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WHEN I FLOATED through the hatch to officially join the crew of Expedition 25 on the ISS, I was elated to be starting a long-duration mission. It had been a long road from DOR, backup on Expedition 5, the Columbia accident, my STS-118 mission, prostate cancer, my second backup training flow, and now my prime assignment—ten years all told.
On board were two Americans and one Russian: Doug Wheelock was serving as the commander for this expedition and would be turning over ISS to me when he left. Doug was a great first ISS commander to serve under. He took a hands-off approach to leadership, letting everyone find his or her own strengths.
My other American crewmate was Shannon Walker. I didn’t know Shannon very well before this mission, but I was surprised by how different she looked when we met in space: her hair had grown out gray over the months she’d been in space without access to hair dye. Shannon had trained to fly in the left seat of the Soyuz, which meant she needed to know the systems well enough to take over in an emergency that might incapacitate the Russian Soyuz commander, and as a result she spent much more time training in Russia than I did. When I got on board ISS, I was impressed with her abilities as a crew member. This was her first flight, so when I arrived I was at first thinking of her as a rookie, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that she had almost ten times as much time in space as I did, and that in fact I could use her help. At NASA, we talk about “expeditionary behavior,” which is a loose term for being able to take care of yourself, take care of others, help out when it’s needed, stay out of the way when necessary—a combination of soft skills that’s difficult to define, hard to teach, and a significant challenge when they are lacking. Shannon was a master at this.
The Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin, a short, stocky guy with a broad smile, was already on board. Fyodor was one of only two people I’ve been in space with more than once (the other being Al Drew). Fyodor was born in the country of Georgia to Greek parents, which is unusual in a cosmonaut corps made up largely of ethnic Russians. He had a real enthusiasm for photography, and loved taking pictures of the Earth. Even more, he loved showing his pictures to his crewmates regardless of what they were trying to do at the time. The cosmonauts aboard ISS generally don’t have as hectic a schedule as the Americans do, and sometimes that difference can show when they are free to socialize during the day, floating around the dining room table sharing coffee or a snack, while we rush from one thing to the next.
On this mission I learned the differences between visiting space and living there. On a long-duration flight, you work at a different pace, you get more comfortable moving around, sleep better, digest better. As my first long-duration mission went on, what surprised me most was how little force it actually took to move around and to hold myself still. With just a slight push of a finger or a toe, I could travel across a module and wind up exactly where I wanted to be.
One of the first tasks I tackled when I got on board was repairing a device called Sabatier, which combines oxygen from the CO2 the Seedra collects and leftover hydrogen from the oxygen-generating assembly to create water. Sabatier is an important part of the nearly closed-loop environmental system of the station. My job was to tune the system, a tedious multiday task, using flow meters and other diagnostic tools. At the time I thought I handled it well, but looking back at it years later with much more experience doing this kind of repair, I realize how much Shannon helped me by getting all the tools and parts together for me in advance, checking on me when I seemed to be struggling, and encouraging me when I got frustrated. Without her help, the task would have been nearly impossible to carry out so early in the mission.
I celebrated my first Thanksgiving on the space station shortly before taking over as commander of ISS for the first time. The next day, Shannon, Doug, and Fyodor departed for Earth, leaving behind Sasha, Oleg, and me.
A few weeks later, the new crew arrived. American astronaut Cady Coleman was a retired colonel in the U.S. Air Force and held a Ph.D. in chemistry, and, I came to learn, played the flute. Some people who knew Cady and me thought that we might not click as crewmates, or that I might kill her, because we came from such different backgrounds—the fighter pilot (me) and the scientist (Cady). In fact, Cady and I became great friends and she was a great crew member, even though I was never able to get her to go to bed on time. Sometimes I would get up to use the bathroom at three a.m. on a work night and find her playing her flute in the Cupola. Cady taught me how to be more in touch with my feelings and those of the people we worked with on the ground. She also helped me see the value of reaching out more to the public, letting people share the excitement of what we were doing in space. This would turn out to be enormously helpful on my yearlong mission.
The Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli, a talented engineer with a great sense of humor, was the third member of the new crew. Paolo is really tall—too tall to fit into the Soyuz, in fact, and the European Space Agency had to pay the Russians to modify the seat, setting it at a steeper angle, in order to fit him into the capsule.
The Soyuz commander was Dima, who had been on the Expedition 5 backup crew with me and with whom I had done survival training a decade ago. This was his first spaceflight. Back when Dima and I were assigned to the same backup crew, he had argued that he should be commander of ISS because he was the commander of the Soyuz and a military officer. Sasha Kaleri, with his extensive experience in space, was much better qualified to command but was not a military officer. Dima was so convinced that he had been wronged that he wrote two strongly worded letters to his management saying that Sasha wasn’t performing up to par and should be removed from the crew. This incredible breach of protocol meant that Dima was not assigned to a flight for many years, despite his superior technical skills.