31.

This story seems insignificant. In truth, it was a great adventure. I saw lucidly in that room what I could never have discovered on a visit to the farm as a tourist.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras

International Space Station, 2 December 2014

Up here, when I wake up, I’m already at work: all I have to do is stretch out my arm and open up my laptop. There are about twenty of these Station support computers, as they’re called, distributed throughout the modules. They’re normal PCs running on Windows, and we use them to look at the timeline viewer, procedures, stowage notes, to send and receive email, make phone calls, manage our photos – in short, for everything that isn’t strictly command and control of the Space Station. There’s a second laptop in my crew quarters, isolated from the on-board network, and it allows a remote connection to a computer in Houston to access the internet. It often has issues, and when it does work, it’s agonizingly slow. When it’s at its worst, it can take ten minutes to write a 140-character tweet. I’ll type a few words and then I’ll write an email or read a document on the other computer, while the characters in the tweet appear in groups of three or four letters.

This morning, the timeline viewer tells me not to eat, drink or brush my teeth before I collect samples of my saliva. I prepared the swabs yesterday and I’m very familiar with the procedure, since I did this several times on Earth, each time for one-week periods. I put the first swab in my mouth and open the door of my crew quarter to signal that I’m up. Sasha lives across from me, in the overhead crew quarter. His door is closed, so he could be in the Russian segment already, or else still sleeping. There’s more than an hour to go before the DPC. Terry lives in the starboard crew quarter near my feet. When the doors are open, we could be roommates talking to each other from bed, or rather, our sleeping bags. It’s a bit like being in a university dorm.

‘Mmmmm,’ I say to his ‘Good morning,’ pointing to my mouth and miming the number four with my fingers. The first swab has to stay under my tongue for four minutes.

‘Ah, OK.’ We don’t all do the same experiments. Terry’s not taking part in this one, which is looking at how disruptions to astronauts’ immune systems renders them more susceptible to infection.

Some of the activities on the timeline viewer are written in pink to indicate that the schedule is flexible: I can do them some other time if I want to, as long as I don’t get in anyone else’s way. Sport is a good example. It’s always pink, and there are two and a half hours of it, split between cardio training on the cycle or treadmill, and resistance training on ARED, a weight-lifting machine. Easy, you’ll say, to lift weights in weightlessness. There’s a catch, though, and you can see it in two large vacuum cylinders that provide an adjustable load, up to 300 kg for some types of exercise. This makes ARED an efficient countermeasure, allowing you to compensate for the effects of a life with no significant physical effort. So once a day, I grab my gym shoes and set up ARED for my training session. My routine always begins with a few variations on the squat, perhaps the most important exercise for limiting the loss of bone mass in critical areas such as your hips and pelvis. When you perform a squat on ARED, not only does the bar move up, but the platform you’re standing on moves downwards. In order to protect the ISS and any experiments from vibration, the entire machine is free to oscillate and slides on special tracks. The result is an undulating movement which can be somewhat disorientating, so much so that at the beginning I often had a sensation of falling forwards. Now I’m much more used to it, and only somewhat worried that one of the cables for load transfer has been broken a lot recently. I watch it constantly to make sure it’s sliding freely in its track, and when I’m finished, I look to make sure there aren’t any damaged fibres. We’re using up the spare cables and won’t receive any others for several weeks.

I’m still very inexperienced and I often struggle to keep up with the red line that runs along our timeline viewer, marking the inexorable passage of time. Luckily, Butch is always ready to help. I usually don’t need much, just some reassurance that I’m doing the right thing. One of his ‘Looks good!’ saves me from checking the procedure again and allows me to go on to the next thing confidently. I’m constantly thanking him. ‘You bet,’ he says as he turns to float back to his work. ‘We all need confirmation cues at the beginning.’ There it is: confirmation. Confirmation that my brain is working well, that I’m not about to cut power to an experiment by removing the wrong plug, for example. I feel more insecure up here. I don’t trust my memory, and I’ll check a number I’ve just read three times. Can it be true what they say, that we’re all a bit stupid in space? Yet my WinSCAT the first of a series of monthly tests I’ll take on board for objective measurements of various cognitive abilities, gave results more or less similar to the pre-flight ones. It registered only slightly slower on my reaction time, but I think that’s to do with my having been floating in front of the keyboard rather than sitting solidly on a chair. So why all the uncertainty? Is it because of the huge responsibility I feel on my shoulders? Mostly likely it’s just temporary overstimulation. My brain is learning how to manage geometry and movement in a situation no human or living being on Earth ever experienced before the space age. Neither millions of years of evolution nor thirty-seven years of life have prepared me for weightlessness. All the same, a half century of spaceflights has taught us that humans are adaptable. I just have to be patient. While my brain is busy changing me into a space creature without my having to think much about it, I have to accept it’s being a little less prompt and timely in remembering a number I’ve just read – and reread it as a precaution, because now this extraordinary human outpost in space is also in my hands.

