AS WE WERE GETTING READY TO LEAVE Mir at the end of my first space flight in 1995, the mood was convivial. We were rushing around taking last-minute crew photos, signing sheaves of envelopes (a cosmonaut tradition: Russians are, for whatever reason, avid collectors of envelopes that have been in space) and double-checking that we hadn’t left any Shuttle gear behind. As a parting gift, we gave the Mir crew all our remaining condiments, like packages of salsa and mustard, which help make space food taste a little less bland.
I didn’t feel let down now that our mission was almost over. I felt that I’d had an experience that no one could ever take away from me—fleeting, yes, but it would be part of me forever, so I was entirely ready to leave. We had done something unprecedented and near-impossible, building a dock for future Shuttle visits, and we’d done it well. As we prepared to undock, there was a palpable sense of triumph inside our spaceship.
I pushed the button to start driving open the hooks that connected Atlantis to Mir, and after a couple of minutes, those built-in springs pushed us apart—an effortless kiss-off. As we started to drift away, the ship-to-ship radio crackled to life and the melancholic strains of “Those Were the Days,” sung in Russian, filled the Shuttle. We’d all sung the song together the night before in Mir, with Thomas Reiter and me on guitar. At the moment of undocking, the campiness of the song fit our mood perfectly. Spirits were high, as though we’d won a gold medal in the Cosmic Geek Olympics.
We did a fly-around, one perfect looping circle to complete a full photographic survey of the station’s exterior. We were (and still are) trying to understand orbital debris—how often it hits spaceships and how big the rocks and dust grains are. Very little orbital debris is man-made; almost all of it is the stuff of the universe, such as meteors and comet tails. Detailed reviews of blown-up versions of these photos, so all the holes and pockmarks could be counted, would provide key data. After 360 degrees of behemoth choreography, with Atlantis slowly revolving around Mir like a whale skirting a giant squid, we fired our orbital maneuvering engines, pulled away safely and headed for home. We stayed on the radio, though, chatting and playing a little Tchaikovsky for our friends back on the station, until we lost contact.
The Shuttle was a far more complicated vehicle than the Soyuz, which is highly automated, and landing it was an exceptionally high-demand piloting task. It was very difficult to fly, this hypersonic glider, so NASA chose top-notch test pilots and then trained them for many years to be able to do it right. Simply getting the Shuttle ready to survive re-entry required multiple systems checks and reconfigurations; one trick—we had to point the belly at the sun for hours to warm up the rubber tires for landing. Landing, in other words, required the same degree of focus and preparation as launching.
The lesson for me was that the very last thing you do on a mission is just as important as the first thing you did—perhaps even more important, actually, because now you’re tired. It’s like the last mile of a marathon: the effort has to be more deliberate and you’ve got to push yourself, hard, to keep going right to the very end. It’s tempting to tell yourself, “I’ve only got 20 steps left,” but if you start anticipating the finish line, chances are that you’ll let up and then you could make mistakes—ones that could be fatal in my line of work.
It’s dangerous to think of descent as an anticlimax. Instead of looking back longingly over your shoulder at what you’re leaving behind, you need to be asking, “What’s the next thing that could kill me?”
I was downstairs on the middeck for that first Shuttle landing, just a hopeful, knowledgeable passenger with no windows, no instruments, no control. My main responsibility was to make sure that everyone on the flight deck was suited up and strapped in. I’d done that perfectly, and was on the middeck alone when Jim Halsell, the pilot, put on his helmet. His communication cord had been floating between the neck ring of the helmet and the neck ring of the suit itself; when the rings locked together they trapped the cord, leaving him unable to talk to our commander or to Mission Control. That’s a big problem at any point in flight but particularly when you’re trying to re-enter the atmosphere.
