11.

… but if something is revealed to me this evening, it will be because I have laboured to carry my stones to the invisible place of construction. I am making ready for a celebration. I shall have no right to speak of any sudden apparition in me of any other but me, for I am building that other.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras

Montreal, 13 May 2012

I’ve been in Montreal for a week, renting an apartment in the charming Plateau Mont-Royal quarter. I haven’t gone anywhere besides work, with the exception of brief strolls in the neighbourhood. I’ve really loved exploring the quaint tree-lined alleyways and terraced houses, each with an external staircase leading to a separate entrance on the first floor. Straight or curved, plain or fancy, all these metal staircases with open steps evoke a liveliness that corresponds perfectly with the colourful energy of this quarter.

After an early morning walk, I make my way each day to the Canadian Space Agency’s facilities for training on the SSRMS, the huge robotic arm on the ISS. It’s a two-week course, with thorough theoretical lessons on engineering aspects alternating with practical sessions at the simulator. The simulator is fitted with a robotic workstation identical to those on board: there are two hand controllers, which I already know well thanks to the course I took in Cologne during my basic training; a computer and a control panel for configuring the system and sending commands; and three monitors showing images from the video cameras. There’s no real robotic arm, but the simulation software shows the exact images we’d see if we were at the controls of the SSRMS in orbit. On a table beside the workstation is a large and very detailed 3D-printed model of the ISS. I found it an object of great beauty, and any model-builder would go crazy for it, but above all it’s a visual aid to prepare you for the mental gymnastics to follow: predicting how the movement of the arm will look from different viewpoints, identifying the best combination of video cameras, mentally reversing their images, deciding how to deflect the hand controllers in order to achieve a particular movement based on the selected coordinate system, visualizing how the configuration of the robotic arm changes during this movement … These are some of the tasks that keep your brain well occupied when you’re in command of the SSRMS.

The robotic arm has no hand. In its place, or rather at both extremities, are two identical end effectors, both of them shaped like squat cylinders. With one of them the SSRMS is attached to the Space Station structure; with the other, it can grapple any object that is equipped with a grapple fixture. The object could be a large spare unit for the external machinery of the Space Station that needed to be relocated, or even an entire module, such as the Columbus, which was removed from the Space Shuttle cargo bay at the time of installation, and joined up with the rest of the ISS. Or it could be a cargo vehicle that had come to resupply the Space Station and needed to be ‘captured’ – so to speak – while it was holding position at a distance of 10 metres: the so-called Track and Capture.

For a few years now the SSRMS has been used to capture the Japanese HTV vehicle, and it will shortly start capturing the American Dragon and Cygnus vehicles too. As of next week I’ll begin training for Track and Capture. It won’t all be new to me, since the visual cues for aligning the end effector with the grapple fixture are exactly the same as those I’ve been using since my basic training. The difference is that with Track and Capture, the target is moving.

—

It was really lucky that my introductory course on the SSRMS, the only two weeks of training that take place in Canada, were scheduled for May, when the weather is mild and conditions are fairly pleasant overall. David, who was doing part of the course with me, took me to his family chalet set on a beautiful lake. I hadn’t seen Andrey, a Russian friend who’d emigrated to Canada, since university in Moscow, and now I could go for a walk with him and his young family in the botanical gardens. And the instructors at the Canadian Space Agency invited me to a small gathering at one of their houses after work. I can still remember all the happy kids – at least twenty of them – in the garden, jumping on a huge trampoline. All this would have been impossible during Montreal’s long, snowy winter. The course had been interesting, and I was leaving with a high score in the final exams, which boded well for the next six weeks of robotic training in Houston.

In terms of EVA, there’d been an unexpected development. Since I’d been assigned to a mission, I was now at the top of the priority list for custom-made gloves, and they’d immediately scheduled a morning for measuring and taking a mould of my hands. It would take a year to get the first prototype and overall a couple of years to have the final pair to use underwater, but I could already taste the joy of putting them on.

