30.

Our travellers had been fully prepared for such a phenomenon, yet it struck them with as much surprise as if they had never uttered a scientific reason to account for it. They saw that, no longer subject to the ordinary laws of nature, they were now entering the realms of the marvellous. They felt that their bodies were absolutely without weight. Their arms, full extended, no longer sought their sides. Their heads oscillated unsteadily on their shoulders. Their feet no longer rested on the floor.

Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon

International Space Station, 24 November 2014

I try to turn the light on, but I can’t find any reference points to guide my hand in the dark. How difficult can it be to find the switch, when my crew quarters are about the size of a phone box and I know very well where to look for it? Feeling around blindly, I end up bumping into the door with my shoulder, which unlocks and opens part way, letting in a bit of light. I get it now: I’m topsy turvy. It seems incredible given these cramped quarters, but I somehow managed to flip over in my sleep. I want to say ‘upside down’, but it doesn’t make sense. ‘Down’ with respect to what? My crew quarters are in the floor, or what we consider the floor: the area where you put your feet, if you want most of the signs in the Space Station to be correctly orientated for your eyes.

Butch sees my head poking through the floor, and he comes towards me from Node 1, floating rapidly through the Lab with a couple of well-placed pushes. ‘Good afternoon! How did you sleep?’

Very well, I’d say, and no, I didn’t tie myself to the wall with bungees. It’s a bit early to know for sure, but I think I’m going to like sleeping like this, floating. Butch shows me how he sleeps when he wants to feel some pressure on his body: with his back against one wall and his legs pushing against the opposite wall. I take note.

I’ve woken up hungry, so I ask Butch for a quick handover session on food preparation. I follow him clumsily into Node 1, fumbling like a child just learning to walk. He assures me that in a couple of weeks I’ll be twirling around like a ballerina. I just hope I don’t break anything in the meantime. In Node 1, the food packets are organized by type: breakfast, meat and fish, sides, vegetables and soups, fruit, including dried fruit and nuts and finally snacks and sweets. It’s mid-afternoon, but I feel like having breakfast. Butch points out a makeshift cupboard, a big white box with a Velcro closing, labelled ‘Breakfast’, in fact. There are a dozen of these boxes and a similar number of smaller metallic containers on the opposite wall, and together they form a sort of improvised pantry, clearly the brainchild of some of the earlier crews rather than an actual design. I take a packet of porridge and another of scrambled eggs, both dehydrated, and dip into a box on the opposite wall containing hot drinks, including tea and various types of coffee: sweetened or unsweetened, with or without milk. While I’m looking for some black coffee, a handful of packets start flying away – and while I’m trying to grab those, I let go of the scrambled eggs; and while I’m trying to catch the eggs, I end up turning over in mid-air and losing my sense of direction. Up, down, forward, aft … It’s all so confusing.

Holding the wayward coffee packets, Butch watches me with amusement and asks me how I feel. Nauseous? Headache? Nothing, luckily, but I’ve got a sickbag in my pocket just in case. The pressure in my head is still there. Butch had the same sensation at the beginning, but he tells me it went away after a week. I follow him to the water dispenser, which is on the ceiling in the middle of the Lab, and he shows me how to maintain my position by putting my feet in a restraint conveniently fixed to the wall. It’s a little like putting on flip-flops attached to a handrail.

The food packets have hooped pieces of Velcro stuck to them, just like every other portable object on the Space Station. Meanwhile, the many successive crews on board over the past fifteen years have left their trace in the form of pieces of fuzzy Velcro on free surfaces all over, but especially in a few strategic or much-used places. There’s one right next to the water dispenser. I put the porridge there while I rehydrate the eggs according to the instructions on the packet: 150 millilitres of warm water. It’s hardly more than lukewarm so you won’t burn yourself, while the cold water I pour into the packet of porridge is not really cold, just room temperature. Happily, there’s a small fridge in this rack. When it’s not being used for experiments we have permission to put drinks packets inside. Normally I only drink water, but on board there are also fruit juices and shakes, all powdered. The only things we don’t have are carbonated drinks.