I’m not even in my own pumpkin-colored pressure suit yet when Jim hollers, “Come help me.” He can’t get his helmet open to release the comm cord. On the flight deck, they’re doing all sorts of checks and turning on the flight controls, and he’s having to yell just to be heard through his big, thick helmet. So I float over to try to pull it off. No luck, the thing is completely jammed. I need to put more muscle into it, but Jim is belted into a seat that’s mere inches below the most critical switches for controlling the vehicle. If I yank too hard and his helmet comes off suddenly, there’s a good chance I’m going to smash into that panel and cause a real problem. I pull more vigorously, still wary of the potential for disaster. The helmet doesn’t budge.
Picture this, if you can: we’re coming down into the upper atmosphere, I’m a rookie still dressed only in my underwear, my stomach’s starting to feel queasy and I’m working a problem no one anticipated, while everyone else is fully occupied trying to ensure we arrive alive. Lightbulb: I whip downstairs, find a big, long slot-head screwdriver—the kind you’d use to break open a door—fly back up and try to use it for leverage to unjam the helmet. Meanwhile, Jim is still focused on helping fly this incredibly complicated vehicle, trying to ignore the fact that now my body is wrapped around his helmet to cushion the thing from flying away, and I’m trying to pry it off with the screwdriver, looking, I’m sure, like Bugs Bunny in that episode where he’s hugging the head of The Crusher, the monstrous boxing he-man.
Finally, the helmet pops off and I bounce off the ceiling, right myself, untrap Jim’s comm cord and refasten his helmet, just in time to drag myself back downstairs and pull on my big orange pressure suit—only, there’s a little bit of gravity now, so I keep getting bounced to the floor and I’m starting to feel sick. The suit wasn’t really designed for you to put it on by yourself, but it’s possible if you work at it, and when I’m finally in, I plunk down in my seat. We’re way down in the atmosphere by this point, already Mach 12, I’m sweaty from the exertion and now I realize I’ve messed up my own comm cord somehow: I can hear what everyone else is saying, but they can’t hear me. That’s no big loss, as my main focus at this point is trying not to throw up.
I feel like I’ve only been in my seat for five minutes when we begin our slow, curving turn to line up with the runway in Florida. Since there are no windows I can’t see anything, but I sure can hear the rush of air that sounds like a freight train and can feel the very steep final dive to the ground, followed by an elegant touchdown. Our final approach speed is 300 knots, 195 at landing, and then we slow down carefully, thanks to a drag chute and wheel brakes. Only when the motion ceases altogether does the commander issue the radio call: “Wheels stop, Houston.”
But the mission was still not really over. We had to refocus and push ourselves physically and emotionally for a last, hour-long burst of effort. There was a 150-step procedure to shut down the Shuttle, and each step was crucially important in order to ensure the vehicle would be ready to fly again in a few months. Only after the ground crew purged the unused toxic, caustic fuels that kept the hydraulic and life support systems running, and covered the fuel nozzles on the front and back of the Shuttle, were we free to exit, unsteadily at best. Some astronauts need to be carried, many vomit, and all of us feel awkward re-adapting to gravity, but an hour later, freshly changed into blue flight suits, we were back to inspect the belly of our spaceship for any damage, greet the ground crew and hold a small press conference.
It was only after all that that I allowed myself to relax. I was a little dazed, but also exhilarated. I’d done my part, and as a crew, we’d fulfilled our mission.
When we launch from Baikonur, the traditional send-off from the Russian ground crew is, “Miakoi posadki!” which means, “Soft landings!” It’s a sincere wish but also a joke, because they know very well that there won’t be anything soft about our landing when we return to Kazakhstan. Returning to Earth in the Shuttle was a fairly gentle experience, but Soyuz landings are famously rough: high g-forces, heavy vibration, rapid spinning and tumbling, all funneling down to a brutally jarring thud on the unforgiving Kazakh plains.