Float here and there, and the day passes in a second. After the evening DPC I go and rummage through my things in search of a large t-shirt with ‘The Answer Is 42’ written on it. It’s my birthday gift for Terry, who’s turning forty-seven today. It’s always good to have an extra t-shirt, I thought, and this breaks the monotony of the single-colour cotton t-shirts that make up part of our weekly workday livery. We’re going to celebrate in the Service Module, which has become our gathering place for crew dinners. Its snug, homely atmosphere, the yellow fabric on all the walls and the simple fact of being able to float around a table makes the Service Module the perfect place to spend good times together.

International Space Station, 3 December 2014

Along with my saliva samples, today I’ll be giving science five phials of my blood. There’s in fact a wide range of blood biological markers that are very useful in understanding the process of adaptation to weightlessness. Terry has been asked to assist me and he is floating, still drowsy, in Columbus, where we keep the blood draw supplies. There’s a large square bag on the floor full of equipment for which there’s no room inside the racks. I slip my legs under the bungees that are anchoring it to the floor and then move them up over my quadriceps in such a way that I can almost stay ‘seated’. After a few clumsy attempts, we succeed in getting our first sample; it’s lucky that I have two arms! Terry and I organize the phials on a piece of duct tape and float off to breakfast and the DPC.

The phials have to coagulate for half an hour and then spend another half hour in the centrifuge before they are ready for the freezer. There are three freezers on board, and keeping them at -94° C takes plenty of energy, so there are very strict time limitations on opening them. Wearing very thick gloves to protect your hands from the cold, you open one of the long trays, and with the immediate release of a cloud of condensation, the sixty-second countdown begins. The procedure tells you exactly where to put the samples: which freezer, which dewar, which tray and which tray section. My biggest fear is that I’ll make some mistake with these tiny details. A sample in the wrong place, and then someone – it could even be me – will have to look for it eventually, and that’s if there’s even time before the designated re-entry vehicle leaves. Or maybe it will only be someone on Earth who realizes that a sample is missing. Result: loss of science. The three words no one wants to hear.

How are you sleeping? How’s your appetite? Digestion? Have you taken any medicines since the last time we spoke? I really have nothing to complain about – I’m feeling really well – but Brigitte bombards me with questions. It’s her job. We see each other once a week for the so-called ‘private medical conference’: fifteen minutes to talk about any possible health problems, but also about the workload and anything else an astronaut wants to discuss with someone who’s obliged to keep the information confidential, unless of course there’s a problem that would impact the mission. In that case, the flight director would be notified immediately.

Brigitte also asks whether I’ve noticed any problems with my eyes. No, and I haven’t mentioned anything to worry her, but the question doesn’t surprise me. For several years now, they’ve been paying particular attention to our eyes on the Space Station, since it’s been shown that many astronauts experience a loss of visual acuity. At present no one knows why this happens, though there are various theories to do with greater cranial pressure and maybe a genetic predisposition, which would explain why the problem affects some astronauts and not others. To discover the cause, we’ll check our eyes with a variety of instruments, from the ophthalmoscope, which takes photos of the retina, to optical coherence tomography, which makes a 3D eye scan.

Terry and I are helping each other out today with the eye ultrasound, aided by a specialist on Earth who instructs us remotely on how to position the probe. I’ve discovered that in space we don’t need the gel typically used in ultrasounds to facilitate wave transmission: we can just use water. Terry lets a little out of a packet and the bubble it forms floats in midair. I approach it, until it touches my eye. As long as I move smoothly, the water stays there, as a gelatinous mass would do on Earth.

This evening I get to the Cupola in time to see us fly over Italy. At last! I spy the alpine valleys of Trentino, where I grew up, while Milan, the city where I was born, is a big yellow mark blurred by the thin layer of clouds over the Po Valley. The rest of the boot is neatly outlined by a filigree of light: if the Earth were an elegant lady in an evening gown, Italy would be her gaudiest jewel. My gaze embraces the whole of the country. There are the places I’ve lived in: Naples, Lecce, Foggia, Treviso; regions I’ve flown over in my jet at 300 m in altitude and over 700 kilometres per hour. Now I’m gliding along the Appenines at 28,000 kilometres per hour, but I have no sense of speed. Up here, there’s no landscape nearby to speed past – only oceans and faraway continents, which unfurl beneath me languidly and majestically.