While my food is resting for fifteen minutes, according to instructions, I venture into Node 3 to use the loo. Compared to the one on the Soyuz, which is composed of only a funnel and a receptacle attached to a flexible tube, the toilet in Node 3 is more like a normal Earth toilet, as long as you don’t pay any attention to the two panels with warning lights and switches that betray the presence of a jumble of pipes, pumps, fans, tanks and filters hidden inside the rack. A Japanese toilet is boring in comparison. To ensure privacy, there’s a cabin around everything, which cuts the space of Node 3 in half. It’s got an accordion door and on the walls are packets of wet and dry wipes, a pack of latex gloves and a bin bag for used hygienic products. Instead of a toilet bowl there’s a chunky metal cylinder for solid waste, and on top of that there’s a small white seat which is kept covered when not in use. Butch has already advised us on the most efficient and stress-free technique: though there are various footholds to help you stay in position, it seems that pushing against the ceiling with your hand is the easiest method. In any case, I’ll try some other time. For now, I just take the flexible hose off the wall, which has a conical yellow funnel on one end for pee. I know that somewhere on the Space Station there are differently shaped funnels intended specifically for women, with forms better adapted to the female anatomy. They also have holes on the sides, so they can be pressed against the body without blocking the flow of air. I carefully asked around, but I didn’t find a single female colleague who’d found this to be a good option. I don’t have that much experience yet, but it seems to confirm that even though we can’t control the direction of our pee as easily as men, the air flow does its work just fine at a few centimetres’ distance.

My scrambled eggs and porridge are still where I left them, stuck to a piece of duct tape on the table in Node 1. I feel some small triumph, finding them still there. I open the packet of scrambled eggs with small scissors, an essential cutlery tool in space, along with a long-handled spoon to reach down into larger packets. I can’t resist the temptation to set some of my breakfast afloat so I can catch it by taking bites in mid-air. It’s bizarre how everything up here is strange and familiar at the same time. I know the name of every place and every object. I can look in any direction and see, in my mind, behind the bulkhead, the layout of the ventilation ducts that distribute air throughout the Station. I know that only here, in Node 1, the bulkhead is salmon-coloured, and that the two instruments for measuring combustion products, attached here with Velcro, are exactly where they should be, where any one of us would look for them if there were a fire alarm. When I want to phone Lionel, though, I have to ask Butch for help again, and he shows me how to use the VOIP phone.

Lionel has gone back to Moscow with the little group of friends and family, by now quite close-knit, who were there at the launch. When I call them from my crew quarters, they’re having supper in a Caucasian restaurant. I imagine them sitting in front of a mountain of khachapuri and shashlik. Was it really only two nights ago that we were together in Baikonur? Already, it all seems like a dream: quarantine, the goodbyes, the launch. I’ve half a mind to float over to the Soyuz, to breathe in that unmistakable odour, touch my Sokol suit. To embed the memory before it begins to fade away. I’ve never been good at remembering. The past slips off me as easily as my clothes.

International Space Station, 25 November 2014

‘Good morning, Houston, Huntsville, Munich, Tsukuba and Moscow! Expedition 42 is ready for the morning DPC!’ Butch exclaims in his Tennessee accent, his voice full of energy and enthusiasm, initiating my first workday in space. Up here, Butch goes to bed super early, just like he does on Earth, and he gets up at five in the morning to do two hours of sports before the day starts for most people. Even amongst astronauts, who are known for being dedicated to their work, Butch’s zeal stands out, fed by his uncommon religious fervour. Meticulous and precise, he made his radio call at exactly 7.05 as scheduled, not a second before and not a second later. Terry and I float nearby, in the Lab’s office corner. Along with the radio panel, there’s a sort of small table and lots of office supplies, from Post-it notes to pens, all of them stuck to the wall with Velcro. This is where, every working day, we’ll start our activities with the morning DPC, or the Daily Planning Conference, a conference for coordinating the day’s work with our control centres worldwide.