It’s a wild ride, and everyone who’s ever taken it seems to have a story about it. My favorite is the one cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko tells about his return in 2008 with American astronaut Peggy Whitson and South Korean space flight participant Yi So-Yeon. When the Soyuz comes back to Earth, explosive bolts fire so the orbital and service modules are flung away to burn up in the atmosphere; only the re-entry capsule has an ablative shield to protect it from the heat. As Yuri and Peggy’s Soyuz started to come back into the atmosphere they heard the explosive bolts fire but, though they didn’t know it at the time, one of the modules didn’t actually separate from their capsule. It was still attached by one bolt and getting hotter by the second, because as the air got thicker, pressure and friction increased. The re-entry capsule, which wasn’t designed to return to Earth with a heavy, burning ball attached to it, became uncontrollable.
As the Soyuz ripped through the sky in pure ballistic mode, the g-force climbed to nine—but it felt much worse than that to the crew because the capsule was tumbling so violently. Instead of just being crushed down in their seats, they were being banged around and squashed every which way. The crew couldn’t see what was causing the problem, but they knew something was terribly wrong and that the vehicle couldn’t survive that type of punishment much longer.
Fortunately, the aerodynamic forces got so intense that the bolt snapped off, releasing the burning module. But it had hung on so long, at such high heat, that the top of the re-entry capsule was completely scorched. Yuri, who is unusually unflappable, even by cosmonaut standards, felt liquid dripping onto his legs and figured, “Oh, it’s molten metal; the Soyuz must be melting.” His response was to say nothing, move his legs a bit and continue fighting to control the vehicle (later he figured out that the drips were water from behind an oxygen panel where condensation normally turns to ice during landing). They were seconds away from death, literally.
Then, thanks to its inherently good design, the vehicle stabilized, its parachute actually opened and the crew’s capsule subsequently smacked down, very hard but safely, on the ground. But they’d landed well short of the intended target, so nobody was there to meet them. No one on the ground even knew exactly where they were; the fireball of re-entry had disrupted communications for many minutes.
Usually, after a crew has been in space for months, they’re too physically debilitated even to open the hatch, so a ground crew is standing by to extricate them. But somehow, after a few minutes, Yuri managed to open the hatch a crack—a superhuman feat given how weak and shaken up he was. Right away he smelled smoke. That was to be expected given the temperature of the vehicle, but when he cracked the hatch a little farther, what he saw was fire, everywhere. The Soyuz had landed in a grassy field and ignited it. By the time Yuri was able to get the hatch closed again, his hands were burning. All three of them wanted nothing more than to get out—they were nauseous and just feeling horrible, sitting in a cramped, now smoke-filled capsule—but the world was on fire. They were in no condition to try to jump out and make a run for it. So they waited. Nobody came.
After a while Yuri decided to risk it and opened the hatch again. Good news: the fire had burned past the vehicle. Somehow he crawled out, and lo and behold, standing there were some locals, a few Kazakh men who’d been drawn by the smoke. They looked at him curiously, and then the only one who spoke any Russian asked, “Where did you come from?” Yuri was trying to explain when the guy interrupted. “Well, what about your boat? Where did the boat come from?” He just couldn’t believe that this flat-bottomed craft had really come from space.
In the meantime, Peggy and So-Yeon, whose back had been hurt pretty badly during landing, were working their way out of the capsule, and the guys helped them. At this point Yuri really wanted to get his radio equipment to try to call the rescue helicopters, but he didn’t have the strength to go back into the Soyuz and retrieve it. No problem. The smallest guy volunteered, helpfully climbing into the “boat” that had just fallen from the sky and grabbing anything he could lay his hands on. Yuri could see him cramming stuff into his pockets, but he was physically powerless to intervene.
Yuri confronted him verbally, though, and while that was going on, the first helicopter came into sight and promptly radioed back to Mission Control that the capsule had been located but no parachute was visible. It had burned up in the fire, of course, but to everyone who heard that message, it could mean only one thing: the crew was dead. Mass devastation. Quickly followed by mass celebration after the copter landed and radioed back the good news: the crew had survived a ballistic landing, an inferno and some boat-loving bandits.