International Space Station, 8 December 2014

Drinking coffee in the morning is one of life’s pleasures, both in space and on Earth. Before the morning DPC, I fill my packet with water from the dispenser and take it along, together with my tools, when I float towards my first activity of the day. There’s a running joke on the Space Station to the effect that yesterday’s coffee becomes tomorrow’s coffee, a light-hearted reference to the water recycling process. And it’s true: even urine gets this treatment, thanks to the complex equipment in the rack under the toilet. The non-recyclable residue ends up in a large cylindrical canister, which is periodically emptied into one of three tanks on ATV that arrive on the ISS with water for the Russian cisterns. It’s strictly for the Russian ones, since their water is sterilized with silver ions, whereas NASA’s water contains iodine. There is always some danger of emptying the urine canister into the wrong tank, one containing potable water not yet transferred on board. That’s why I always check at least three times to make sure I’ve connected the transfer hose in the right spot. The canister is one of the most massive things you have to handle on board. It weighs nothing up here, but it retains its mass and inertial properties. In other words, if you gave it a shove to make it float across the FGB module, which is long and narrow like a tunnel, it would tend to maintain a stable direction and I could let myself be pulled along, like a witch on her broom. There’s a danger that this could be highly amusing. Hypothetically speaking, of course.

I have to admit to some guilt, and confess that I am contributing nothing to today’s water recycling. All in a good cause, however: I’ve given my pee to science. I’m taking part in various experiments that require me to take urine samples over a twenty-four-hour period. It’s one of the things I was a bit nervous about, since the logistics of collecting urine in weightlessness are not as straightforward as filling a plastic cup on Earth. I even tried it out in Baikonur a few days before we left, using some collection bags I’d been given in Houston for practice. Luckily they work really well, both down there and up here in space.

This evening, I finally called Mary and Stacey to say hello. The strange thing is that, because they live in Houston, a call from space is like a local phone call. After many failed attempts, I realized that the dialling code I was using wasn’t necessary; you needed it only for calls outside the United States. I was, in fact, using the international dialling code. How strange to think locally from up here! Even stranger to hear a voice saying mechanically, ‘What’s your emergency?’ In my attempts to reach Mary and Stacey, I omitted one of the zeros and ended up calling 9-1-1.

International Space Station, 10 December 2014

I can think of nothing worse than having to chase after liquids or solids floating away from you while you’re using the loo, and nothing more embarrassing than having to confess to your own crew that they might experience a particularly unpleasant close encounter. Tales of legendary mishaps of this sort have circulated, and I’m guessing that some of them may even be true. When I heard Butch go into the bathroom right after me, and then shout ‘The toilet insert!’, along with one of his polite fake swear words, I knew I’d made the second most embarrassing mistake. Above the toilet’s solid-waste container there’s a small seat with a lid, which forms a sort of miniature w.c. Since you don’t really sit down, almost everyone finds it easier to lift the seat up, and push the buttocks directly over the circular hole underneath, the opening to a short tube that goes into the container. At the end of the tube, there’s a semi-rigid curtain, which allows you to push something into the container and prevents it from coming back out. Last but not least, there’s a single-use insert, a small bag made of thick, clear plastic punched with numerous holes that allow the air to suck things in. Besides leaving the bathroom ‘clean enough to eat on’, as one Space Shuttle commander is reported to have said, space etiquette requires you to put in place a new insert for the next user before you leave the toilet. I hadn’t done that, and Butch didn’t notice in time.

‘I’m sorry, Butch!’ I shout through the toilet door, hoping he can hear me above the noise of the fan.

Happily, Butch recovers quickly from his initial surprise. ‘Oh, don’t worry. I have two little girls, so I’m used to putting my hands in poo.’ It’s true what they say: parenthood teaches you everything.

