23.

∆v = change of the rocket’s velocity

v_e = effective exhaust velocity

m_i = initial mass

m_f = final mass

K. Tsiolkovsky, ideal rocket equation, 1897

Star City, 15 May 2014

The meeting spot is outside, on a little road that cuts through the woods, in front of an unassuming old building. When Alex and I arrive with Yuri Petrovich, a small group has already gathered, and others arrive in dribs and drabs: men in jackets and ties, women in elegant dresses, a few little girls. Several have brought large bouquets. They might seem like guests at a wedding if it weren’t for the fact that some of them are wearing the typical Star City khaki-coloured work uniforms. Looking carefully, I notice that many of the men have medals and honours pinned to their chests – the younger ones only one or two compared with all those worn by the older men, who are probably retired cosmonauts. The man with the most medals is Alexey Leonov, and he’s unmissable even behind his dark glasses. He’s a legend: in 1965 he made the first spacewalk in history, spending twelve minutes outside the Voskhod 2.

After fifteen minutes of greetings, hugs and small talk, the crowd moves inside for the breakfast ritual. Yuri Lonchakov, head of the cosmonaut training centre, quickly leads us in a series of mandatory toasts, ceding the floor in turn to representatives from various agencies and administrations, and other notable guests. Alongside the well wishes for the prime crew, there’s a recurring toast addressed to us, the back-up crew: to be careful never to drop our guard. Of course not. God forbid! When it’s Suni’s turn to make a toast, she speaks from the heart. After reminiscing about all the time she has spent in Star City over the years, from back when she was a wide-eyed young astronaut, she recognizes how many of those present are now not only friends, but old friends. ‘This is a fantastic place to grow old together!’ she concludes emotionally. Tri, chetyre … hurrah, hurrah, hurrah!

After some twenty toasts, we are as usual invited to take our seats for a moment. If we didn’t do so, there could be dismal consequences as we set out on our journey, according to the now familiar Russian superstition. Besides, this isn’t an everyday journey: we’re about to depart for the legendary Baikonur. Outside in the street, Terry, Anton and I walk behind Reid, Alex and Maksim, taking up our post for the next two weeks: faithfully following the prime crew. After the final group photo, with a monument of Lenin in the background, we’re directed towards a waiting bus. There’s a small crowd, some pushing, and Reid pauses for a moment to give his children one last hug, and then we’re all inside, the door closes, and a short time later the bar is lowered behind us over one of the lateral access roads to Star City.

Two Tu-134 planes are waiting for us near the Chkalovsky airbase. Two, because we’re not allowed to fly on the same aeroplane with the prime crew. Terry, Anton and I board the second one and we follow the prime crew fifteen minutes later. We make ourselves comfortable in the forward part of the cabin, a kind of first-class area with large armchairs arranged as in a living room. In line with tradition, and just like everyone else, I didn’t eat anything at the farewell breakfast, so I hope we’ll be having some food soon. I’m also curious: there are legends of a lavish meal being served during the three-hour flight to Baikonur. Many believe they load the breakfast buffet onto the planes, but probably it’s only a way of answering the age-old question of what happens to all that untouched food after the crews depart. In any case, I wait patiently for the expected delicacies. At the back of the aircraft there are a couple dozen specialists from Star City in rows of seats configured as they are on a commercial airliner. These are the instructors, drivers, doctors, trainers and interpreters who will be spending our quarantine with us, the so-called operational group, or rather half of them, since the others are on the first aeroplane. They’ve already taken out vast quantities of drinks, fruit, cold cuts and preserved vegetables, but we politely refuse their invitations, since we are naturally waiting for a handsome banquet. From the pantry comes the sound of plates, and Anton reassures us that the flight assistant must be finishing her preparations. Anton should know: he’s made this journey twice for his previous mission. But I think I can spot the Volga in the distance, a sign that we’re about to leave Russia behind – and the promised feast has yet to arrive. A quick investigation reveals that our trip has begun with a minor catering problem. Could it be that someone failed to sit down at the departure breakfast this morning? Oh well, it doesn’t matter. Our colleagues from the operational group are happy to welcome us, and we settle into ‘economy class’, eating well and laughing cheerfully. It’s a close-knit group, and most of them have been to Baikonur together many times. Seeing them here, you’d think they were students on a school trip, but each of them performs an important function in the final preparations for launching Alex, Reid and Maksim.