Though I hoped for a somewhat less eventful ride home, as our time on Station drew to a close I felt a sense of real anticipation about my first Soyuz landing. I’d trained extensively for it and viewed it as a fitting end to my career as an astronaut: a rare experience right on the hairy edge of possible, approached with forethought and a sense of purpose. I’ve looked forward to every flight I’ve had as a pilot, but I suspected this would be one of the most memorable of them all.
I was right.
The last few days of a mission are usually a bit of a blur, because there’s so much to do. On top of the regular tasks, we have to practice landing procedures on a computer simulator and pack up our Soyuz meticulously, because where and how each item is stowed affects the vehicle’s centre of gravity, which in turn determines how much control we have over it. Typically, the last minute is also when you finally get around to doing all the little things you’ve been meaning to do for months: shooting a video tour of the ISS to show friends and family back home, taking photos of crewmates in bizarre, only-in-space poses and, just because you can, peeing upside down.
But our mission did not end typically. We had that emergency spacewalk on May 11, a major undertaking just 48 hours before we were scheduled to undock, so everything thereafter was a scramble. Right until the minute we got into our Soyuz, we were flying around—literally—cleaning up the Station, throwing out old clothes and tying up loose ends.
The pell-mell nature of our departure meant that nostalgia had no opportunity to take root, so our Change of Command ceremony on May 12 wasn’t momentous or elegiac. It was cheerful and rushed. I handed responsibility for the Station over to the new commander, my good friend Pavel Vinogradov, with a little speech and a big handshake (which didn’t work all that well in zero gravity, because our whole bodies moved up and down, so the effect was less than solemn), then got right back to my to-do list.
While Roman focused on the Soyuz, Tom and I did some last-minute science and tried to help set Chris Cassidy up for success. He was going to be all alone in the American module for a few weeks, just as Roman had been all alone in the Russian module after Kevin Ford’s crew left. We urged Chris to have dinner with his Russian crewmates, make an effort to socialize and allow himself to enjoy some downtime rather than work round the clock. That evening, Tom, Roman and I finally added our crew patch to the wall. It was number 35 in the long, colorful row, which helped keep sentiment at bay: so many astronauts and cosmonauts before us, and so many yet to come.
At 9:00 GMT that last night, I was reviewing my Soyuz checklists when the “Space Oddity” video was posted on YouTube. I wasn’t thinking much about it beyond hoping that it went well for Evan. It had been his idea, his responsibility, his baby, and he was the only person who was nervous about it—a good indicator of ownership. All I’d done was sing, strum and press record. Before I went to bed I quickly checked online to see whether anyone had watched it yet. I was shocked. There had already been close to a million hits.
The very last day on the ISS was a bit like a travel day anywhere. Among other chores, I vacuumed my sleep station and cleared out the few remaining personal items, including my sleeping bag. The next crew would bring new ones; we take ours back with us in the orbital module, in case we have deorbit troubles and wind up having to spend a night or two on the Soyuz. If not, they’re jettisoned along with the module and burn up on re-entry. I took a few last photos, cleaned up the Japanese lab, worked a few experiments and reviewed the Soyuz checklists again to make sure I was refreshed.
But despite the flurry of activity I felt a need to steal time, to find a way to be alone in this incredible place, physically and mentally. When I was 7 years old and my family moved from Sarnia to our farm in Milton, I’d had the same impulse. I distinctly remember walking around our Flamingo Drive neighborhood for a last look, fully realizing that my time in that place, which had been a big part of my life and had helped form me, was now at an end. On the ISS I did the same thing. I deliberately went to the Cupola and spent some time trying to soak up the feeling of being there, to internalize what it felt like and what the world looked like from that vantage point. I felt not sad but respectful. I wanted to acknowledge the significance of the time I’d spent on the ISS, and everything it had meant to me.
Then the clock struck 3:30 and, like Cinderella, we were suddenly yanked out of one existence and thrust into another. We said hurried goodbyes to the other crew, tempted to linger with them in that remote place yet knowing we had to stick to the time line. Then we hustled into the Soyuz and closed the hatches. I would not be back in the ISS again, but that was all right. Earth is home to everyone I love.
