32.

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.

Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason

International Space Station, 31 December 2014

The clocks on the Space Station are set to UTC time, or solar time at meridian zero, and when they say 9.00 p.m., it’s time to celebrate the first New Year, the one in Moscow. As soon as we’ve all exchanged good wishes on board, Sasha, Yelena and Anton begin calling their families. It’s not an easy time right now in Russia, and for the past few weeks many have been worried about their savings. So all the more reason to be happy about a New Year’s wish from space! On the groaning table in the Service Module, a computer sits quietly showing The Irony of Fate, a romantic comedy from the Soviet era. This warm and reassuring film is shown on TV in Russia on the last day of every year, and we all know it, to the extent that we interrupt our conversations at certain points just to watch the best scenes. When it’s over, we bond in a sort of karaoke session with songs from the film interspersed with some from Adriano Celentano, and a bit of improv from anyone who feels like singing. At one point Sasha even goes off to get the guitar. We’re having the most discreet party on or off the planet: however loud we are, no one can hear us outside our metal shell. We’re enveloped in the hermetic silence of space.

Who knows how perplexed alien visitors might be if they passed near our solar system with fancy technologies worthy of a science-fiction film and, their curiosity piqued about our little planet, almost entirely covered by a thin layer of water, sent a group here to look around on New Year’s Eve itself – a moment with no particular significance, astronomically speaking. I can imagine them going back to their mothership, with an amazing propulsion system faster than the speed of light, and reporting: ‘The planet is dominated by microorganisms that have obviously had great success in nurturing a wide variety of complex species to satisfy their needs for mobility, nutrition and reproduction. The most notable of these species is a biped with almost no fur, found all over dry land. Every hour, the bipeds located in a specific longitudinal range abandon themselves to rituals of uncertain significance during which they consume ethyl alcohol and shoot into the sky generators of light, smoke and noise – a practice apparently unconnected to war. One particularly bizarre group consists of six bipeds locked in a metal container about 400 kilometres from the Earth. The absence of a system for generating artificial gravity might suggest that this is a structure for punitive detention. It could also be a means of isolation to protect others from contagious illness or other dangers. We have judged it prudent to avoid all contact with them.’

Actually, we’re not that isolated up here. Besides the usual Sunday video calls to our families, there was one on Christmas Day and there will be another one tomorrow. I’ve even been able to talk to my loved ones while we were flying over them, and I imagined our eyes meeting somewhere halfway between Earth and space. Lionel hung the Christmas tree from the ceiling in our apartment, imitating the one Butch put up a little while ago in one corner of the Lab, together with six stockings hung neatly over the hatch – one for each of us. During the past few weeks, whenever one of us has come across someone else’s favourite packet of food, we’ve put it into their stocking. Yelena adores cappuccino, for example, while Anton especially loves NASA’s meat dishes. I also put into everyone’s stocking some packets of my bonus food. My actual Christmas gifts of chocolates and sweets are still stuck down on Earth. They may turn out to be useful for our next Christmas in space – the Orthodox one. It will definitely be hard to repay Sasha, Yelena and Anton for the large beautiful foulard they gave me. Unfolded, it moved sinuously in the cabin like the legendary flying carpet. In that festive atmosphere, Butch gave me my golden Astronaut Pin. In accordance with NASA tradition, by making it to space I had earned the right to wear it.

When the clocks on board say eleven o’clock, we celebrate the arrival of 2015 on the European continent, and imagine the fireworks displays in Cologne, Rome and Paris. We then wait for the stroke of midnight on the Space Station, singing tunelessly and chatting away. There’s a buzzy cheer. Anton and I engage in a silly dance over one of the windows in the Service Module, hoping to greet the new year by dancing on top of the world. Then everyone starts to feel tired and not up for waiting till six in the morning, when Houston will welcome 2015, so we gradually break up for the night. I hug Yelena and Anton and, with the last ‘Happy New Year!’, I float away with my roommates to Node 2. I’m no longer clumsy, having learned to give just the right push to move smoothly through the Space Station. I feel at home up here now and, however hard I try, I can’t really imagine what it was like to walk, to feel my own weight or the pavement resisting my feet. My feet are losing their calluses. Soon they’ll be as soft as a newborn’s.

Before I get to my crew quarters, I treat myself to a first glimpse from the Cupola in this new year. Now that I’m more at ease with life and work on board the Space Station, now that I don’t struggle to keep up with the timeline, now that the postponement of the Dragon mission and the arrival of Christmas have thinned out our agenda, I have a bit more time to contemplate the beauty of our planet. Sometimes I stay in the Cupola for an entire orbit before going to bed. As the Space Station wraps the Earth in its embrace, I watch a silent film unfold before my eyes with an endless flow of seas and continents, mountains and deserts, glaciers and lakes, forests and cities. I can see for around 2,000 kilometres in all directions; further away, the curvature of the planet conceals oceans and lands behind the horizon. This view is restricted and vast all at once. Vast for human eyes, used as they are to being confined to the surface of the Earth, but restricted when compared to the dimensions of the planet. If the Earth were the size of a billiard ball, we would be little more than a few millimetres away, and could see less than a coin-sized patch of its surface.