The first one to respond to Butch’s call is Jeannette, an astronaut colleague who is working today in Mission Control in Houston as CAPCOM, or capsule communicator, the person deputed to talk to the Space Station on Space-to-Ground. ‘The plan is on board,’ Jeannette begins, implying that the schedule on the timeline viewer is up to date. She quickly covers a variety of issues, asks questions, answers outstanding queries. Butch does most of the talking, since Terry and I don’t understand that much. Butch has been working with Mission Control for months, and they talk like any other group of people in the same business who periodically put their heads together for a progress update. We’ll catch up gradually, thanks to the handover sessions scheduled for this first week.

‘If there are no further questions, today’s PAYCOM is Crissy and she’s ready to talk to you from Huntsville,’ Jeannette concludes.

‘Thanks, Houston, we’ll speak to you throughout the day. Huntsville, good morning from Expedition 42!’ Butch starts talking with Crissy about activities that concern NASA’s experiments. The Space Station is first of all a research platform, where PAYLOAD is jargon for experiments and PAYCOM for the name of the communicator position in Huntsville. If the ISS were a lab on Earth, we’d say that Houston manages the infrastructure, making sure that the building doesn’t collapse and that there’s heating and hot water, while Huntsville oversees the implementation of research activities. These roles are fused in the same control centre for Columbus, the European lab, and the Japanese one, the JEM: with EUROCOM and J-COM we discuss both systems and experiments. Finally, Butch calls Moscow and hands over to Sasha. He, Anton and Yelena take part in the conference from the Service Module. It’s notable how long the Russians speak via radio, since TsUP relies less on the timeline viewer and other electronic documents for the exchange of information. For this reason, Butch deselects the Space-to-Ground channel 1, or S/G 1. It will be used for the rest of the day by the Russians to speak to Moscow, while we are left with channels S/G 2, S/G 3 and S/G 4.

For all of us, the first activity of the day is a review of emergency procedures. We tour the Space Station together, looking over the equipment: the ventilation shut-off valves, the large electric torches secured to every hatch, portable pressure gauges, fire extinguishers, emergency masks. When we finish our inspection, we review procedures and the role assignments – the ones we established in Building 9 during the drills last summer, in a terrestrial life that already seems very far away. Maybe it’s normal that our arrival at the Space Station only yesterday morning already seems like a distant memory. I’m constantly learning, absorbing images and sensations, finding new ways to move my body in space. My perception of time seems to be expanding.

At the same time, I’m frequently reminded by life on the Space Station that I’m a rookie. I continue to move around awkwardly, often setting myself up for a collision. While I’m floating in mid-air, it’s impossible to correct myself before I bash into something. Moving in the Lab is particularly difficult, because there’s not much free space on the walls. The equipment is set up everywhere, port, starboard, deck or overhead: thick cables, large connectors, drawers with protruding handles, laptops – each with a partially coiled cable and bulky converters. We also keep frequently used items in the cabin, just attached with some Velcro. Despite the apparent disorder, I know that everything is exactly where it should be – at least until I get there, all thumbs, and send things flying.

I’m also not comfortable yet with many simple everyday tasks. One colleague described the first week on board as an attempt to drink from a fire hose. I’d say the description is fitting. I’m perfectly trained on every single aspect of working on board, but only experience is going to teach me how to translate that knowledge into efficient execution. For now, I continue to bombard Butch with questions, and luckily he has endless patience.

International Space Station, 27 November 2014

No DPC today. My fourth day in space coincides with Thanksgiving Day, an American holiday that’s celebrated on board. I’ve always liked the idea of dedicating one full day in the year to being thankful. For my part, I’m very grateful that my mission has started out with such a calm week. Poor Butch didn’t have a real day off for a month when he first arrived.

Yesterday I performed my first experiment, ‘Blind and Imagined’. It wasn’t an easy debut, since I had to install a lot of equipment and laboriously calibrate four video cameras, then proceed to perform a long series of pre-planned movements that were recorded to evaluate motor control and balance. Not at all a difficult task after a few weeks in space, I imagine, but on my third day it was really challenging to manage this long and elaborate protocol. It all took much longer than planned, yet in the end we successfully captured all the data.