Once in the Soyuz, the pace slowed abruptly. It was a dramatic shift, a bit like complete silence after listening to Beethoven’s Fifth at top volume. We have to do meticulous pressure checks before we trust our hatches, and it takes about two hours before the temperature settles—at first, the Soyuz is chilly—and we can be absolutely sure that we have a tight hermetic seal. The week prior, we’d brought the vehicle out of hibernation and checked the thrusters and motion control system. Since then, Roman had been packing—alone, as only cosmonauts are allowed to pack a Russian vehicle, and under considerable pressure. When Kevin Ford and his crew had returned to Earth, Kevin’s seat shock absorber had failed, so he’d experienced a higher g-load, and there was some concern that the issue might have been the way their Soyuz was packed. So Roman had to make sure ours was done just so, and it was.
The re-entry capsule was jammed with medical samples in cold packs and broken hardware that needed fixing—so full, in fact, that we’d had to leave personal belongings on the ISS in “wish to return to Earth” bags. I’d sent a few things back in March, but there were items I’d still needed on board—a favorite shirt, the “recording in session” sign from my sleep station—and now I had to leave them behind and hope they wouldn’t remain on orbit permanently. Someday there might be space for them in another vehicle.
One thing I wasn’t going to leave behind was my Maple Leafs shirt. After a very long dry spell, the team had qualified for the Stanley Cup play-offs, and tonight was the seventh game of the Eastern Conference quarter-final series. I’d been following it avidly, albeit belatedly, on Station; while running and cycling, I’d watch day-old games the CSA and NASA sent me via data uplink. Leafs fans are stubbornly, some might say irrationally, loyal, not the sort of people who care that they’re not supposed to wear team jerseys under their spacesuits. It was May 13, the Leafs were playing the most important game of the season so far—what other choice did I have? I put my shirt on over my long underwear and settled into the left seat. It felt good to be in my spot again in this sturdy little rocket ship.
I was no longer in charge. Roman, our Commander Soyuza, was, and he’d flown home in a Soyuz before. Tom and I hadn’t, and we also hadn’t been in the vehicle for five months, so during the pressure checks we reviewed all the things that could kill us next, talking through what we’d do if the undocking hardware didn’t work, for example, and which page we’d turn to if we didn’t accelerate properly during the deorbit burn. Roman is a confident, genial leader, and he ran us through the procedures and checks efficiently. Then we started getting into our Sokhols.
They were noticeably more snug. Without the pressure of gravity, the cartilage between the vertebrae in your spine expands and your body lengthens; this was taken into account when our suits were fabricated, but nevertheless, it was surprising to discover at the age of 53 that I’d grown an inch or two. It took each of us about 15 minutes to find a way to scrunch down into our suits, and afterward we closed off the orbital module that had given us a modicum of living space five months earlier, on our way to the ISS. Unless something went wrong and we got stuck in space an extra day, we wouldn’t need it; descent only takes three and a half hours. The module was now full of garbage, ready to be jettisoned.
Finally, when we were well cocooned and strapped firmly into our seats with our knees wedged up against our chests, I pushed the command to undock from the ISS. We were on our way.
Undocking is a peaceful contrast to the fiery pageantry of launch. It takes about three minutes for the giant hooks and catches to release. Our Soyuz is a small barnacle clinging to a massive ship, but gradually little springs push us away and we drift off as our friends watch from the windows of the ISS, waving farewell.
We travel slowly at first, just 4 inches a second, but after three minutes, we fire our engines for 15 seconds and start to pick up speed. Then we coast, relying on orbital mechanics to take us well clear of the Station. We need to get a safe distance from the ISS before lighting our engines again, or the exhaust and spatterings of waste fuel would batter her big solar arrays, in the same way a windstorm batters a ship’s sails.
This puts us on a slightly different trajectory than the ISS as we orbit the Earth. Moscow calculates all the new data, such as our deorbit burn time, and we pencil it onto our checklists. It’s calm now, but I take anti-nausea meds. I know tranquility is only temporary.