With full stomachs and a few toasts behind us, I ask if I can take a look around the cockpit; or should I say, the nose of the aeroplane. This Tu-134 has a glass nose, as if someone had cut off the front of the fuselage and replaced it with glazing with the same shape. It contains an observation post that was formerly used for reconnaissance and visual navigation, and I reach it from the cockpit through a sort of tunnel, taking my place on the jump seat. It’s like sitting on the edge of a cliff, but with no danger of falling. Below me is the Kazakhstan steppe, a monotonous flat brown landscape extending as far as the eye can see, and seemingly for ever: no matter how much we’ve left behind, the horizon keeps on spewing out the same amount of featureless terrain. Human presence is rare and scattered, and yet it’s in these lands that space exploration began. Huddled in the nose cone, I try to imagine what it will be like in the Cupola on the ISS. That, too, is a glass bubble of sorts, where you can admire the world. Who knows how different or similar it will be? We’ll be weightless, farther away, going faster … Our journey today would take less than five minutes if we were going as fast as the Space Station.

I’m called back to the cockpit as we start our descent and I’m given permission to stay there until we land. At one point, the co-pilot directs my gaze to the Syr Darya, one of Central Asia’s main rivers. Now that I know where to look, I make out Baikonur beyond a bend, like a mirage on the arid, empty steppe. Once we’ve landed, we taxi to the parking spot and stop next to the only other aeroplane, the Tu-134 carrying the prime crew. Terry, Anton and I are the first to leave the plane, and we walk towards a small, orderly delegation on the apron, not far from the aircraft. After a somewhat formal initial greeting, during which we speak from a distance of a few metres away, the head of the delegation approaches us, smiling broadly, and shakes our hands warmly. They tell me his name is Sergey Romanov, and he’s the head of the Energia operations here in Baikonur. He will oversee the final preparations for our Soyuz. My first impression is that he’s an intelligent man with a kind heart, and I feel like we’re in good hands.

The welcome ritual is brief: we take a group photo with the delegation and say a quick hello to local students, who’ve come with shiny garlands. We then head for the bus waiting on the apron. With us are Doctor Savin and Valery Korzun, the latter impeccably dressed in jacket and tie despite the sultry weather. Valery is a veteran cosmonaut who’s flown on the Space Shuttle and Soyuz and visited both MIR and ISS, and he’s now responsible for training in Star City. Here at Baikonur, he’s the head of the operational group. I know him from all the exams; he poses as a severe and demanding evaluator, but I know that he’d throw himself into the flames to protect the crew. I’ve long had a hunch that his gruff exterior conceals a tender heart, a warm and compassionate attitude towards others. Doctor Savin is more inscrutable. Even before we met, I knew of his reputation through his nickname, ‘Dr No’. His strict insistence on respecting the quarantine rules has been a source of frustration for more than one crew, but many have noted how he tries to avoid being anywhere he might find himself a casual witness to some small violation. Out of sight, out of mind.

We’re relieved to find that the bus is air conditioned, since we’re already sweating in our blue overalls. Reid, Alex and Maksim are not, of course, with us. We have to travel separately, and they’re on the bus reserved for the prime crew. These are the same vehicles that will take us to the launchpad, and they have large seats with ventilation connections for feeding fresh air into our suits. The driver came with us from Moscow, and he’s getting ready to ferry us to the quarantine, that mythical place not yet in space, but well removed from normal life on earth. All three of us are exhilarated.

After half an hour’s ride, the Kazakh police car ahead of us stops in front of a big gate, which opens to let us in and then closes again immediately behind us, isolating us from the rest of the city. In truth, we won’t be totally sequestered. We’ll actually leave here tomorrow and for a second time a few days before the launch so we can go to the cosmodrome and carry out the Soyuz fit checks. Terry, Anton and I will also take part in the traditional visit to Baikonur, a privilege reserved for the back-up crew. A city of modest size, Baikonur has only about 10,000 inhabitants. On the road from the airport I saw mostly ugly apartment blocks in poor condition, some of them probably abandoned. But the theme of our trip will be space rather than architecture. I already know where we’ll be stopping, having seen the sites countless times in photos with previous crews. We’ll lay red carnations at the feet of the statues of Sergei Korolev and Yuri Gagarin, and we’ll pose before the latter, imitating his gesture, immortalized in stone, of stretching his arms towards the cosmos. Then we’ll visit the museum of Baikonur history and, on leaving, we’ll take another classic photo inside a replica of a Kazakh yurt, wearing traditional clothes over our blue overalls. All I have to do in anticipation of those moments is to insert our faces in scenes I feel like I’ve known for ever. Of course, there are no sounds, smells or conversations in those images, no emotions and reflections. What will we feel? Curiosity, interest, pleasure, apprehension, fear, fatigue, impatience, excitement? I can’t wait to become fully part of those scenes, and to experience every bit of life that links them up, all the things that you don’t see in the official photos.

