28.

The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe.

Joseph Campbell, Reflections on the Art of Living

Soyuz TMA-15M, 24 November 2014

The rocket plucks us from Earth in a firm but gentle grasp. Every now and again it adjusts its attitude in order to keep us on the planned trajectory, and then we feel a dull thump accompanied by some oscillation, but all told, the vibrations we feel are light. The liquid-propellant engines on the Soyuz don’t have the fury of the solid-fuel boosters on the Space Shuttle, which shook the screens in front of the astronauts. It must seem to Terry, accustomed to that violent lift-off, that we’re not moving yet.

But we’re moving, and how! With every second that passes we become lighter by one and a half tonnes, as the propellants burn and are expelled through the nozzles. As a result, the acceleration progressively increases, pressing us into our seats with increasing force. It’s not unpleasant, at least for now – quite the contrary. It feels like my body is sinking into the rocket, becoming one with it.

‘Thirty seconds, and engines are stable,’ announces 16-3rd via radio.

Anton responds mechanically, ‘Everything’s in order on board. The crew feels fine.’

We must be about to exceed the speed of sound, if we haven’t done so already. It’s a significant transition in terms of the rocket’s structural integrity, but we don’t feel a thing inside. We’re leaving the sonic boom behind.

In the checklist the launch procedure is condensed onto a single page, a simple graph depicting the ascent and the main events as a function of time elapsed from lift-off. After 114 seconds, for example, at an altitude of 40 kilometres, the launch escape system will separate. We have no indication of our speed or acceleration on the control panel, nor any telemetry data on the rocket’s firing. The physical sensations, the noise, the growing force that presses us into our seats – all this is reassuring, but the only objective information on our ascent reaches us via radio.

‘Sixty seconds. The attitude is nominal,’ says 16-3rd.

I know that in the next minute the G-force will rapidly increase under the action of the five engines thrusting us upwards – they are now pushing a rocket which is already roughly 100 tonnes lighter. As a precaution, I begin using the breathing technique we learned in the centrifuge, stiffening my rib cage. The vibrations are increasing in intensity, and we start bouncing around as if we were riding a bike at full speed over an uneven road without shock absorbers. Olaf, hanging from his cord, is swinging around crazily. My procedure checklist is shaking. I’m holding it only halfway up, and the top of the checklist is bending forward under the effect of the acceleration. To flatten it so I can keep reading, I have to stretch out my arm, and it’s now difficult to lift it and control its movement. As we approach first stage cut-off, we’re pinned to our seats by a force equal to more than four times our weight.

This is it, I’m thinking, when I feel the first blow. But the rocket continues to push with the same force. It was just the separation of the launch escape system. The actual first-stage cut-off is the next jolt, a few seconds later, the one that accompanies the shutdown of the four lateral boosters. I feel myself shoved forward, but trapped by the straps and held firmly against the seat. Our velocity continues to increase under the thrust of the core engine; however, the acceleration has diminished suddenly and with it my perceived weight. It’s momentarily disorientating, but the brain adapts quickly. From 16-3rd, we get confirmation that the second stage is working perfectly.

The ascent chart in the checklist shows the next major event: the separation of the fairing, the aerodynamic shell that has protected us as we’ve gone through the atmosphere’s dense lower layers. I grab the torch stuffed between my kneeboard and my leg and point it at the small, round window on my left. The metal shell is out there, a few centimetres away. I wait. The rocket is shaken by two strong jolts that signal the ignition of the pyrotechnic charges, and with a sudden leap the shell disappears into the darkness. I can’t say I saw it leaving: one moment it was there and the next it was gone. It’s still night outside. I go back to focusing on the launch.

As forecast, the ‘Guided Descent’ button lights up on the panel, which means that from this moment on, if there should be a launcher failure, we could still hope to return to Earth in a controlled manner rather than ballistically. After the automatic separation from the rocket, we would have three minutes to decide – three minutes to look outside and confirm that our roll angle is less than 45°. In the absence of that condition, any attempt to make a controlled re-entry would result in our literally being killed by the G-force. We’ve spoken about it a lot over the past few days. Given that we are not trained to evaluate that angle and that it’s night outside anyway, we’d definitely opt for a ballistic return, with its unpleasant, even dangerous dose of Gs, but at least not inevitably fatal.

