LIFTOFF!

ON AN EMOTIONAL DAY, THE CREW SAYS GOODBYE AND LEAVES THE EARTH BEHIND. NEXT STOP: THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION

At 1:42 a.m. on March 28, 2015, Scott Kelly, Mikhail Kornienko and Gennady Padalka roared off the launchpad in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. Just 11 minutes later, they were in orbit.

YOU’D THINK YOU’D HAVE TROUBLE deciding how to spend your last day on Earth if you were about to leave it for a year. But the fact is, you’d have nothing to decide at all. Every bit of it would be planned for you—literally second by second—as it was for Gennady Padalka, Mikhail Kornienko and Scott Kelly in advance of their liftoff at 1:42:57 a.m. local time in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, where the Russian launch facilities are located.

The three men were instructed to nap until nine hours before launch, or precisely 4:42:57 p.m. They left their quarters exactly one hour later, at 5:52:57 p.m., settled into the space center ready rooms and began their preflight preparations at 6:52:57. And on the day ticked. For the families, all those hours were a much more ambling business—time they had to contrive to fill on their own. As Kelly was getting his final hours of mandated terrestrial sleep, his daughters, Samantha and Charlotte, 20 and 11 at the time; his partner, Amiko Kauderer; and his brother, Mark, visited Baikonur’s outdoor market in a hunt for spices Kauderer and the girls wanted to take home.

Mark, who arrived in Baikonur still wearing his characteristic mustache—the only thing that allows most people to distinguish him from Scott—had shaved it off this morning. “Do I look like my brother now?” he asked, and then added mischievously, “Maybe I am.”

Kauderer, who works as a NASA public-affairs officer and has witnessed her share of launches as well as her share of spouses steeling themselves for the experience, carried herself with the same apparent calm. So did the girls, who have seen their father fly off to space several times before. As for what Scott himself was feeling, Mark was sure it was nothing terribly special. “He’s been through this four times already,” he said. “Actually, when you count the times you don’t launch, it’s six or seven.”

In a ceremony days before launch, officials from Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, hand off the Soyuz spacecraft to the prime crew and the backup crew of the one-year mission.

On launch day, the routine pressed on regardless of what Scott might or might not have been feeling. At 7:52 p.m., the crew, clad in blue jumpsuits, left the ready rooms for the 100-yard walk to the buses that would take them to the suit-up building. A rousing Russian song played over loudspeakers, while crowds were kept behind rope lines, both to prevent a crush and to protect the astronauts who were still under medical quarantine. Once they were sealed inside their bus, however, the lines collapsed and the crowd surged forward. A child was lifted to touch the window. Padalka pressed both of his hands on the glass while a woman reached up and pressed hers opposite them. In Russia, cosmo­nauts are every bit the cultural phenomenon they were half a century ago.

Kornienko, Kelly and Padalka prepare to step onto the gantry elevator that will carry them up to their Soyuz rocket.

No one outside of flight technicians saw the crew again for two hours, until they had been suited up and the families were brought in for a final goodbye—the crew on one side of a glass partition and the loved ones on the other, communicating via microphones. “Poka, poka ”—Russian for “bye-bye”—Padalka’s daughters called to him. Mark, who made two visits to the space station on his shuttle flights, was less sentimental. “I left some old T-shirts up in the gym,” he said to his brother. “Want to bring them down for me?”

“You look good without that mustache,” Scott answered.

“Yeah, I’ll probably grow it back on the flight home. I miss it already.”

Scott’s exchanges with Amiko, Charlotte and Samantha were less playful, and afterward, when Roscosmos officials declared the five minutes allotted for the visit over, Amiko gathered the girls in a hug. “We have to hold it together,” she says. “That’s our job.”

Finally, family, media and space officials left the suit-up building and walked to the parking lot just outside. The crew emerged a few minutes later to a fusillade of camera flashes and walked to three designated spots painted on the asphalt. American, Russian and Kazakh flags fluttered behind them and Roscosmos officials stood before them, bidding them a final goodbye. Padalka, the commander, stood in the middle during the ceremony, and he occupied the middle seat in the spacecraft as well.

A Soyuz veteran, Padalka has joked that he could fly the craft with nothing but a pair of cabbages in the seats on either side of him. Maybe. But if he meant that in the months he was training for this flight, there was no sign of it on the night he left. The crew, who would depend on one another for their lives, boarded their bus, drove to the pad and climbed into their spacecraft. Two and a half hours later, at the designated second, their Soyuz rocket’s 20 engines lit, and they left Kazakhstan—and the planet—behind.