I wait for Butch to emerge so I can apologize again, and then I return to the sample collection I’m working on. The experiment is called Microbiome and it’s a study of the non-human inhabitants of the ISS. I’m not talking about aliens, which must be well hidden if they’re here, but the billions of microorganisms that share our space up here, many of which live in our intestines and impact our state of health. Other than taking samples of blood, urine and faeces, Microbiome requires that we swab the surfaces of various components that get touched frequently, such as the shutter knobs in the Cupola, for example. While I’m in there, I sneak a peek out of the window. We’re over an expanse of water, and the map shows that we’re about to fly over Patagonia. It’s one of my favourite places, with the snow-capped Andes and lakes nestled in the valleys, their water painted an intense turquoise by the fine glacial sediment. I take a couple of photos, disappointed that the southern tip, the famous Tierra del Fuego, is covered by clouds again. I’ll have to look out for it another time – I still have five months left.

International Space Station, 13 December 2014

The radio is quiet on weekends, for hours at a time. I’m tempted to say that silence reigns: I no longer hear the continuous hum of the dozens of pumps and fans that are left on. I only notice them when I realize how impossible it is to talk from one module to another. There is an advantage, in some ways: the continuous hum covers voices so that you can actually have a private conversation with your family or the flight surgeon without necessarily shutting yourself up in your crew quarters. To escape passing traffic, we often use one of the computers in the side modules, such as the JEM or Columbus. My favourite spot is in the JEM, not far from the two round windows in the endcone, and I often take my video calls in there with my feet under a bungee on a wall, doing a yo-yo – with gentle nudges, of course. More vigorous ones would cause Houston some alarm, as it’s monitoring the Space Station’s acceleration. I’d get a call for sure, even on Saturday. You don’t play games with microgravity on ISS.

Every now and again, we call on Saturdays to get remote help with our cleaning. Before removing the panels and running the vacuum over filters in a given module, we ask Houston to turn off the smoke detectors in order to prevent false alarms. We could do it ourselves, but the controllers willingly give us a hand. Working on Saturday must be pretty boring for them. CAPCOM usually calls a few minutes later to confirm that things are switched off, announcing, ‘The crew is prime for detecting smoke.’ In other words: make sure there’s at least one human nose around until the detectors are turned back on.

Although it is Saturday, we have work to do, since Dragon will arrive in just a few days. For me, this is an important moment: for the first time after all the years of simulation I am at the controls of the real robotic arm, the SSRMS. Right now, it is a powerful and imposing presence outside the windows of the Cupola. I’ve lost track of how many pictures I’ve taken. It’s so beautiful out there, outlined against the horizon. My job is to move the end effector of the SSRMS from a distance of 5 m to the grapple fixture designated for this exercise, and to stop the moment when I would press the trigger to initiate capture. Butch takes the controls for a few seconds and, returning a favour I’ve done him earlier, he dutifully misaligns the SSRMS relative to the grapple fixture while I look away so I won’t see the movement his hands make on the commands. It would make it too easy: I have to figure out which corrections are necessary from the alignment cues on the target, which is drawn around the grapple pin, and I have to make the corrections in motion as I approach. Butch says he’s satisfied with the starting position and cedes the controls.

I’m a bit nervous. This is not a simulation. There are 14 metres of robotic arm moving outside. It’s one of the most critical components on the Space Station, essential for grappling cargo vehicles and for many of the repairs in EVA. As soon as I deflect the manual controllers, I find to my relief that the SSRMS is a well-domesticated beast: it moves tamely, following my commands, and is much more stable than the simulator arm, which accustomed me to managing much more significant oscillations. Train hard, fight easy.

International Space Station, 18 December 2014

‘The plan is not on board,’ CAPCOM told us at last night’s DPC. What she meant was that we shouldn’t trust the timeline viewer, because it would be modified overnight. Dragon’s launch, set for tomorrow, has been put back to January, and all our activities now have to be rescheduled. What a shame! All my Christmas gifts for the crew were already in the bowels of Dragon, in my Crew Care Package. I’ll have to explain that Father Christmas ran into some difficulties.

I spent the greater part of the morning doing repair work on a piece of failed hardware, and now it’s time for a run. T2 isn’t very different to a common treadmill on Earth, apart from two things. The first is that it’s fixed to a wall, on a vibration isolation system. The second is the harness, with two rings at hip level to attach one end of two variable-length chains. The other end is fixed to the frame of the treadmill, just on the side of the running belt. These chains stop me from floating away at my first step, but they also include an elastic segment that makes running possible. By adjusting the length of the chains, I can regulate the force with which they press me onto the running belt. At the moment I’m about 60 per cent of my normal body weight, and the harness is there to distribute that load between my hips and my shoulders, based on the same principles of a good backpack. In fact, I find myself shifting the load quite often, alternately relieving my hips or my shoulders. After three weeks of training, I think I’ve come to a final judgement: I do not get on with the T2 harness. This strange kind of running, however, on legs that don’t weigh anything, is extremely important not only for cardiovascular conditioning, but also for maintaining bone density. With every impact of your foot on the platform, a regulating signal is sent to the bone-building cells, the osteoblasts, and this helps to maintain the delicate balance between production and destruction of bone tissue. So I run faithfully, four or five times a week, distracting myself from the bothersome harness with an episode of Battlestar Galactica, a series I requested be sent to me on board, one episode a day. An excellent choice!