We’re now past four minutes of flight time, and the second-stage engine will soon shut down. In this final phase, the smooth engine firing is interrupted by moments of irregular, jerky vibrations. They’re not terribly comforting, to be honest, but 16-3rd keeps reassuring us via radio that everything is nominal. At the appointed time, the engine shuts down, thrusting us forward against our straps. With a bit of juddering and thudding – and our excited cries – another phase of our ascent to orbit is concluded.

I feel the push from the third stage and the voice of 16-3rd, which lets us know that the engine has ignited as it should. We’re at an altitude of about 160 kilometres, according to the graph in the procedure checklist. Whatever happens from here on out, I am officially an astronaut. In the first phase of our ascent, we climbed along a roughly vertical trajectory to get through the dense atmospheric layers as quickly as possible. In the remaining four minutes, the thrust of the third stage will serve most of all to help us gain the horizontal velocity we need to stay in orbit. Getting to space is easy, as they say; the difficult thing is to acquire the speed to stay there.

Should there be a failure in this final phase, our landing would be a treacherous one. The last line of the checklist page about the ascent sums it up in two words: mountains, and then the sea, it says. The immense and relatively welcoming Kazakhstan highlands are now behind us. 16-3rd continues to transmit radio updates on engine firing, Anton in turn assures him that everything is fine on board, and I periodically check the parameters of our spaceship. Up to this point, it’s been a textbook launch. My visor didn’t even get fogged up.

Thirty seconds before the scheduled engine cut-off, I raise the protector over the KO command, what we call the ‘separation contact’. When we’re in weightlessness, a number of lights on the control panel should light up to confirm the separation of the launcher, and if they don’t, I’ll have to send the command manually within ten seconds. It’s a simple action; all the more reason why I don’t want to make any mistakes. If we don’t get to the Space Station tonight, it certainly won’t be because I didn’t send the KO command in time.

However, there’s no need. The Soyuz does everything itself. The engine of the third stage shuts down, the invisible hand pressing me into my seat releases its grip, and I’m thrust against the straps. I watch as Olaf begins to twirl around, and a cloud of white particles goes by my window: debris driven there by the engine’s cut-off. We detach from the third stage with a shudder, and a series of dull thuds alert us to the extension of the antennae and the deployment of the solar panels. A few seconds … and our Soyuz is ready to fly on its own.

A sudden silence falls over us. Of course, the ventilation system keeps humming like a swarm of bees behind my head, but after the racket of the engines and the succession of explosions from the charges, it feels like silence has descended on us. In their thick gloves, my hands are dangling at about eye level, as if they weren’t attached to me. In an immediate flip that flies in the face of millions of years of body memory, I have to make an effort to hold them against my body. I stare at them for several moments, entranced, before Anton’s voice reminds me that I have other duties. ‘Let’s go to page 33,’ he says, and it’s a pleasure to follow his order, skipping over four pages of procedure, the ones we would have used if there’d been a launcher failure. Our mission has barely begun, but we’ve already got past one of the two riskiest phases: the launch. The other will be our re-entry, now six months away, when we’ll have to release in a controlled way all the energy the rocket stored in our little Soyuz in the form of altitude and, above all, velocity.

Now that we’re in orbit, we begin our pursuit of the Space Station. It went over us a couple of minutes before the launch, when we were still in Baikonur. We’ve entered its orbital plane, and now it is about 3,000 kilometres ahead of us to the northeast, above Mongolia, with a phase angle of 25°. In the next six hours we’ll bring that angle down to zero. Relative to the ISS, we’re on a lower orbit; therefore we fly faster.

‘Astrey, TsUP from Moscow. How do you hear me?’ Now that the launch is over, responsibility for the mission has passed from Baikonur to TsUP. Dima went back to Moscow a couple of days ago to be ready on site. It will be his familiar voice we hear for the next few hours. He pronounces his words calmly and walks us through the first operations. Time is short now, as the Soyuz will soon start preparing automatically for the first two engine burns. It’s Anton’s duty to supervise these operations. I have to check that the systems work properly and carry out the leak check. Luckily, I feel well. I’m moving my head cautiously, of course, unwilling to tempt fate, but I’m not feeling the least bit nauseous. I retrieve my pencil from mid-air, where it’s dangling from a cord, and I write down system parameters and pressure values for the leak check in the appropriate chart.

‘Samantha, look outside!’ Terry urges me a short time later. I was so absorbed in my work that I hadn’t noticed it: the orbital night is coming to an end. The last stars are fading, and the world outside is tinted blue and red. It’s my first dawn in space. Just a fleeting glimpse in my uncomfortable position, as I negotiate with my confused vestibular system and continue the checks. But what a sight! I look at it again a few minutes later. As we fly towards the Sun, the mantle of darkness recedes below us. There’s the Earth, down there: blue, as it should be, with sprinkles of white that cast long shadows over the sea.

