18.

Houston, 5 November 2013

I stop for a coffee at Starbucks on NASA Road 1: four lanes in each direction, becoming six at the junction, and a central reservation studded with palms.

Along the roadside, a series of low buildings with drab windows, and in front of those, small car parks. Small for Texas, that is. There’s a drive-through, but as always the queue inside is shorter. I get back in the car with a take-away coffee containing as much caffeine as five espressos, I think to myself. I need it, since I’m jetlagged and scheduled for many hours of Prep and Post. Today we’re going to simulate a day of EVA without the EVA itself.

From NASA Road 1, I turn into Saturn Lane and from there I take it right towards the main gate of the Johnson Space Center. I’ve been coming here for more than two years, but I’ve been in only a fraction of the many buildings spread across its 1,600 acres. They hold offices, laboratories, simulators, a clinic and many other things, both ordinary and extraordinary. In Building 31N, for example, the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility houses 400 kilograms of lunar rocks, which were brought back to Earth by the Apollo astronauts. Mission Control Center, or MCC, is in Building 30. This is where flight controllers held their breath until they heard the historic sentence ‘Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.’

I park near the now familiar Building 9, a tall hangar, 200 metres long, with yellow tracks for the overhead crane running along its walls. Everyone calls it simply Building 9, but the correct name is Space Vehicle Mockup Facility. On the eastern side, full-scale mock-ups replicate the entire length of the ISS. You can go from the Russian Service Module, barely outlined, all the way to Node 2 at the other end, which is faithfully reproduced along with all the other NASA modules. I head for the Airlock and join the small group already gathered round a big table at the foot of the raised access platform that runs along the mock-ups.

It’s been a few months since my last Prep and Post. Butch was in the suit then, and I took part as the IV, or Intra-Vehicular, the person who sees to all the operations related to the suit and Airlock before and after the EVA. Maybe one reason so many people want to do the spacewalk is that the alternative is to do the IV. The procedures are complicated, and you literally hold your colleagues’ lives in your hand. Risking your own causes a lot less anxiety.

As usual, Regan has brought a big box of chocolate-chip cookies. To put it simply, I can say that I’ve learned everything I know about the EMU suit from him. It’s been two years since my first classes, and by some strange coincidence he’s still the instructor. At the time, he was in charge of my training as a reserve astronaut, and now he’s been assigned to the EVA team for our crew, along with Alex and Faruq. Whenever I’m in Houston, we have regular lessons together here in Building 9, where, besides the Airlock, there’s also a worn-out EMU suit which proves useful for maintenance demonstrations. Sometimes we meet upstairs in the Virtual Reality Lab to practise the flight with the SAFER rescue jet pack. And we often spend a few hours in a freezing cold, windowless room with a large schematics on the wall showing the suit’s life support system, a complex collection of pipes, valves, reservoirs, pumps, fans, regulators, sensors and many other components that make the EMU a small, wearable spaceship. In that small room, Regan is at the controls of a simulation programme, which he can configure with all kinds of virtual suit malfunctions. For my part, I work on a DCM, the only part of the suit that’s physically present: the Display and Control Module, an electronic box that’s usually attached to the chest of the EMU, fitted with switches and a small LCD display to monitor the telemetry and send commands.

Armed with a cuff checklist – forty small stiff pages, spiral-bound and worn on the forearm by astronauts in EVA so that information is within easy reach – I practise correctly diagnosing the malfunctions and following the proper recovery procedures, keeping in mind the mantra I learned during my pilot’s training: ‘Maintain aircraft control, analyse the situation, take appropriate action’, in that precise order. It’s little consolation if you manage to handle a failure, only to smash into a mountain or use up your fuel flying in the wrong direction. Yes, a spacewalk is more forgiving, since there is no risk of crashing or colliding with an obstacle, but there are always errors waiting to happen, ones that can aggravate a given situation. A simple tether snag, for example, is enough to make you lose precious time when you need to get back to the Airlock in a hurry. That’s why we also train in the pool for suit malfunctions, even though the water suit doesn’t have a working DCM. Every so often, as we work, an alarm goes off in the headphones, and Regan’s voice announces the problem we have to resolve. In addition to the usual ones – like loss of pressure in the suit, excessive amounts of carbon dioxide or suspect voltage – there’s a new one: water in the helmet.