I must say I’m also really curious to hear the tales about Baikonur’s history, so tightly interwoven with the early days of cosmonautics and the secrecy surrounding Soviet space missions at that time. When the city was built in the 1950s, there was nothing but the Tyuratam railway interchange. What is more, the name Baikonur belonged to a small mining city several hundred kilometres away, a trick to confuse foreign intelligence services seeking to locate the new Soviet cosmodrome. It’s even alleged that fake structures were built in the real Baikonur to trick spy planes, but this may be only legend.

What isn’t a legend, though, is what they say about quarantine, how pleasant the location and our daily life can be. We astronauts live with the Russian doctor in a small two-storey building situated in a lovely park full of leafy trees, which must be rather unusual in Baikonur’s arid climate. I’m assigned spacious and comfortable accommodation on the ground floor with one bedroom, a large living area and a bathroom. The prime crew is on the second floor, and shortly after we arrive we all get together in Maksim’s room to toast the beginning of the quarantine. Alex has already put an espresso machine in the hallway. He and Reid brought it all the way here, and will leave it as a gift to future crews. A few months ago, Reid even took orders for the coffee pods. Since Baikonur is three hours ahead of Moscow, our day is short, and it’s soon time for supper. We eat in a small and elegant dining room. As Dr No explained to us, all meals are cooked specially for us according to stringent criteria regarding hygiene and quality. Obviously we’re expected not to eat food from any other source, but I don’t think this will be a problem for anyone, since the menu is rich and flavourful. Everyone knows that the biggest risk in Baikonur is putting on weight.

After supper we go for a walk in the park and we soon reach Cosmonauts Alley, a straight pathway paved with grey tiles and flanked on both sides by trees planted by all those who’ve flown into space from Baikonur. At the foot of the first tall and luxuriant tree is a sign that reads: ‘This tree was planted by Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin in 1961’. I don’t know if it’s true: I guess that if by any chance Yuri’s tree had succumbed to the cold, aridity or disease, someone surely would have replanted it very quickly. I ask Anton to take a picture anyway in the soft light of the sun’s last rays, and then we go to find his tree among the more recent ones. They’re still young shrubs, planted alongside a lane that runs perpendicular to the main pathway, with the park on one side and, just beyond the row of small trees, a gentle slope towards the Syr Darya on the other. At the junction of the two roads is a small circular platform dominated by a model of the Soyuz rocket. From here, the view of the steppe is spectacular. We pause for a long time in silence, leaning on the balustrade and enjoying the cool evening, life’s simplicity.

Baikonur Cosmodrome, 29 May 2014

The launch is scheduled for 1.57 local time. Fifteen minutes beforehand, we’re taken up a short staircase, through a small opening, and out onto a narrow balcony that winds around the cupola of the small white building. This is the headquarters of the search and rescue teams, and it’s from here that efforts to recover Reid, Alex and Maksim would be coordinated if there were an emergency re-entry during the ascent to orbit. Helicopters, aeroplanes and amphibious vehicles are deployed along the rocket’s ground track – more than 5,000 kilometres – and the rescue vessel Georgy Kozmin is on the alert in the Sea of Japan. At 2.06, we hope, they’ll all be able to toast one more crew that had no need of their services. Everyone, that is, except those deployed nearby in Kazakhstan; they will remain poised to intervene should the Soyuz make an emergency re-entry after the first or second orbit. Tonight, I am conscious as never before of how the difficulties of running a human spaceflight programme go well beyond the construction of rockets and spaceships.

The rocket is over there, about 1.5 kilometres away, shiny and beautiful, plucked from the surrounding darkness by the powerful lights of the launchpad. The service towers, two shells that enfolded the rocket in a tight mesh of scaffolding and contain the lift that takes the astronauts to the top, are already retracted and lie horizontally. Only two umbilical connections remain, and those allow the liquid oxygen tanks to be topped up, slowly replacing the oxygen that evaporates and escapes as white puffs ruffled by the wind. The tanks’ extremely cold temperature causes the water vapour from the atmosphere to be deposited in the form of ice, which now clothes the rocket in white.