I hope the researchers will be able to draw useful conclusions about neurological adaptation in weightlessness that may one day help in the rehabilitation of motor and balance problems. As far as I’m concerned, it’s fun to observe, however unscientifically, the games my brain is playing with me. For example, if my feet are pointing towards the ceiling or one of the walls, then my head automatically decides that that’s the floor. It’s probably a useful adaptation, which tends to alleviate your sense of disorientation, but I have the impression that it also interferes with my mental map of the Space Station’s topography: when I need to turn into a side module, I often find myself going the wrong way, towards the JEM instead of Columbus, for example. Butch assures me that it will change in a few weeks, when I’m more familiar with the Station, and my brain learns to grasp visual references quickly. Anton, on the other hand, pokes fun at me: so why can’t I just stay on the floor? Well, maybe it’s because I’ve just arrived, but I’m having fun inhabiting space in its three dimensions. I can spend the rest of my life on the floor. I often eat floating at the ceiling, with my head down, like a bat. Anton maintains I’ll lose this vice, too, in a few weeks. We’ll see. I think Anton’s perspective is influenced by the internal organization of the Service Module, where he spends most of his time, and there’s a clear distinction between up and down, as if it were a terrestrial environment. The Russians would never think of putting the water dispenser on the ceiling, the crew quarters on the floor, a treadmill on a wall. But I love them like that.

Terry and I start right in today with our workouts, a daily requirement that we’ll continue right up to our re-entry. Without constant training, weightlessness causes not only muscular atrophy and cardiovascular deconditioning but also a significant loss of bone density, a sort of accelerated osteoporosis. We’re lucky to have extremely efficient gym equipment on board the ISS. The simplest machine, and the one I grapple with first, is the CEVIS: Cycle Ergometer with Vibration Isolation and Stabilization. It’s a stationary bike, though anyone looking for a seat will be disappointed: it makes no sense to sit down in weightlessness. So I put on my cycling shoes – the first shoes I’ve worn since the launch – attach my feet to the pedals, and tie a strap around my waist. CEVIS reveals itself to be as tough as I expected. No one was able to explain it to me exactly, but its mechanics are notoriously different to those of a bike on Earth, so much so that it’s hard to follow your usual training protocols. To help with my pedalling, I push myself down with my arms, holding on to the metal frame of the CEVIS. It’s all fixed on a wall rack, but with a trick: a vibration isolation system dampens the loads transmitted into the ISS structure. In the long run, this extends the structural life of the Station, and in the immediate term it meets the demands of the scientists, who definitely wouldn’t want vibrations, kicks or jolts to disturb their experiments. It is, of course, impossible to restrict all impact to the structure, and small disturbances do take place anyway for the simple reason that the Space Station is not an abstract mathematical point, but a body with a finite extension. That’s why, to be precise, we don’t speak of weightlessness but rather of microgravity. Of course, I can’t actually feel the difference. The small residual effects of gravity are registered only on sensitive accelerometers scattered throughout the Space Station.

Butch is our host for the Thanksgiving Day festivities. In Node 1, he’s prepared a feast of caramelized sweet potatoes, cornbread, mushrooms and, of course, smoked turkey. For dessert, there’s a cherry and blueberry cobbler. All of these are standard ISS food packets that Butch set aside during various on-board menu rotations, some of them freeze-dried, others ready-to-eat after a spell in the little oven. We were all amused to read out some of the more extravagant cooking suggestions from our Daily Summary, a document Houston sends every day to update the crew on the Space Station systems, answer outstanding questions and communicate the names of staff on duty in the various control centres. It ends with this phrase: ‘End of operational content’; then there are usually a few pages of cartoons and jokes the control centres hope will start our day with some hearty laughter. They’ve gone wild today, and Riccardo, the friend who put the finishing touches to our Soyuz logo, has managed to put in a made-up Thanksgiving menu from Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe that lends its name to the second book in Douglas Adams’ Trilogy in Five Parts.

We’ve done our part, too, to entertain our control-centre colleagues. In an honest match on Space-to-Ground between Butch, Terry and me, Butch was justly deemed to be the undisputed winner of the contest for the Best Turkey Imitator in Low Earth Orbit.

