Steve worked hard to convince the Russian doctors that my surgery had been a success and that I was going to be able to pee just fine in space. We called Steve “Doogie,” because of his youthful appearance, or “Happy,” for his cheerful disposition. He worked on this issue for more than a year. It would have been easier for NASA to simply replace me with someone else, and I’m grateful they stood by me. In the end, the Russians agreed to let me fly, recognizing that our expertise and experience in this area were superior to theirs. They still made me fly with a catheterization kit in the Soyuz.
I began training for my mission to the space station in late 2007, with the launch scheduled for October 2010. Missions to ISS were divided into expeditions of six crew members, and my time on station would cover both Expeditions 25 and 26. In 2008, I began working with Sasha Kaleri, the Soyuz commander, and Oleg Skripochka, who would fly in the left seat as the flight engineer. Sasha is a quiet and serious guy with a full head of dark hair speckled gray. He was one of the most experienced cosmonauts, having flown three long-duration missions on Mir and one on the ISS—608 days altogether. He also brought a lot of old-school attitude and tradition, including some small Soviet flags, as part of his kit of personal items we get to launch in the Soyuz. He seems to be nostalgic for the Communist system, which of course was odd to me, but I liked him nonetheless. Oleg was on his first spaceflight. Studious and well prepared, he tried to model himself after Sasha in every way, and in turn Sasha treated Oleg like a son or a little brother.
This wasn’t my first time training with the Russians, of course; I had trained to fly as the backup for Expedition 5 in 2001 and again as part of the backup crew for the flight prior to this one. By now, I was intimately familiar with the way the Russian space agency handles training similarly to NASA, such as an emphasis on simulator training, and the way they don’t, like their emphasis on the theoretical versus the practical—to an extreme. If NASA were to train an astronaut how to mail a package, they would take a box, put an object in the box, show you the route to the post office, and send you on your way with postage. The Russians would start in the forest with a discussion on the species of tree used to create the pulp that will make up the box, then go into excruciating detail on the history of box making. Eventually you would get to the relevant information about how the package is actually mailed, if you didn’t fall asleep first. It seems to me this is part of their system of culpability—everyone involved in training needs to certify that the crew was taught everything they could possibly need to know. If anything should go wrong, it must then be the crew’s fault.
Before we can fly on the Soyuz, we must pass oral exams, graded on a scale of one through five, just like the exams given throughout the entire Russian educational system. We took our final exams before a large commission, nearly twenty people in all, who were grading us. We also had a larger audience of spectators. Privately, I referred to the oral exams as a “public stoning.” Part of the process is a postexam debrief in which crew members argue for the grade they believe they have earned, minimizing and avoiding responsibility for any mistakes. This arguing over grades is something like a sport, and it seems we were being graded partly on how we pled our cases. I never wanted to argue—I was willing to take whatever grade the instructors wanted to give me, because I knew that in the end I would soon fly in space regardless.
Some of our training took place at other sites, as we learned to do everything from repairing the equipment on the space station to conducting experiments across many scientific disciplines. One day at the Johnson Space Center, I was in a session with a materials scientist who was teaching a group of astronauts how to use a new piece of equipment on the space station, a furnace for heating materials in zero gravity. While he was explaining the properties of the furnace, he showed us a golf-ball-sized sample of a material that had been “forged” in the furnace and said repeatedly that it was “harder than a diamond.” I found that difficult to believe and asked whether I could hold it. He smiled and handed it to me.
“Is this really harder than a diamond?” I asked.
He assured me that it was.
I put the sample on the floor and raised my heel over it, looking at the scientist questioningly.
“Go ahead,” he said.
I brought down my heel hard and the sample shattered, pieces flying all over the room. Apparently, it wasn’t harder than a diamond. This incident became part of a narrative about me in some people’s minds at NASA—that I didn’t have enough respect for the scientific work being done on the space station. It’s true that I’m not a scientist and that research was never my main motivation for going to space. But even if the science wasn’t what drove me to become an astronaut, I have a profound respect for the pursuit of scientific knowledge and I take my part in that seriously. After all, I would argue, testing that sample from the furnace was an example of using the scientific method to gain knowledge.
Another uniquely Russian spaceflight practice was the creation of custom-molded seat liners for each crew member. The first time I served as a backup crew member, I went to Zvezda, the company that makes the Soyuz seats and Sokol suits, as well as the spacesuits the cosmonauts wear on spacewalks and ejection seats for Russian military aircraft. With a NASA flight surgeon and an interpreter who specializes in medical translation, I traveled to the other side of Moscow from Star City, through many miles of Moscow suburbs. Once inside the guarded and gated Zvezda facility, I was helped into a container like a small bathtub, then had warm plaster poured in all around me. After the plaster hardened, I was helped out, then got to watch while an old weathered technician with a beard like Tolstoy’s—he was really more like an artisan—went to work. I watched his huge, callused hands, with long sensitive fingers like a sculptor’s, carve out the excess plaster to create a perfect mold of my back and butt.
A few weeks later, I came back to Zvezda for a fit check of the newly made seat liner, followed by the dreaded pressure check—an hour and a half on my back in my custom-made spacesuit in my custom-made seat liner with the suit pressurized. The circulation in my lower legs got cut off, and the position became a distinctly painful form of torture. All the cosmonauts and astronauts dread this procedure, but if anyone complains, they are met with a curt answer: “If you can’t deal with this pain now, how can you deal with it in space?” I never bothered arguing about it, but this was a flawed argument; in space you can deal with discomfort that you know is keeping you alive. A few weeks later, I came back for the pressure check again, this time in a vacuum chamber, a ritual meant to give us confidence in the suits. These activities can feel more like ceremonial rites of passage than engineering necessities, as with so many of the traditions in the Russian space program. In the coming years, I would carry out this painful ritual two more times.
Pouring plaster for my Soyuz seat liner Credit 8