The rocket was still green two days ago, when we saw it for the first time during the rollout, the transfer from the assembly building to Launchpad 1. An old train, for some reason painted in garish reds, blues, greens and yellows, took it away at a solemn pace. It looked like a train with human features, the kind you see in animated films, not modern ones but the older, hand-drawn films. A train with huge eyes for headlamps, panting from the effort and grumbling a bit, because it’s done this trip for years and for nothing, not even a little thank-you. Everyone’s here to admire the rocket, which isn’t actually so impressive, lying there like that …

Actually, it doesn’t stay down for long. Once it gets to the launchpad, it’s erected in a vertical position in an astounding exercise of craftsmanship and visual estimation: ‘Come forward – stop – a bit to the left – that’s it.’ We watched it, in disbelief, from inside the flame trench, a big circular ditch into which the bottom of the rocket is inserted to a depth of about 6–8 metres, and from which the burned gases flow through a special channel during the first moments of the launch. We were under the rocket, on a narrow service platform that runs right around the flame trench, while it was erected. And at the end, there we were, face to face with the twenty nozzles on the engines of the first and second stages, suspended before our eyes. Suspended: because the Soyuz wasn’t standing on the ground, but rather held by the four arms of the launchpad, which wrap around it halfway up, like a ballerina in mid-air, her partner’s hands holding her tight around her waist. When the rocket begins to lift off, these arms automatically open like petals without the need for any active mechanism, which could malfunction, but rather in a completely passive way, through the action of simple counterweights. There’s nothing quite like the disarming ingenuity of Russian space technology.

The first umbilical is retracted, a sign that there’s less than a minute to go before lift-off. Less than a minute, and we will no longer be the back-up crew. This has been a once-in-a-lifetime experience. We’ll be back in Baikonur in six months, and everything will unfold in much the same way, but it won’t be the same: it won’t be spring, and we won’t be so carefree. On the contrary, despite the ample amount of free time left by our work schedule, we will never feel like there’s enough to finish all the things we still have to do.

We won’t stay up late partying in the operational group’s building, dancing until we’re exhausted, and there won’t be any late-night walks around the park after curfew, talking and joking under the starry skies of the steppe. The back-up crew can be forgiven a few small transgressions. A few days ago, late at night, Anton and I, along with a small group of young instructors, ran into the head of Roscosmos, the Russian space agency; he’d just come from Moscow and was taking a walk down Cosmonauts Alley. To our relief, the only thing he said when he saw us was ‘Where’s the third one?’ as he looked around for Terry, who’d gone off to make a phone call. In Baikonur people like to see the crew together, even in the middle of the night, when they should be sleeping.

To mark the approaching end of our status as back-up crew, I popped into Anton and Terry’s room this afternoon while the prime crew was resting. I pulled them along through a hole in the fence, all the way to Syr Darya. We’re allowed to use that hole to go for a run, though probably we shouldn’t go alone. We went to throw a bottle into the river, having stuffed it with a photo, one of thousands of crew portraits we had signed during endless sessions outlined on our daily schedule as ‘symbolic activity’. We wrote a message on it and included an email address we created ad hoc. What a goofy thing to do! If everyone had the same idea, the river would be full of rubbish. My childish justification is that the occasion is really special and this part of the world is almost uninhabited. And luckily so, since every now and then a spaceship falls from the sky. I’ve no idea if some mysterious steppe dweller will one day send us an email, but the trip to the river gave us the chance to witness an amazing spectacle: a short distance downstream a herd of horses was drinking, a powerfully beautiful scene foreshadowing tonight’s launch.

This is it, and I’m starting to feel some apprehension. I’ve already been to a launch, but that first time was very different. I didn’t know a single member of the crew, not even Terry, who, by some twist of fate, is here beside me now. Today, at the top of the rocket sit three friends we hugged only two hours ago beside the launchpad. I don’t think anyone can identify with them at this precise moment like we can, not even those closest to them, though they are certainly looking on with more apprehension. I can see them in my mind’s eye, their visors lowered, eyes focused on the procedure checklist open to page 29, its famous diagram depicting the different phases of launch and the critical actions to follow in case of emergency. These are not discussed much during training, since the simulator doesn’t replicate rocket failures, though they are explored in detail during the quarantine.

