The next task for me is working on the end effector, the “hand” of the robot arm. Without it, we can’t capture and bring in the visiting vehicles that deliver food and other necessities to the U.S. side of the station. Once I’m secured in a foot restraint, I realize how lucky I am: rather than facing the blank exterior of an ISS module, as spacewalkers usually do (and as Kjell is at this moment), I am facing out toward the Earth. I can watch the stunning view splayed out below my feet as the Earth goes by while I work, rather than having to turn around and look out the corner of my eye during the rare free moment. I feel like Leonardo DiCaprio at the bow of the Titanic, and I’m king of the world.
While I was training for this mission, I practiced greasing a replica of this end effector, using tools identical to the ones I’m using up here. While I practiced, I wore a duplicate of my spacesuit gloves. But the experience is still disorientingly different now that I, the grease gun, and the grease are all floating in space, the sun rising and setting spectacularly every ninety minutes, the planet spinning majestically underfoot. The grease gun is well designed, like a high-grade version of a caulking gun from a hardware store, but it’s awkward to use with the fat-fingered gloves of the pressurized suit. For several hours, I wield this cumbersome tool like a five-year-old with finger paint. The grease goes everywhere. Small beads of grease jump off the gun as if they have a will of their own to explore the cosmos. Some of them come right toward me, which could pose a serious problem; if grease starts to coat the faceplate of my helmet, I may not be able to see to find my way back in. This task is taking much longer than had been scheduled, and soon my hands are aching to the point where I start to think I might not be able to move them. Of all the things that are tiring about this spacewalk, the amount of effort it takes to manipulate the gloves is by far the worst. My knuckles are rubbed raw, the muscles beyond fatigued, and I still have a great deal left to do. I work with Kimiya as he precisely maneuvers the robot arm to place it exactly where I need it. I put grease on the end of a long wire tool and stick it into the dark hole of the end effector. I can’t see in there and can only hope the grease is going in the right place as I blindly feel around.
This task is taking so long I know I won’t get to complete some of our other scheduled activities. Kjell is running long as well; the cables he is routing to enable future visiting vehicles to dock are proving to be as difficult to wrangle as my grease gun. We are well past the six-and-a-half-hour mark when we start getting organized to call it a day and head back to the airlock. Despite having consumables that would last another few hours, we have to leave enough time to deal with any unexpected problems.
We still have the toughest part of the spacewalk in front of us: Kjell and I must maneuver ourselves back into the airlock. Kjell goes first and guides his bulky suit through the opening without getting hung up on anything. Once inside, he attaches his waist tether. Then I release his safety tether, which is still connected to the outside of the station, and attach it to myself, then release my own. I swing my legs over my head and flip upside down into the airlock, so I will be facing the hatch to close it.
By the time we are both inside we are breathing hard. Closing the hatch, absolutely mandatory, will be much harder than opening it, with the fatigue from the spacewalk taking its toll. My hands are completely spent.
The first step is to close the thermal cover of the outside hatch, which has been severely damaged by the sun, like most of the equipment exposed to its harsh rays. The cover doesn’t fit right anymore—it’s assumed the shape of a potato chip—and it takes a lot of finesse to get it secured properly. With the thermal cover closed, it’s time to get hooked back up to the umbilical that provides oxygen, water, and power to the suits via the station’s systems rather than the suit itself. This isn’t an easy task either, but after a few minutes we manage to get them connected properly.
Despite my fatigue, I manage to get the hatch securely closed and locked. As the air hisses in around us, Kjell and I are still breathing hard from the work of getting back inside. We will have a wait of about fifteen minutes, punctuated by a few leak checks, to make sure the hatch is properly closed while the airlock returns to the pressure of the station. As we wait, I struggle to equalize my ears by pressing my nose against a pad built into my helmet and blowing (this Valsalva device is designed to replicate the effect of holding our noses). This requires much more force than I thought it would, and later I will discover I have burst some blood vessels in my eyes in the process.
We have been in these suits for eleven hours now.
At some point during the repressurization process, we lose comm with the ground. We know it means that for at least a while we aren’t being broadcast on NASA TV and can say what we like.
“That was fucking insane!” I say.
“Yeah,” agrees Kjell. “I’m beat.”
We both know we will have to do another spacewalk in nine days.
When the hatch opens and we see Kimiya’s smiling face, we know we are nearly done. Kimiya and Oleg do a close inspection of our gloves and take many pictures of them to send to the ground. The gloves are the most vulnerable parts of our suits, prone to cuts and abrasions, and the glove experts on the ground want to know as much as possible about how our gloves have fared today. Any holes will be easier to see while our suits are still pressurized.
When we are ready to get out of the suits, Kimiya helps us remove our helmets first, which is a relief in one way. But we will miss the cleaner air: the CO2 scrubbers in the suits do a much better job than Seedra. Getting out of the suits was hard on Earth, but there we had the advantage of gravity, which helped by pulling our bodies down toward the floor. Here in space, my suit and I are floating together, so I need Kimiya to hold on to the arms of the suit and pull hard while he pushes down on the pants in the other direction with his legs. Extruding from the hard upper torso reminds me of a birthing horse.
Once I’m out of the spacesuit, it hits me all at once how draining it’s been just being in the suit, never mind the full day of grueling work I did while wearing it. Kjell and I head to the PMM, where we remove our long underwear and dispose of our used diapers and biomedical sensors. We take a quick “shower” (move the dried sweat around on our bodies with wipes, then towel off to dry) and eat some food for the first time in fourteen hours. I call Amiko and tell her how it went—she watched the whole thing from mission control, but I know she’s waiting to hear what it was actually like for me. She worried about this spacewalk more than she worried about any other part of this mission.
“Hey,” I say as soon as she picks up the phone, “that was something. I don’t know exactly how to describe it. It was fucking crazy.”
“I’m so proud of you,” she says. “It was intense to watch.”
“It was intense for you?” I joke, though I understand what she means. She’d been in mission control since three in the morning Houston time and didn’t eat or even go to the bathroom until I was back inside safely.