I grab a cookie and head for the dressing room with Terry, where we’ll put on the undergarments and the cooling unitard, or LCVG. The first three hours of today’s Prep and Post have flown by, between introductory briefings and Airlock configurations. The moment has now come to put on our suits and practise the ISLE procedure. Pronounced like the English word, the acronym stands for In-Suit Light Exercise, the pre-breathe protocol normally used on the Space Station in the American Airlock. Though it’s a lot longer and more complicated than the Orlan equivalent, because the lower operating pressure in the EMU carries with it a higher risk of decompression sickness, the ISLE established itself as the standard NASA method, replacing the protocols more often used in the past, which required you to pedal on a stationary bike or to spend the night in the Airlock at reduced pressure. To allow enough nitrogen to be released from the tissues, the ISLE has you breathe pure oxygen through a mask for at least an hour, while performing normal activities. This is followed by a partial depressurization of the Airlock down to 10.2 psi, or around two-thirds of normal atmospheric pressure, before you take off the mask, put on the EMU suit, fill it with pure oxygen and carry out fifty minutes of light exercise. The exact meaning of ‘light’ is what Terry and I are learning today. We’re instructed to perform slow, measured movements with our arms and legs, as these serve to raise our metabolic rate a little and accelerate the release of nitrogen from the tissues as needed. But we mustn’t get too tired, since during a real EVA we’d have to perform hours of exhausting work outside the ISS.

A real EVA. I want one so badly! I’d love to find myself in this situation in orbit, sealed in the suit, attached to one wall of the Airlock with Terry across from me, watching one another as we engage in a bumbling, slow-motion ballet. Today, the medical staff are monitoring our metabolic rates and they tell us to move with greater or lesser energy so that we stay within the expected limits. In orbit, we’d be trusting our muscle memory. In orbit …

I know very well that there’s little likelihood of me making a spacewalk. At this moment, two EVAs are provisionally planned for Expedition 42, and if they are confirmed, Butch and Terry will carry out both of them. That’s how it should be. None of us has experience of EVAs in space, but my colleagues have many more hours of training in the pool and have demonstrated better skills. In addition, the two EVAs are actually a single activity divided into two sorties, so it’s entirely reasonable that they should perform both. And that’s to say nothing of the fact that I need a size M suit, or rather torso. Right now, all the suits currently configured with the life support system are size L or XL, and no astronaut will need a smaller one until I get there. It’s an added complication, because swapping the torso on a suit takes time, and on the ISS crew time is the resource in shortest supply.

I can’t help hoping all the same. If I weren’t hopeful, how could I continue preparing with the necessary dedication? Of all the training, working in the suit is the only part I find really difficult, so I need to feel motivated in order to give it my best – out of self-respect, if nothing else. And because, to put it simply, it’s my job. It’s essential that I’m able to perform an EVA on the Space Station, at the very least to provide the necessary redundancy, in case Butch or Terry had a medical issue, for example. Many of the critical components of the ISS are found on the outside, so the ability to perform a contingency spacewalk in the EMU should be maintained at all times.

And then, who knows? There’s always a chance. And although no one is ever entitled to an opportunity, opportunities are reserved for those who are prepared. Perhaps a third EVA will be added to the plan for our expedition. In which case, Butch and Terry will have acquired a lot of experience … and one of them might be allowed to go out with a less experienced colleague.

—

Alongside the NBL runs and the Prep and Post classes there was an occasional class in Building 9 with high-fidelity hardware, much closer to the equipment actually used in orbit than the pool mock-ups. Sometimes we trained in the POGO system: suspended in mid-air from a harness, we could experience the difficulty of maintaining a stable position without the ‘unfair’ aid of water resistance. Working with the PGT at high torque settings, for example, required a solid grip on a handhold, so you wouldn’t start turning around as soon as you hit the hard stop. I enjoyed the all-round preparation, and it seemed like my efforts were slowly bearing fruit. Another good piece of news: the prototype for my tailor-made gloves was ready for testing. After a long wait, I was about to have gloves that were perfectly fitted to my hands.

Besides our EVA training, there was a wide variety of activities to see to in Houston, ranging from official photos taken as individuals and as a crew to simulations of water samples collection for periodic microbiological and chemical analyses. In Building 9, sometimes we discussed daily life on board, what the crew quarters are like, for example, and where to plug in the vacuum; other times we’d simulate serious malfunctions such as the failure of a C&C MDM, one of three top-tier computers in the ISS command and control hierarchy.

