the Russians never create two designs when one will do. In a few months, this Progress will deliver equipment, experiments, food, oxygen, and care packages to us on the ISS. After that, a Soyuz will launch in July carrying a new three-person crew. Somewhere in this hangar, the parts for the next Soyuz to fly after that are being assembled, and another one after that, and another one after that. The Russians have been launching the Soyuz since I was three years old.
The Soyuz spacecraft—Soyuz means “union,” as in “Soviet Union,” in Russian—is designed to maneuver in space, dock with the station, and keep human beings alive, but the rockets are the workhorses, humanity’s answer to the pull of Earth’s gravity. The rockets (which for some odd reason are also called Soyuz) are prepared for launch in an assembly and test facility across from the hangars known as site 112. Gennady, Misha, and I cross the street, pass the gathered Russian media, enter that enormous building, and stand in another cavernous, quiet room, this time regarding our rocket. Gunmetal gray, it lies on its side. Unlike the space shuttle or the colossal Apollo/Saturn that preceded it, the Soyuz spacecraft and rocket combination is assembled horizontally and rolled out to the launchpad in that position. Only when it reaches the launchpad, a couple of days before we launch, will it be set upright to vertical, pointing toward its destination. This is yet another example of how the Russians and Americans do things differently. In this case, the procedure is less ceremonial than the NASA way, with its stately, majestic rollouts of vertical launch vehicles balanced on an enormous crawler transporter.
At 162 feet long, this rocket, the Soyuz-FG, is noticeably smaller than the assembled space shuttle, but it’s still a daunting colossus, a building-size object that will, we hope, leave the ground, with us riding on top of it, at twenty-five times the speed of sound. Its navy gray sheet metal, adorned with low-tech rivets, is unbeautiful but somehow comforting in its utility. The Soyuz-FG is the grandchild of the Soviet R-7, the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile. The R-7 was designed during the Cold War for launching nuclear weapons at American targets, and I can’t help remembering how as a child I was aware that New York City, and my suburb of West Orange, New Jersey, would certainly have been among the first targets to be instantly vaporized by a Soviet attack. Today, I’m standing inside their formerly secret facility, discussing with two Russians our plans to trust one another with our lives while riding to space on this converted weapon.
Gennady, Misha, and I all served in our militaries before being chosen to fly in space, and though it’s something we never talk about, we all know we could have been ordered to kill one another. Now we are taking part in the largest peaceful international collaboration in history. When people ask whether the space station is worth the expense, this is something I always point out. What is it worth to see two former bitter enemies transform weapons into transport for exploration and the pursuit of scientific knowledge? What is it worth to see former enemy nations turn their warriors into crewmates and lifelong friends? This is impossible to put a dollar figure on, but to me it’s one of the things that makes this project worth the expense, even worth risking our lives.
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THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION got its start in 1984, when President Reagan announced during his State of the Union address that NASA was designing a space station, Freedom, to be put in orbit within ten years. Resistance from Congress created years of cutbacks and reconfigurations, and Freedom was no closer to actually being built when, in 1993, President Clinton announced that the station would be merged with the Russian Federal Space Agency’s proposed space station Mir-2. With the addition of space agencies representing Europe, Japan, and Canada, the international coalition came to include fifteen countries. It took more than one hundred launches to get the components into orbit and more than one hundred spacewalks to assemble them. The ISS is a remarkable achievement of technology and international cooperation. It has been inhabited nonstop since November 2, 2000; put another way, it has been more than fourteen years since all humans were on the Earth at once. It is by far the longest-inhabited structure in space and has been visited by more than two hundred people from sixteen nations. It’s the largest peacetime international project in history.
I wake up my last morning on Earth at around seven. I spend the morning looking through all of my bags—one to meet me in Kazakhstan, others to send back to Houston. The logistics are strange: What do I want to have with me when I first land? What will I not need until later? Did I make sure to write down my credit card and account numbers for things like my utilities and bank? It’s hard enough to deal with these sorts of details on Earth, but I need to be prepared to avoid defaulting on my mortgage, as well as to buy Amiko and the girls presents, from space.