My last earthly breakfast is a Baikonur attempt at American cuisine: runny eggs (because I could never make the Kazakh cook understand the term “over medium”), toast, and “breakfast sausages” (actually microwaved hot dogs). Getting ready on the day of launch takes much longer than you’d think it would, like so many aspects of spaceflight. First I take a final trip to the banya to relax, then go through the preflight enema ritual—our guts shut down in space initially, so the Russians encourage us to get things cleaned out ahead of time. The cosmonauts have their doctors do this, with warm water and rubber hoses, but I opt for the drugstore type in private, which lets me maintain a comfortable friendship with my flight surgeon. I savor a bath in the Jacuzzi tub, then a nap (because our launch is scheduled for 1:42 a.m. local time). When I wake, I take a shower, lingering awhile. I know how much I’ll miss the feeling of water for the next year.
The Russian flight surgeon we call “Dr. No” shows up shortly after I’m out of the shower. He is called Dr. No because he gets to decide whether our families can see us once we’re in quarantine. His decisions are arbitrary, sometimes mean-spirited, and absolute. He is here to wipe down our entire bodies with alcohol wipes. The original idea behind the alcohol swab-down was to kill any germs trying to stow away with space travelers, but now it seems like just another ritual. After a champagne toast with senior management and our significant others, we sit in silence for a minute, a Russian tradition before a long trip. As we leave the building, a Russian Orthodox priest will bless us and throw holy water into each of our faces. Every cosmonaut since Yuri Gagarin has gone through each of these steps, so we will go through them, too. I’m not religious, but I always say that when you’re getting ready to be rocketed into space, a blessing can’t hurt.
We do a ceremonial walkout past the media with a traditional Russian song playing, “Trava u doma,” a song about cosmonauts missing home that sounds like a Soviet marching band playing at a carnival:
And we don’t dream of the cosmodrome’s roar
Nor of this icy dark blue
Instead, we dream of the grass, the grass near our homes…
The green, green grass.
We get on the bus that will take us to the building where we get suited up. The moment the door to the bus closes behind us, a rope holding back the crowd is cut, and everyone rushes forward. It’s chaotic, and I can’t spot my family at first, but then I see them, in the front row— Amiko, Samantha, Charlotte, and Mark. Someone lifts up Charlotte, who is eleven, so she can put her hand on the window, and I put my hand up to hers, trying to look happy. Charlotte is smiling, her round white face in a grin. If she’s sad that she won’t see me for a year, if she’s scared to watch me leave Earth on a barely controlled bomb, if she’s aware of the many types of peril I will face before I get to hug her again a year from now, she doesn’t show it. Then she’s down on the asphalt again, standing with the rest of them and waving. I see Amiko smiling, though I can also see tears in her eyes. I see Samantha, who is twenty. Her wide smile betrays her apprehension for what is to come. And then the bus’s brakes release with a hissing scream, and we are gone.
—
I SIT ON a cheap leather couch waiting to suit up in Building 254, a thirty-minute drive from Saddam’s Palace. A flat-screen in the corner shows a silly Russian TV show that none of us pay attention to. There is some food laid out—cold chicken, meat pies, juice, and tea—and though it isn’t what I would have chosen as my last earthly meal for a year, I eat a bit.
First Gennady is called into an adjacent room to strip down and put on his diaper, cardiac electrodes, and a fresh pair of white long underwear (meant to absorb sweat and shield us from the rubber of the Sokol suit). When Gennady returns, Misha goes in to diaper up. Then I go. Whenever I do this, I chuckle to myself that I wouldn’t have thought I’d be in diapers again until much later in life. It’s now time to get our Sokol suits on. We have white-coated, surgical-masked Russian specialists to help us get dressed. They expertly close the openings in our suits with a series of folds and the peculiar rubber bands.
The three of us walk into another room, which is divided by a sheet of glass. On the other side are our families, managers from the Russian space agency (Roscosmos), NASA leaders, and members of the media, sitting in rows of seats facing us. I know the closest analogy should be a NASA press conference, but this moment has always made me feel like a gorilla in the zoo instead.
I immediately spot Amiko, Mark, and my daughters in the front row. Amiko and the girls have been here for a few days, but Mark only just arrived. They all smile at me and wave. Not for the first time, I’m grateful that my brother is there for them. As an experienced astronaut himself, and someone who knows me better than anyone else, he can help them understand what will be going on, and reassure them when necessary, better than anyone else could.
Amiko smiles happily and points to the pendant I had made for her before I left Houston, a silver version of the Year in Space mission patch. Samantha and Charlotte wear the silver pendants too. I will bring a second version of the pendants, in gold with sapphires set into them, with me to give the three of them when I return. Amiko’s smile is sincere and happy, but because I know her so well I can also see that she is tired, not only from jet lag but also from the strain. This is Amiko’s second time going through the process of preparing for a long-duration mission with me, so she’s known what to expect, though I’m not sure that makes it any easier. She also works for NASA, in the public affairs office, so she knows better than most astronauts’ partners what I am facing on this mission. In some instances this knowledge will be comforting, but more often than not—including today—it would have been less stressful to know less.