On 7 November, Terry and I received an email from Baikonur with a peculiar subject line: ‘Woooohoooo’. During the night, Soyuz TMA-11M had lifted off, and Reid had at that moment become the prime crew flight engineer. He wrote jokingly, ‘We now humbly hand over to you the title of back-up crew.’ Just six months later, in Star City, we would pluck from the table an envelope containing the scenario for our final exam as back-ups, and a few weeks after that, in Baikonur, we would leave Building 254 of the cosmodrome, one step behind Reid, Maksim and Alex as they headed for the bus that would take them to the launchpad, with family and friends shouting their final goodbyes. I was close enough to resonate with their emotions, but far enough away that I didn’t feel the burden of responsibility, and I was possibly more moved at that point than when it was my turn to get on the bus.

The vast clockwork carrying me towards Baikonur was beginning to pick up speed, and the little army of people I regularly interacted with regarding Expedition 42/43 was growing ever larger. Brigitte was now officially my flight surgeon, and I appreciated her holistic approach to health issues. Deihiem, the ESA biomedical engineer assigned to the mission, would work closely with her. Biomedical engineers have a console position from which they can follow operations on the ISS in real time, attending to aspects that may not be strictly medical but nevertheless impact an astronaut’s health, from air quality to sports activities to the daily workload. Alex, the ESA mission director, gave me regular updates on the mission content, often driven by changes in the launch plans for cargo vehicles scheduled to deliver new experiments or spare parts.

For some time now, whenever I was in Houston, I’d been receiving emails from Alonzo, who was responsible for making sure that Terry and I took all the many medical exams prescribed for the ISS crew. Alicia would put all our appointments on the schedule, but Alonzo always sent us a reminder, ensuring that we remembered any constraints, such as not drinking caffeine or eating, or anything regarding sleep or sports. Alonzo’s work was starting to overlap with Matt’s. Matt was the one responsible for the implementation of the human research programme, those experiments in which we astronauts act as guinea pigs, so to speak. In previous months, he had organized informed consent briefings for Terry and me, where the principal investigators had presented the experiment protocols and explained any possible risks to us. Having secured our availability and confirmed personal preferences, Matt had created our experiment package and now had to ensure that we took part in all the pre-flight sessions. Called the BDC, or Baseline Data Collection, these provide researchers with baseline values to compare with the data collected during the mission, so they can quantify any changes that take place as a result of being in space. Though it was unlikely that I would have to jump in for Reid in May, it was not impossible, so my first BDC took place already that November, a year before the planned start of my mission. As I would do many times before, during and after my flight, I wore a couple of temperature sensors for thirty-six hours, including two nights. One was stuck to my forehead and the other to my sternum, and the aim was to record fluctuations due to the circadian rhythm. The little suitcase containing the hardware also held a sombre black bandana you could use to cover the large sensor on your forehead and, at least partially, the cables connecting the sensors to the data logging unit, which you could fix on your arm or around your waist. As these BDCs began, and with increased medical exams, life presented me with something new to deal with. There would be weeks when I would have to wake up half an hour early to collect saliva samples according to a strict and laborious protocol, and days when I would have to juggle my other duties while laden with refrigerated bags for the collection of urine or faeces. When Terry invited me to go to a baseball game with him and Anton a few months later, I would take along a letter from NASA and a phone number for the head of security in case I was stopped at the entrance by stadium staff suspicious of the cables emerging from under my bandana and my T-shirt.

Anton’s education and mine in American sports had already begun with a game featuring the Texans, Houston’s American football team. It was a mandatory cultural experience, as much about the ads on huge oversized screens as it was about the game, not to mention the elaborate dances by attractive cheerleaders and gigantic glasses of Coca-Cola watered down by industrial quantities of ice. I hardly understood a thing about the game, despite Terry’s dogged attempts to explain the rules. He relented when I assured him that, as a European, I also understood nothing about soccer. With this confession, my case could be filed away as hopeless without a second thought.

After Houston, early winter, cold and snowy, awaited me in Moscow, but first I would stop at EAC for a couple of weeks for a bit of office work and a few days of ATV training. With little more than a year to go before the launch, which had recently been moved forward to 24 November, I spent little time in Cologne now. I found myself checking the trip template to count the weeks when I’d be sleeping at home until launch: barely five. I was living my life out of a suitcase, and careening on tracks that led to the launchpad, where a rocket, bold and imposing, stood out in stark relief.