“It’ll be all right,” I say, talking to myself as much as I’m talking to him now.
Suit experts on the ground are still discussing whether to proceed, and what precautions we’ll need to take. Meanwhile, we are told we can open the hatch and enjoy the view while they decide on a course of action. As I put my hand on the handle, I realize that I have no idea whether it will be day or night outside. I unlock the hatch handle and crank it, releasing the “dogs.” Now I have to simultaneously translate the hatch toward my chest and rotate it toward my head, which is challenging, because with nothing to hook my feet onto, I’m pulling myself toward the hatch almost as much as I’m pulling it toward me.
I tug and push and pull for a few minutes, and finally the hatch cracks open. The reflected light of Earth rushes in with the most abrupt and shocking clarity and brightness I’ve ever seen. On Earth, we look at everything through the filter of the atmosphere, which dulls the light, but here, in the emptiness of space, the sun’s light is white-hot and brilliant. The bright sunshine bouncing off the Earth is overwhelming. I’ve just gone from grunting in annoyance at a piece of machinery to staring in awe at the most beautiful view I’ve ever seen.
Inside my spacesuit, I feel like I’m in a tiny spacecraft rather than wearing something. My upper body floats inside the hard torso, my head encased in the helmet. I hear the comforting humming noise of the fan moving the air around inside my suit. The helmet has a faint chemical smell, not unpleasant, perhaps the anti-fog solution our visors are treated with. Through the earpiece built into my comm cap, I can hear the voices of Tracy in Houston and Kjell just a few feet away from me out here in outer space—that, and the strangely amplified sound of my own breathing.
The surface of the planet is 250 miles below my face and whizzing by at 17,500 miles per hour. It takes the ground about ten minutes to tell Kjell and me to go outside the hatch, where we can move around better, so I can check over Kjell’s suit for a leak. In the cold of space, a leak would look like snow shooting out of the backpack of the suit. If I don’t see snowflakes, we may be allowed to continue.
I grab both the handrails on either side of my head, getting ready to pull myself out. The airlock’s hatch faces the Earth, which would seem to be the direction we would call “down.” When we trained in the pool, the hatch was facing toward the floor, which always felt like down. Though I was neutrally buoyant in the pool, gravity still forced me toward the center of the Earth, providing a clear sense of up and down. For the hundreds of hours we practiced for this spacewalk, I got used to the idea of this configuration.
Once I’m about halfway through the hatch, though, I have a transition in perspective. Suddenly I have the sensation of climbing up, as if out of the sunroof of a car. The large blue dome of Earth hovers over my head like some nearby alien planet in a sci-fi film, looking as if it could come crashing down upon us. For a moment, I’m disoriented. I’m thinking about where to look for the attachment point, a small ring where I will hook my safety tether, but I don’t know where to look for it.
Like any highly trained pilot, I know how to compartmentalize, to push thoughts out of my mind that aren’t helping me to complete the task at hand. I focus on what is immediately in front of me—my gloves, the handrail, the small labels on the outside of the station I’ve familiarized myself with through countless hours of training—and ignore the looming Earth above and the feeling of disorientation it creates. I don’t have time for it, so I set it aside and get to work. I take the hook from my safety tether off my mini-workstation, a high-tech toolholder attached to the front of my spacesuit, and secure it to one of the rings just outside the airlock, checking to make sure the hook is in fact closed and locked with complete certainty. Like putting an airplane’s landing gear down before landing, this is one of those things you absolutely do not want to screw up.
During my last long-duration mission on ISS, two of the Russian cosmonauts, Oleg Skripochka and Fyodor Yurchikhin, did a spacewalk together to install some new equipment on the outside of the Russian service module. When the two of them came back inside, they both looked shaken, Oleg especially. I assumed at first his reaction was to being outside for the first time, and it wasn’t until this yearlong mission that I learned all the details of what had happened that day: during their spacewalk, Oleg had become untethered from the station and started to float away. The only thing that saved him was hitting an antenna, sending him tumbling back toward the station close enough to grab on to a handrail, saving his life. I’ve often pondered what we would have done if we’d known he was drifting irretrievably away from the station. It probably would have been possible to tie his family into the comm system in his spacesuit so they could say good-bye before the rising CO2 or oxygen deprivation caused him to lose consciousness—not something I wanted to spend a lot of time thinking about as my own spacewalk was approaching.