After about two and a half hours it’s time: we turn the ship tail-first and set up for deorbit burn, firing the engines for 4 minutes and 20 seconds. There’s a critical moment during the burn when there’s no turning back—you’ve decelerated so much that you’re committed to falling into the atmosphere. We passed this point and felt the vehicle pushing on our backs, like a solid hand. The sensation is that you’re accelerating in the other direction, but actually you’re slowing down.
What follows is a wild 54-minute tumble to Earth that feels more or less like 15 explosions followed by a car crash. The Soyuz’s trajectory changes from a circle to an ellipse, and when we hurtle down to the low point we begin brushing into the upper atmosphere, where the denser air instantly starts slowing us. It’s like sticking your hand out a car window when you’re flying down the highway, and feeling the drag of the wind. Then, 28 minutes after firing the engines, the explosive bolts blast open, lobbing the orbital and propulsion modules away to burn up. I think of Yuri, Peggy and So-Yeon, and hope our Soyuz did its job. The loud staccato bangs as the bolts exploded had sounded right, and I saw the fabric that covers the vehicle flash by the window. Then the drag of the air starts to stabilize us and I know we’re good. We still have some roll, but there’s no way a reluctant module is still hanging onto our capsule.
It’s getting hotter and more humid, despite the tough protective hide of the ablative shield. Looking out, I see orange-yellow flames and a stream of high-speed sparks pouring off the vehicle, and hear a series of bangs. Either there’s a flaw in the shield or some trapped moisture, or we’ve got a real problem. I don’t say anything, because what is there to say? If the shield fails, we’re dead. We are a fiery bullet slicing through space, coming into sunrise.
Two minutes later, at 400,000 feet, the air gets perceptibly thicker. The temperature inside the capsule is still climbing, and my Maple Leafs shirt is drenched with sweat. Now there’s even more drag and a rude welcome back to gravity, which squashes us back in our seats. The g-force builds rapidly to 3.8 times Earth weight, which is crushing compared to the weightlessness we’ve enjoyed for the past five months. I can feel the heaviness of the skin on my face as it’s mashed back toward my ears. I take little cheater breaths; my lungs don’t want to fight gravity. My arms seem to weigh a ton, and suddenly it’s a strain to lift one even a few inches to flick a switch on the control panel. Going from weightlessness to max g and then back to the 1 g experienced on Earth only takes 10 minutes, but it’s a long 10 minutes.
Once we’ve slowed significantly—picture a rock sinking in a deep pond—our drogue chute opens to cut our rate of descent. At 17,000 feet, the main chute opens and we’re laughing, yelling, “Yeehaw!” The Soyuz is spinning and whipping around crazily, rattling and twisting too quickly, even, to make us sick. Then suddenly, bam! We’re stabilized, hanging tautly under the parachute. We jettison the thermal shield that ensured we didn’t burn up when we re-entered the atmosphere; our windows were blacked over from the heat, but now an extra layer of covering peels off and we can see the blue morning sky. All remaining fuel has already been vented to ensure we don’t burst into flames when we hit the ground.
We try to catch our breath, weak after the multi-axis disorienting tumble, the wildest of amusement park rides. To complete the effect, our seats suddenly slam upward, rising automatically to the top level of their shock absorbers to cushion us from the brunt of what’s about to happen. The crush of acceleration helps us tighten our straps. We know the moment of impact will be bad; the seats’ liners were custom-built to mold to our bodies so that our backs don’t break. Just before impact no one says anything, not even Roman, who’s been narrating our descent as he is supposed to, talking a mile a minute the whole way down, telling the ground what’s going on. We’re all clenching our teeth, lightly, so we don’t bite through our tongues.