We’re about to lose Russian radio coverage. Dima makes a last, rather formal radio call before bidding us goodbye. ‘Astrey, the spaceship is in orbit as an artificial satellite of the Earth. Antennae and solar panels are deployed. The orbital period is 88 minutes, the inclination is 51°, the altitude is between 199 and 242 kilometres. You have permission to loosen your straps and raise your visors. Until the next radio contact–’

‘Ciao, Dima,’ I think. ‘We’ll just circle the Earth and then we’ll speak to you again. Don’t go very far!’

I turn off the radio and to make sure I remember to turn it back on, I set the alarm for one minute before the next pass over the Russian stations. Half an hour later, I can definitively state that our Soyuz does not have any leaks, and I announce that in accordance with procedure, we can take off our gloves. Terry and Anton don’t need to hear it twice. The gloves are a serious hindrance. I go back to reviewing my own sensations: everything’s OK overall, but I’m beginning to feel an irksome pressure in my head, no doubt due to the fluid shift, or the redistribution of body fluids that happens during weightlessness. My vestibular system is also starting to play tricks with me. I have a clear sensation of being in forward freefall, a feeling that I would crash onto the control panel if my straps were not holding me in. I decide to tighten them, allowing myself less space for floating, and that seems to help.

When I finish checking the systems, I join Anton in monitoring the engine burn. The first one is now imminent, and it will last a minute and a half, taking us that bit closer to the Space Station. It’s a slight thrust, but it’s enough to upset my vestibular system, which is already being tested: I force myself to look straight ahead, without turning my head, and the sense of disorientation slowly disappears.

After all the excitement, there’s not much to do now until the next engine burn in about an hour. The Sun goes down, marking the end of my first orbital day, and the first stars come out. Terry suggests that we turn off the light for a couple of minutes in order to get rid of the only light pollution there is up here. I spy the Milky Way, and I recognize Cassiopeia. They’re as far away as they are from the Earth, but up here it seems like we could have a conversation. Ah, what a silly thought! People have always spoken to the starry sky. And yet there’s something poignant about contemplating the heavens from inside this metal box, a tangle of technology – not even that advanced – that allows us to be up here, in space, where humans are not meant to be.

I go back to focusing on the systems and I notice something suspicious about the pressure in the descent module. It goes down, comes up, then goes back down. If we were in the simulator, I’d prepare for a depressurization, but the actual sensors aren’t so precise or clear, so I shouldn’t rush to conclusions. I do alert Anton, and we decide to continue monitoring the situation … It’s so amusing to send the procedure checklist spinning in the air! It’s really something, this weightlessness; it’s just that this pressure in my head is a nuisance … What a spectacle on the Earth below: there’s a storm, a furious succession of flashes like strobe lights in a disco … Meanwhile, the pressure values keep going up and down, but the trend is not downward, and in any case, if there were a real problem we’d feel it in our ears … It’s time for the second engine burn. As always, Anton is watching our attitude and acceleration, and I’m keeping an eye on the operating pressures. Everything is going just as it should … Terry starts using a hand-pump to transfer the condensate from the air-conditioning system into one of the storage tanks … The alarm rings, and I turn the radio back on.

‘Astrey, TsUP from Moscow. How do you hear me?’

Later, after two orbits and two engine burns, reacquiring the radio signal is more difficult. This time we expect to establish contact with the Space Station. It’s now barely 200 kilometres away, and it should act as a radio link with Moscow via Houston, so we won’t have to rely on the infrequent Russian stations coverage. We’re now an hour and a half away from docking. At last we hear Dima’s voice, weak and unintelligible. Conversation is impossible, but Anton keeps on transmitting, periodically reporting our distance and relative velocity. We’re on the braking parabola: in a few short series of engine burns, the computer will take us to the same altitude as the ISS, progressively decreasing the speed of approach. At around 100 kilometres, the radio contact stabilizes. The first voice we hear from the Space Station is Sasha’s. ‘C’mon guys, hurry up! We’re waiting for you.’