After my run, I decide to treat myself to a new pair of trousers. I have six pairs of tactical pants – very practical – for the whole of the mission, in either khaki or army green. They’re waterproof and have lots of pockets to which NASA applied strips of Velcro so they can be kept closed. It’s incredible how easy it is to lose things up here. All it takes is for a pocket to open up or a moment of distraction – and that moment may later cost you a lengthy search. The other day I was looking for a torque wrench. It wasn’t that small, but after a while I suddenly realized it was right there, floating half a metre in front of me. My eyes were focusing at a greater distance, on the walls a few metres further away: I’m not used to looking for things in midair.

Whenever I can, I duck into the Cupola, sometimes just for a quick look and sometimes to snap photos. The computer map shows our position and our ground track, but I like to try and guess. Naturally I know my way around my small, beloved Europe – which we overfly in about ten minutes – and I easily find my bearings when my gaze settles on lakes, islands or peninsulas with characteristic shapes. But sometimes I try in vain to find known reference points on an immense expanse of earth or sea. All the same, the Earth is becoming more familiar to me with every passing day, and I greet its colours, textures and patterns like old friends when they show up on the horizon. How could you fail to recognize the blue of the Caribbean Sea, with its infinite gradations of indigo, emerald, turquoise and cobalt? Or those cathedrals of rock and snow, the Himalayas, with their frozen lakes? Or the soft brown undulating texture of the Namibian desert? Some orbits fly almost entirely over the oceans. Then I spend a long time looking at the horizon while it spews up sea and clouds, sometimes of a creamy consistency, other times light as a dusting of icing sugar, at the mercy of the winds as they create straight roads or swirling spirals, clear faultlines or smoky transitions in sharp chips or soft white puffs. Atolls peep out between the clouds, remote and fabled, delicate and evanescent, and perhaps never trodden by human feet.

International Space Station, 22 December 2014

Activities on the Space Station follow each other in quick succession, and as long as they’re not accompanied by an emergency alarm, they are all carried out with equal meticulousness and attention, but in an unruffled manner. This goes also for in-flight calls with important individuals, the ones we call ‘VIP events’. On Earth, these kinds of events are preceded by days of frenzy on the part of everyone involved. Up here, however, all we get is a short, written briefing, and we’ll find a block of ten minutes on our timeline viewer outlined in blue to indicate that that is a fixed activity that must happen at a precise time. It’s no different from making an in-flight call with a school, for example. It’s how it went earlier today for the traditional Christmas wishes that the President of the Republic addressed to all Italian military serving abroad – plus me, in low Earth orbit. I was touched when the President, perhaps a little emotional himself, dropped my formal title and told me, ‘I’m calling you Samantha, because you’re Samantha for all of us Italians.’ The call, which was only audio for me, ended as usual after only a few minutes. I had just enough time to restow the camera, microphone and flag, and float away to get the tools for my next task. That’s how it is on the Space Station: each activity is like a soap bubble. Once it’s had its time, it disappears without a trace, making way for the next one.

And yet, I think back to those words, spoken by someone who is certainly not inclined, by role or by culture, to easy hyperbole. I’m not immune to vanity and I’m certainly gratified by so much affection. But for the first time, I find myself dreading what’s to come, my re-entry on Earth and life after the space mission, which I’ve never wanted to think about much. Will I be recognized on the street? Will my country be the place on Earth where I’m no longer anonymous, where I’m the subject of gossip, where I’m spontaneously offered unsolicited favours, perhaps in exchange for a selfie? Will the price of my space voyage be a life of minor celebrity, and will I be continually unsettled by never-ending accolades, propositions and requests, as if it weren’t already hard enough, even without the traps of celebrity, to lead a centred, virtuous life respectful of others? ‘Celebrity is an illness that always leaves a scar,’ wrote Oriana Fallaci at the time of the Apollo missions.fn1

At any rate, no use thinking about that now. We’ve got huge sacks of rubbish to take to ATV, and Butch is already waiting for me.