Our little gamma-ray altimeter waits for an echo from the ground, and then, two seconds before impact, sends a command to fire our optimistically named Soft Landing Rockets—gunpowder charges that cut our descent rate to 5 feet per second. They turn a horrific car crash into a survivable one: we hit the hard ground of Kazakhstan, a ton of steel, titanium and human flesh. It’s windy on the steppe, so our chute drags us over onto our side like a chopped tree, and we roll end over end a few times until Roman flicks a switch to cut the parachute lines, and we … stop. The Soyuz rests on its side. I’m upside down, hanging heavily in my straps from the ceiling, stunned, shaken, stirred.
A normal landing, right on target: we hear the drone of the search and rescue helicopters. We inhale the burnt, acrid smell of our spaceship. Tom points to the window: where moments before there had been space, now there is pale brown, powdery dirt. We hear a jabber of voices—the Russian ground crew.
We’re back on Earth, at last.
Next thing you know the hatch is being pried open and there’s blue sky, bright sunshine, the smell of fresh air and living things, a commotion of voices. Arms reach in to lift Roman out of the capsule. Someone else digs out the samples and science, the things that need to be put in a freezer or on a plane right away. Tom is carried out next, then it’s my turn. I was NASA’s rep at several landings, so the ground crew knows me, and the guy who lifts me out says, in Russian, “Chris, the clip is magnificent, it made us proud.” He’s talking about “Space Oddity,” I realize, and he means he’s proud of this business we’re both in. It’s a nice way to be welcomed back when you’ve fallen from the sky.
I’m pale and blinking after months without sunlight, and so weak and rubber-limbed that I need to be carried over and propped up in a canvas chair beside Tom and Roman, who is already joking with the medical staff and looking great, like he’s ready to play a round of golf. I am not. Doctors and nurses are wiping the dirt off my forehead; I accidentally touched the charred edge of the Soyuz while getting out and then touched my face, so I look as though I’ve been smeared with charcoal. They’re asking if I’m all right, tenderly, and covering me with a blanket. NASA and CSA officials, local dignitaries and Russian soldiers are buzzing around. It’s overwhelming, after being with no more than five other human beings for the past five months, to be surrounded by a crowd of well-wishers, especially after the physical excesses of crashing down to Earth.
My helmet comes off and someone hands me a satellite phone. Helene. A few reporters press forward for the photo op: E.T. calls home. I hear my wife’s voice, sure and clear, relieved and happy. I tell her I love her, then ask the question: Did the Leafs win the game? No, she tells me, they’re out of the play-offs. They’d gone down in flames, just like me.
I’m smiling, doing my best to impersonate a person who doesn’t feel disoriented and sick. But my arms feel so heavy I can barely lift them, and I stay motionless, to reduce exertion. Every part of my body feels sore or shocked, or both. It’s like being a newborn, this sudden sensory overload of noise, color, smells and gravity after months of quietly floating, encased in relative calm and isolation. No wonder babies cry in protest when they’re born.
After sitting still for 15 minutes, and handing over my personal belongings to a support person who will make sure they don’t mysteriously disappear (anything that’s flown in space is a collector’s item), I’m carried, chair and all, into a hastily erected medical tent to be transferred to a cot. By this point I’m retching, feeling just terrible. Medical staff clean me up, help me out of my Sokhol and my Leafs shirt, now soaked with sweat, and into my regular blue flight suit, then put in an IV to give me more fluids so I don’t faint.
Next, along with Roman and Tom, I’m loaded into an armored vehicle, a long, low-ceilinged thing that reeks of diesel fumes, to be carted a few hundred yards to a helicopter. Not a peak experience when you’re nauseated. We each get our own MI8, a Russian military transport helicopter with a bed, nurse, support person and doctor. I’m most interested in the bed. I’m dazed, and every time I move my head I feel like I’m spinning through space and time. I fall asleep almost immediately.