We begin to feel how tired we are, and we try to help each other to stay awake. During one of the long pauses between one engine burn and the next, Dima thoughtfully enquires whether we’ve all had the chance to go into the orbital module. This is his roundabout way of asking if we’ve been able to use the toilet. There was an interval marked out for this a couple of hours after the launch, but Anton took a long time over the installation of the video camera GoPro, which will film the docking process through the front window. There wasn’t any other time for it: in the manoeuvring phases we can’t move from our seats because the computer would interpret any shaking as a failure of the attitude control and would categorically refuse to start the engine. But during the previous radio contact, Dima indicated another possible interval before the start of the final ISS approach phase, so Anton can now confirm that flight engineer no. 2 has indeed been in the orbital module. ‘Successfully,’ adds Terry, his voice sleepy but clearly amused.

‘Successful, right, Terry?’

‘Yes, one hundred per cent successful!’ Terry gloats.

‘Empty,’ Anton adds, and we titter, along with Dima and probably various other control centres all over the world as soon as the conversation is translated into English, which is what happens in real time with all Space-to-Ground communications that go through the Space Station.

For the second time tonight, I envy Terry and Anton their empty bladders. There wasn’t any opportunity for me to go into the orbital module, but I didn’t really expect that much. There’s almost never time for the flight engineer to go. All I want is to be able to pee in my nappy. I don’t ask for much, right? And yet I can’t. No one was able to explain this inconvenient and involuntary reluctance, but it’s a well-known problem, so much so that various astronauts advised me to try peeing while lying down in the bath, in the hope that this would act as positive conditioning or at least help to lose any mysterious inhibitions. I did it a few times – successfully, as Terry would say. But right now, no matter how hard I try, something unconnected to my conscious will is stopping my bladder from emptying. I’m trying not to worry, and I tell myself that the problem will resolve itself later, when we can use the Soyuz toilet, but I know very well that this story could have another epilogue, featuring the catheter. It’s already been used, I’m told, and more than once. During our medical training, Terry and I got some practice inserting the catheter in someone else, using a dummy, and I even gracefully accepted the offer of additional training on how to catheterize myself, taking a kit home with me in order to practise. But things are very different up here: everything floats, and, as a rookie in space, I would find it difficult just to stay still.

Anton distracts me from my physiological worries to show me the image from the external video camera. There it is, the Space Station. In this absolute blackness, empty and hostile, our Soyuz is pointing securely at our only conceivable destination, this outpost of humanity where Sasha, Yelena and Butch are ready to welcome us with a hot meal. By now we’re in constant contact, and our transmitter is kept on so that the ISS and other control centres on Earth can listen in on everything we say. On our side, we are ready. The docking probe is extended, and the Kurs system antennae are working perfectly. At 3 kilometres away, there’s yet another automatic engine burn, and from now on we could also take manual control if necessary. I shake off my sleepiness, forcing myself to make a final effort to concentrate: if there were a failure at this stage, we’d have to act very quickly to effect the docking.

We’re perfectly aligned with the port of the MIM-1 module, slowly but surely approaching the ISS, when I allow myself a quick look outside. The moment isn’t chosen randomly: I’m looking for the Space Station. Not the indirect, black and white image from the cameras. I want to see it with my own eyes, in colour. I’ll never be able to see the whole thing, but I’m waiting for part of it to appear in my window. Some of the veteran astronauts have told me to look for it in the last 40 metres. I’ve loosened the straps as much as I can and I’m floating over my seat. When I turn towards my window, the first thing I see is one of the small solar panels on our Soyuz. Nothing new there: I’ve seen it before, but something draws my attention to the edge of my peripheral vision. I turn my head slowly and feel a jolt of astonishment and joy. Maybe my pent-up emotions are bubbling over. Maybe my tiredness is finally getting the better of me. Maybe it’s simply that I wasn’t prepared for such sudden beauty. ‘Oh my god!’ I exclaim, and Anton immediately orders me to be quiet. He’s right, of course. The radio transmitter is on, and on Earth they cannot know that everything is fine, that there isn’t some problem – other than an overabundance of happiness. The Space Station is right there, outside, mighty and resplendent, lit up with orange light, warm and alive, in which its huge solar panels seem to burn, incandescent. When I turn to look outside a few seconds later, the orange blaze has disappeared. The Space Station is now bathed in a cold, metallic light – and then it’s swallowed up by the darkness. Another orbital night has begun.

I realize that I’ve just had my first glimpse of my new house, precisely in those few fleeting moments of orange glow, in the transition from day to night. And I have the absurd sense that the universe – so indifferent to the fortunes of humankind, let alone those of a single person – that universe wanted to give me a gift tonight.