At the first flash of light, the sign that the engines have ignited, I press the call button on my phone, where I have already programmed Anton’s number. We have decided to listen to his ring tone in the few seconds before blast-off; it has tormented us during our classes together, because of Anton’s unquestioned habit of always keeping his phone on, but by now it has become the soundtrack for our crew. So, to the tune of ‘The Final Countdown’, we watch as the last umbilical is retracted, the engines reach full thrust, and a small sun lights up on the steppe accompanied by an explosion of noise and vibration. It’s a gentle lift-off, and the rocket seems to pause, half swallowed by a white cloud of burned gases, as if entertaining second thoughts at the last moment. Then it stops stalling and rises, slowly but resolutely, perfectly stable in its trajectory, taking with it three fragile human bodies escaping the fate of being confined to the surface of this planet.

We rejoice, but only a little, because the ascent into orbit has barely started. After two minutes, we watch the first-stage boosters separate, four small lights that stay still and go out, while the small sun at the centre continues to burn and rise skyward, becoming ever smaller. Reid, Alex, and Maksim are soon just a small faint dot, which disappears from view. We quickly leave the roof and move to the operations room. All eyes are turned towards a screen that shows the internal video images, while the speaker broadcasts reassuring radio communications. After eight minutes and forty-eight seconds, we see them judder, the unmistakable sign of the jolt that accompanies the shutdown of the third and final stage of the rocket.

Reid, Alex and Maksim, despite the encumbrance of their suits and gloves, join hands in a sign of jubilation. They have become a new satellite of the Earth.

In the operations room the rescue team raise one of their first toasts to us. For the prime crew: tri, četyre … hurrah! hurrah! hurrah!

—

After that emotional highpoint in Baikonur, it wasn’t easy to go back to the routine of training. To be frank, it was truly frustrating. Inevitable, and expected, but frustrating. Four days after taking part in the launch, our eyes still shining with images, hugs and smiles, sparks of light in the night, dawn’s flames reflected on Syr Darya … Only four days later I was in Cologne, at EAC for a week of refresher training on ATV. While my thoughts were in Kazakhstan, languishing in a fabulous dream from which I refused to wake up, and my heart jumped ahead, anticipating the cold and snow of Baikonur in November, a limp puppet sat in the simulator, mechanically executing operations that I knew inside out by now and for which I felt I needed no further training. It took me a while to come to terms with the frustration I felt about the next six months of ordinary life before my departure for space. Ordinary life. I don’t know how many people would agree with that definition. Was I too used to a life of excitement, an extreme case of hedonistic adaptation? To be fair, Reid and Alex had warned us: they, too, had found the return from Baikonur disheartening.

Luckily, I was granted ten days’ holiday. I’d known for a while that it would be my last chance to see family and friends who were normally far away, and for that reason I’d sent an invitation months before: Futura Party, 7 June, from 12.30 onwards. My parents organized a big party, blessed by a lovely early summer sun, which heightened the pleasure of seeing so many friends from childhood, adolescence and adult life. I was bound to most of these people not by virtue of seeing them regularly, but by an elective affinity that had survived infrequent contact and the fragmentation of my life, punctuated as it was with separations and new beginnings, a life in which I carried my house around with me like a snail. A slimy, silvery trail remained, and, looking back at it from this point in time, the whole of it traced and meandering behind me, it seemed to lead stubbornly and improbably towards a flight in space. That the snail would often take the wrong road, that providential rain arrived sometimes just in time, that other times a friendly hand had moved the snail a little further, taking it away from a busy road at the right moment – all that was impossible to see from a distance. Those faces and conversations brought back moments from the past, and they all seemed to contain an implicit promise of my inevitable future. I knew very well that this was an illusion, but just for that day I gave in to the irrational, and to the pleasure of feeling the past, present and future meld together in a dense, sparkling bead of quicksilver.

An unexpected flyover put the finishing touch on that beautiful day. Darkness was falling as we finished our meal, and someone received a text that the Space Station would shortly pass overhead. At the appointed time, all eyes looked skyward, searching for a bright spot moving west to east. I was the first one to spot it – or maybe they all indulged me in that particular privilege. We toasted to the Futura mission, the Space Station and the six humans on board. I felt alive: wholly and profoundly alive.