Landing at the airport in Karaganda about an hour later, I’m at least refreshed and strong enough to sign the vehicle’s door (one astronaut or cosmonaut did it once, a spur-of-the-moment impulse that was instantly institutionalized as a must-do—and it is kind of cool to add your own signature to those of colleagues you know personally or by reputation). Tom, Roman and I are helped into a car and whisked off to a ceremony where a local VIP presents each of us with a purple robe and black hat that look a bit like something Merlin might wear, and a two-stringed gourd-shaped guitar. Young Kazakh women in formal dress provide standard offerings for travelers: salt, bread and water.
Then there’s a press conference and the first question is, “Did you know that ‘Space Oddity’ has had seven million hits?” I didn’t, actually. The number sounds unbelievable and I’m really feeling sick now, but need to explain that Expedition 34/35 was not about a music video. Rather, the purpose of the music video was to make the rare and beautiful experience of space flight more accessible. I babble something in Russian about the importance of having human beings in space, not robots, then some merciful person trundles me off to the bathroom, where I can be sick without worrying about bad press.
Later, we’re driven back to the airport’s taxiway, where Roman gets on a plane to Russia, and Tom and I board a NASA G3, a small jet with two beds in the back and room for 10 passengers. Farewells are bleary and to the point, not sentimental. We don’t have it in us. We’re all ready to sink into the oblivion of sleep. It takes about 20 hours to return to Houston, and between naps, medical staff monitor our vital signs and clamor for more blood and urine samples; NASA is trying to get as much data as possible on the physiological impact of long duration space flight. While the jet refuels in Prestwick, I have a shower, sitting on a chair. It feels amazing to wash my hair, to be clean all over for the first time in nearly half a year.
When I get off the plane in Houston, bone-tired and not yet steady on my feet, a small group is there to greet me. I kiss Helene, hold her for a moment. Being able to talk to her without a two-second delay, as we had on the ISS phone, feels like both a decadent luxury and a familiar comfort. Family and friends have come, people I know and like and have thought of over the past five months, and I take a bit of time with each of them. It’s both pleasant and slightly stiff, like a receiving line at a wedding—a necessary ceremony marking a transition. Helene is watching, knowing I want to leave, so we go, straight to crew quarters.
It is 11:30 at night, which means, time to give 14 vials of blood then do a few sims and tests to assess our balance and ability to concentrate! Tom and I had always known we’d have to do this and also knew it was important, but of course, given the hour and how we were feeling, we felt a little grumpy about it, especially when we realized we were bombing the tests.
There was a hand-eye coordination test, similar to one I’d done 21 years earlier in Ottawa during astronaut selection: alternately using your left hand, then your right, then both, you stick pegs into a row of holes on a peg board, being evaluated for speed and accuracy. It’s like a cribbage drag race. I was clumsy after zero gravity, and had trouble grabbing just a single peg from the shallow bin without sending the rest of them flying to the ground. Then there was a computer test, where you had to try to keep a cursor inside a circle that was moving all over the screen, while simultaneously typing in numbers that showed up on another screen. The worst, though, was the motion simulator. You sit in a small round cockpit mounted on a tilting platform, responding to computer images that simulate flying a NASA T-38, driving a race car on a winding mountain track and maneuvering a bulbous rover on Mars. Even pre-flight, the visuals were provocative, but now the experience was truly sickening.
I don’t think I’ve ever been as happy to go to bed as I was that night. After months of being able to somersault effortlessly through the air, I could barely hold my head up. Bed was about all I could handle.
But I was happy that evening for another reason: I felt we’d succeeded at something difficult. Expedition 34/35 had been a success scientifically, and social media had made it an educational success, too. I knew I would never return to space; I’d finally achieved a goal I’d devoted most of my life to achieving. I didn’t feel sad about that. I felt elated: I’d done it! And I knew there was more to do, even if, at that moment, I wasn’t quite sure what, exactly. But if seeing 16 sunrises a day and all of Earth’s variety steadily on display for five months had taught me anything, it was that there are always more challenges and opportunities out there than time to experience them.
Yes, we bashed into the ground pretty hard in Kazakhstan. But I didn’t view it as the end of something. Rather, I saw it as a new beginning. And in that sense, at least, it was a soft landing.