6.

At last I am settled in my function, no longer drifting into a faceless future … from now on my actions, one by one, will create the future.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras

Star City, 6 June 2011

I’ve never been afraid of getting old. The passage of time has always made me feel better about myself, and by nature I tend to look ahead, curious about what will be, rather than look back with nostalgia. It’s true that I don’t have the same boundless energy at thirty-four that I had as a girl, the inexhaustible energy that makes you feel like you could take over the world – with reserves left over to tackle a grizzly should you happen to meet one. But every now and then I have days like this, when I suddenly feel the impetuous force of a river overflowing its banks. It’s my first day back in Star City.

Last night at the airport, I was filled with joy when I saw Nikolai’s kind face. He took me to the Profilaktorium, and in the Russian way insisted on carrying my suitcases. The lady on duty at the entrance gave me an enthusiastic welcome, almost reproaching me for having been away for so long. I didn’t even stay at the Profilaktorium the last time, but I did go there almost every day to work online in the ESA office on the second floor. The office sits at the end of a hallway, behind a glass door covered in stickers bearing the logos of the Soyuz missions with European participation. Along the corridor hang official photos of all the crews with Europeans on board. André Kuipers is on the wall with the 2004 Delta mission, but he is also physically present right now, as the Dutch labels on various food packages on the shelves of the small communal kitchen suggest. In a few months, André will leave on his second mission.

I settled into one of the four comfortable rooms that ESA rents permanently, to host astronauts and temporary staff. There’s a bedroom with a double bed, and a day room with a sofa, a desk and a huge dresser in dark wood. Everything is a little old-fashioned, as in your grandparents’ house. This morning, Yuri Petrovich knocked on the door and greeted me with a big hug and the keys to the lock for my bike. Anna, who looks after the ESA office along with Yuri, returned my pass to me with an affectionate smile, and took my passport in order to complete the necessary paperwork to register me with the authorities. I got my bike out of storage and stood for a few minutes at the door, taking in the clean air and the idyllic view of the lake, with its white gazebo and the narrow wooden pedestrian bridge that leads into the forest on the other shore. A few minutes’ calm pedalling, and I reached the entrance to the technical zone. Star City was bright and warm, so different from the rainy grey of last autumn.

Even this morning’s lessons in the Soyuz simulator are different. We’re no longer sprinting ahead in some headlong, uninformed rush, just to get a taste of Soyuz operations, but we’re now building competence slowly and patiently. I’m curious to learn everything, and I mean everything, about the Soyuz. The first step is mastering the names of things. With Ruslan, a young instructor, I go over all the components crowded into the descent and orbital modules, the two volumes of the small spaceship accessible to the crew.

At the end of the morning, with all those names swimming around in my head and only loosely attached to the things they represent – at least to the few initiated in the world who are familiar with the Soyuz – I say goodbye to Ruslan and ride my bike to the cafeteria to have lunch with Luca. I haven’t seen him for months. As an assigned astronaut, his life is now ruled by what we call the trip template, an Excel sheet produced by schedulers from all the different space agencies and containing information on the movements of each crew member from the beginning of their training right up to the day of the launch. It resembles a colourful mosaic, with each square representing one week and various colours corresponding to training locations: light blue for the United States, yellow for Russia, green for Europe, purple for Japan and blue for Canada. Since there are only a few weeks of International Space Station training at EAC, Luca’s not spending much time in Europe.

We meet up again that evening, along with the other astronauts who have a yellow square right now on their trip template. I meet Luca’s crewmates: Chris Cassidy, whose mild manner hides his past as a Navy Seal and his being perhaps NASA’s best spacewalker, and Karen Nyberg, a woman of many talents with a PhD in engineering and a passion for running. This time, instead of going to Cottage 3, we meet outside near a small building that has a working banya, or Russian sauna. There’s a shashlyk outside, a traditional barbecue the Russians have adopted from the Caucasus. I speak little, simply enjoying the fact of being here in this place with these people. The pleasure I feel washes away what’s left of my restive mood of the past few months – and I’m like a swimmer just emerged from the water who towels off and is now enjoying the sun and the breeze drying off any remaining wet patches of skin.

The evening over, I make the short walk back on my own. It’s late, but at this latitude the summer days are long, and there’s still a soft light. At the Profilaktorium, Yuri Petrovich has left a box in my room containing all the Soyuz manuals and checklists I’ll be studying in the coming months. I pull them out and put them on a bookshelf, where they take up almost a metre of space.

It’s time to get down to work at last.

Be careful what you wish for – it might come true. Or so the saying goes. My eight weeks in Star City that summer turned out to be interesting and fulfilling, but also extremely intense. My course was very compressed and designed so as not to conflict with the normal crew rotation. Within two weeks all the other astronauts had left, so there were no more suppers together in Cottage 3. I attended theoretical and practical lessons anywhere from six to eight hours a day and studied till late. Maybe I studied too much. I was pleased with the praise I received after my exams, but I was aware that not everything I was learning had a direct application on the actual operations of the Soyuz. It’s well known that the Russians favour an extremely thorough theoretical preparation, which doesn’t always correspond to the practical demands made on operators or the crew. But I didn’t mind; on the contrary. My training had barely started, so I was full of energy, and the engineer in me was pleased to gain comprehensive knowledge of the systems, even about hidden aspects of the machine, ones I’d never have to use during a flight. In any case, it’s always harder to learn something you’ve overlooked than it is to forget what you don’t need. My in-depth studying would prove to be an ideal investment when I began the simulator sessions with my fellow crew members a couple of years later.

The exams were a very serious matter. For the more complex ones on the guidance, navigation and control system, the classroom was always teeming with instructors who seemed to be competing with one another to ask the most difficult and convoluted questions. I’d answer from the teacher’s desk in a scene almost embarrassingly reminiscent of school, and after a period that could vary from half an hour to two hours, depending on the complexity of the subject, I’d be asked to wait for a few minutes in the corridor while my score – on a scale of one to five – was decided.

There was a lot to study, and the only distraction I allowed myself was a daily run along the paths that criss-crossed the forest and around the small lakes in the vicinity. As I wrote to a friend at the time: ‘I feel like I’m on a spiritual retreat: just me, the manuals and the birch trees.’

These were peaceful days, full of satisfaction for someone who was building her dream, brick by brick.