International Space Station, 29 November 2014

‘Always remember that we’re in a fish bowl up here,’ was one of Butch’s first warnings after our arrival. At first I wasn’t sure what he meant.

Was it because we were floating around like fish in water? No: it’s because the walls are like glass, and we’re always under observation. Every day, as soon as the morning DPC is finished, a wide-angle camera begins transmitting images from the Lab and Node 1 to Earth. Another one transmits images from JEM and, in the background, Columbus. There are cameras in Nodes 2 and 3 too, but since those areas are for living, hygiene and sports, the cameras are usually turned to the wall unless there’s some particular need or request. Today, however, the cameras are all off, or at least not transmitting anything to Earth. It’s the beginning of a quiet weekend in space.

I get up late, feeling rested and fit. Thankfully, I no longer feel that pressure in my head and I’ve stopped putting a sickbag in my pocket just in case. I get out of my sleeping bag and cross the Lab in my pyjamas. I’m beginning to manage my floating better: I still run into things every now and then, but not as often and in a more controlled way. I’m learning to be more precise with my pushes and I use only the force required, which is actually not that much. I remember how Cady tried a few years ago to describe weightlessness to an actress who was preparing to play an astronaut in space. ‘Imagine that you’re holding a strand of hair stretched between your fingers, and you’re using it to push yourself along, with a touch so light that the hair won’t break. That’s all you need to get yourself slowly floating towards the other part of a module.’

In the pantry, the box with the breakfast packets is almost empty, so I dive into the PMM to look for another pack. The Pressurized Multipurpose Module, which is the main stowage place of the ISS, was supplied to NASA by the Italian Space Agency. Butch has also ingeniously turned it into a ‘shower room’ by installing over the entrance a makeshift curtain that can be closed whenever necessary. A kindness towards me, maybe, but perhaps also so that he’ll feel comfortable. The PMM is a great stowage module, but it’s pretty cold and doesn’t have proper handrails. Sooner or later I’ll have to tell Butch that I prefer to wash with a bit less privacy in Node 3: it’s more comfortable and welcoming. Sure, it’s also very busy in there, at least during work hours, and everyone has their own views on how much flesh they want to see, especially when it comes to the opposite sex. I’ll bring it up later, when we’ve got a bit more used to each other. For now, it’s the PMM.

‘Dobry den, good morning, Samantha.’ Anton is suddenly behind me, floating in from the Russian segment in his usual good mood. We don’t see much of each other here on the Space Station. The cosmonauts work almost exclusively in the Russian segment, and we go there only rarely apart from evenings, when we often eat together and chat for a bit. After having spent weeks together in Baikonur and shared the intense experience of the launch, it’s strange to see so little of Anton. Now he’s come to bring back my spoon. Again. It flew off once already this week, inevitably heading for the Russian segment because of the way the air circulates, through the ducts towards the American modules and returning to the Russian modules through the open hatches. My spoon, like all lost items, floated with the airflow towards the first ventilation grid, in this case the one in the nearby FGB module, where Anton found it while cleaning. He hands me the precious utensil and goes back to his vacuum cleaner, floating nimbly in the funnelled tunnel that connects the American segment with the Russian one.

Saturday is housekeeping day for the whole of the Space Station, and I, too, will get busy with a vacuum cleaner later on. There’s nothing else scheduled for today, other than our weekly video conference with our families. The calls are not so different from common video calls on Earth, except that the audio goes through the Space-to-Ground radio on a privatized channel, configured so that no one on Earth can listen in. On board, it’s simply considered good space etiquette to avoid listening to others’ conversations.

So when I go through to the Cupola, I hurry to the radio panel and deselect channel SG/4, since Sasha is using it in another module to talk to his family. It will be my turn in about ten minutes, and I’d like to have my first video call with Lionel here. I log on to the computer and wait, enjoying the last of the dying sunset. Then suddenly I see it, far off towards the north: a green tongue of flame snaking along the horizon in a hypnotic dance, like the graceful, shimmering veil of a ballerina, fluttering with her sinuous moves.

It’s my first aurora borealis.