AT HOME ABOVE THE WORLD
SCOTT KELLY AND MIKHAIL KORNIENKO SETTLE INTO A ROUTINE OF MAINTENANCE, LAB WORK AND MOVIE NIGHTS
A view of the ISS’s solar array from inside the station
A YEAR IN SPACE IS MARKED IN PART by the holidays that pass while you’re away. Christmas? Sorry, out of town. Easter? Ditto. Thanksgiving, New Year’s Eve, Halloween? Catch you next year.
It’s fitting, then, that the first holiday astronaut Scott Kelly spent in the first month of his stay aboard the International Space Station was Cosmonautics Day. Never heard of it? You would have if you were Russian.
Cosmonautics Day celebrates April 12, 1961, when Yuri Gagarin lifted off from the same launchpad from which Kelly’s mission began, becoming the first human being in space. Kelly and his five crewmates got the morning off on that special day, taking the opportunity to enjoy the relative comforts of a spacecraft with more habitable space than a six-bedroom home. But in the afternoon it was back to work—following a moment-by-moment schedule that was scripted on the ground, that was adhered to in space and that, while often grueling, is the best way for astronauts and cosmonauts who have signed on for a long hitch to focus on their work and keep the time from crawling.
Kelly’s first month was, in some ways, typical of the 11 that followed. There was the arrival of a SpaceX cargo ship, a vessel carrying 4,300 pounds of equipment and supplies, including a subzero freezer that can preserve experiments at –112°F, that needed to be unloaded; new gear to aid studies of the effects of microgravity on mice; and a sample of so-called synthetic muscle, a strong but pliant material modeled after human muscle, to be used for robotic limbs and joints. Also tucked into the load was a less practical but infinitely more anticipated item: a zero-gravity espresso machine, dubbed the ISSpresso.
There are 250 experiments that must be tended to at any one time aboard the ISS, but the most important of them in the past year were Kelly and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko themselves. In their first month in space, the two long-termers submitted to a whole range of preliminary experiments that tracked their health throughout their stay. Space physicians already know the basic answer; it’s not a good one. But the hope is that Kelly and Kornienko will help provide ways to mitigate damage.
Biomedical studies in the first month included seeing how the upward shift of fluids in the body affected the eyes; sampling saliva and sweat to test for bacterial levels and chemical balance; leg scans to determine blood flow; studies of blood pressure, which can fluctuate wildly when the heart no longer has to pump against gravity; analyses of throat and skin samples; and bone-density tests.
The 11 months that followed were not all a Groundhog Day repetition of the first. Kelly was scheduled for two space walks, the first of his four-mission career, to conduct basic maintenance work and help oversee a complex reconfiguration of the station, with modules and docking ports repositioned to accommodate commercial crew vehicles built by Boeing and SpaceX, which are supposed to begin arriving in 2017. He spent long hours preparing for the walks, training in NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab, a 6.2-million-gallon pool in Houston with a full-size mock-up of the station resting on its bottom. Weights in the buoyant spacesuit ensure that an astronaut neither floats up nor sinks, mirroring the drifting-in-place experience of walking in space.
But work—even thrilling work like a space walk—could not be all there was to sustain an astronaut spending a year aloft, and so Kelly also had free time and leisure activities to look forward to: movie nights, Web surfing, and regular video chats, phone calls and emails with family. The periodic arrivals of cargo ships provided such luxuries as fresh fruits and vegetables—which don’t last long in space, but they don’t have to, because six-person crews missing the comforts of home scarf them down quickly.
The clubhouse turn of Kelly and Kornienko’s one-year mission occurred in December 2015, the 50th anniversary of what was once America’s longest stay in space: the two-week flight of Gemini 7, which astronauts Frank Borman and Jim Lovell passed in the equivalent of two coach airline seats, with the ceiling just three inches over their heads. The ISS is a manor house compared with the Gemini. But the astronauts are still astronauts, human beings in a very strange place experiencing very strange things—in some cases for a very long time.
The galley (above) includes an angled surface where food packets can be attached with Velcro. Kelly’s sleeping quarters (below and bottom) afford him a measure of privacy. The green sleeping bag can hang upright because there are no “up” and “down” in space.