In the meantime, I’d finished the introductory cycle of four sessions in the pool, including the first one lasting six full hours. Well aware that my size put me at a disadvantage, I prepared for every run with maniacal attention to detail. By this time, Cady was used to seeing me at her kitchen table at odd hours, watching videos of my underwater work so I could find ways to improve. And before every pool run, I’d scuba-dive in the NBL to inspect the translation paths and the worksites, trying to memorize the position of obstacles and no-touch zones. It was easy to see them through a diver’s mask, but just as easy to miss them in the suit, with the helmet’s restricted field of view.

When I’d taken the ‘1G’, the lesson that takes place before every run in the pool and in which the instructors point out the features and oddities of the components with which you’ll be working, I spent my evenings and weekends writing and rewriting the procedures, trying to streamline the sequence of operations, the configuration of the tools or the ‘tether plan’ to avoid crossing or tangling the safety tethers. When I’d finalized the procedures, I performed meticulous ‘chair flying’, a technique borrowed from the piloting world, and involving a vivid and detailed visualization of a complex activity in its entirety or at its most critical phases. Of course, I wasn’t preparing for flying sorties, as I once was, but this was the same concept: mentally training yourself to complete a series of operations planned in advance.

Since I wasn’t part of a class of astronauts taking the course together, I usually found myself paired with veteran astronauts. Two of them actually offered to partner me and acted as informal instructors: Peggy Whitson, then chief of the Astronaut Office, and Sunita – called Suni – Williams, who was preparing for an imminent launch. I was amazed that such busy spacewalk veterans would take the time to train with me in the pool.

The introductory cycle was finished, and now the EVA Skills Course began: four more runs in the suit, to be followed by a qualifying exam. My days at the NBL began early. At around six, I’d pick up a couple of boxes of fresh kolaches, pastries of Czech origin which are very popular in Texas, and a couple of litres of coffee from the local Starbucks. It was tradition to leave it all in the NBL control room as a courtesy for the divers and the rest of the staff. I was usually already on the pool deck by 6:30, configuring the modular mini-workstation and the toolbags. After six hours underwater and a quick shower, I’d return to the control room for a debrief, going over things with the instructors, analysing, commenting and paying particular attention to areas for improvement.

After a day in the pool I usually went to bed early, exhausted, and the next day I’d feel an ache in muscles I never knew I had. My chin was often swollen, and it stuck out, probably because it rubbed against the neck ring of the suit. It didn’t hurt, but for several days I had the characteristic profile of a fairy-tale witch. Even today, if I look carefully, it seems there’s a certain asymmetry to my chin, as if the swelling on one side never entirely went down. Yet there was a great sense of satisfaction. Every training session at the NBL was a small peak to scale, and reaching the end of an expedition was always fulfilling. It felt like all my hard work was paying off, since I was getting moderately positive feedback. Of course, no one thought I’d become a star with EVAs, just as I’d never become a basketball or volleyball champion. But I didn’t expect to encounter any problems with completing the course or obtaining the qualification. Alas, future events were to prove me wrong.

Alongside EVA and robotics, there were still dozens of courses to take on the ISS systems – less difficult, it’s true, but they nevertheless filled my days and the frequent exams required some preparation. So I had very little time for social life or recreation, to the point where David probably lost track of how many times I turned down invitations to go sailing with him.

I left for Europe at the end of June, relieved to escape Houston’s hellishly hot summer, as well as the freezing cold air-conditioned interiors, which forced me to wear fleeces and jumpers even in high summer. At the ASI headquarters in Rome, however, where the public announcement of my assignment took place in early July, I reached the conclusion that too much air-conditioning is still preferable to none. I took a few days’ holiday in the Alps and made a brief visit to Col-CC to meet the flight control team assigned to my ISS expedition. Soon afterwards, I began training again, moving from Cologne to Japan, then heading east to the US once more, and finally returning to Europe several weeks later.

‘Slow orbit’: that’s what astronauts call this round-the-world tour. I would make it more than once during my years as an apprentice astronaut.