I can’t deny it: the orbits I love most are those that fly over Europe. Sometimes we arrive from the northwest, and once we’ve crossed the ocean, we sight land first on Ireland’s southwestern peninsulas, those fingers sticking into the Atlantic, announcing the British Isles. We are soon over the continent, and then down towards the Mediterranean. At night it’s particularly moving: London and Paris, brilliant and unmistakable, call to one another from across the Channel; from Calais to Amsterdam and right up to Cologne, it’s all a dense web of warm light, and then the human presence thins out until, beyond the Alps, I make out the unique contours of Italy. The peninsula shines brightly, beautiful and still, like a sleeping princess. Sometimes, the Mediterranean is a black well; at other times it offers the sublime spectacle of the moon’s reflection, in a milky light of mysterious beauty that directs the attention of the entire universe to this patch of sea, as if Venus were just about to emerge from the waters. Other times we fly a little more to the east, between Greece and Turkey. I can almost hear Homer singing as one island after the other, one tongue of earth after another comes into view, bathed in the snowy light of the Moon. A little farther on I see Cairo, and from there the Nile steals the show, snaking towards the heart of Africa like a diamond necklace on a black dress. In the distance, the stars emerge from behind a band of spectral green, verging on yellow, which wraps the earth in a diaphanous veil. At times it’s wider, and sometimes it’s thinner, often delineated by a cleaner, more intense line that marks the transition into the blackness of space. Occasionally, this colour display continues higher up, with brilliant strips or splashes of violet suspended above the horizon. It’s the nightglow of the upper atmosphere. Practically invisible by day, when the planet appears to be wrapped only by a thin blue ring, the upper atmosphere reveals itself to the eyes at night, in a dance of photons emitted by molecules excited by solar radiation. It’s a symphony of colours that resounds silently when the Sun slides below the horizon, like a music box that continues to chime after the clock winder has gone.

Today, however, I see none of this. For several days we’ve been flying around the Earth in a condition called ‘high beta’, a reference to the letter of the Greek alphabet that indicates how our orbital plane is orientated with respect to the Sun. At the moment, the angle is so big that we are constantly in the light, as in the polar summer, when illuminated by the midnight sun. These are complicated days for the Space Station, because the continuous illumination puts the thermal regulation system to the test. It was quite warm today in the Russian segment. The rest of the Station stays at the usual 22° C, more or less, though not without effort: the controllers on the ground have to accurately manage the orientation of the external radiators and take other measures to guarantee a comfortable temperature for us and the equipment. Because of these restrictions, it would be impossible to welcome Dragon right now.

For us humans living up here, the high beta means that we haven’t seen a real night for days now. We’re flying along the terminator, the line on Earth that separates light from darkness: before us we have the weak Sun, low on the horizon, projecting long shadows, and behind us an uncertain twilight, never dark enough to reveal the stars or city lights. When there are sunsets, they linger, like passionate, reluctant farewells. But the Sun is teasing us: it hovers just a little below the horizon, and well before darkness falls over the planet, it shows up again to flood the world with fiery orange. Ironically, it’s in precisely this state, while we are prisoners of an eternal dusk, and our gaze is frustrated whether we turn it earthward or into space, that we ourselves are more easily seen from the surface of the planet, as a constantly illuminated dot.

With my physical eyes temporarily blinded, I find myself more often using my mind’s eye. Every now and again, while I gaze at the long shadows and the delicate, rose-tinted light of dusk, memories bubble up in front of me. The New Year’s Eve party bubbles are very few, recent and clear. I didn’t really celebrate until I was over thirty years old. Before then, I spent those long nights working feverishly in my parents’ hotel in a small mountain town. I had a carefree, independent childhood there, skiing in the winter and exploring the woods in the summer, dreaming up great adventures on every forest path, along every stream. Then it was middle school at the convent boarding school in Bolzano, where I studied hard and played hard, with all the energy of a twelve-year-old and an intensity heightened by the constant presence of girls my own age. I joined in every activity that was offered, and I was always begging for a few more minutes of recreation, for one more game. I played to win. In secondary school I discovered karate and fell in love with it. In order to train in the evenings, and so that I could escape from boarding school, where I was starting to feel constrained, in my third year I started to live Monday to Friday in a rented room. I rode my bicycle everywhere and dreamed of going to the States on an exchange programme. The following year, I did indeed travel with the organization AFS to the country of the Space Shuttle and Star Trek and came back with an even stronger desire to become an astronaut. Uncertain whether I should pursue engineering or physics at university, in my last year I transferred to another school in Trento with a greater focus on science. I continued to practise karate two or three times a week in Bolzano, returning to Trento by train late in the evening. The city centre was deserted, and I’d cross it at top speed on my bike to get back to the apartment I shared with three university students. And while my classmates were learning how to drive, I was taking scuba-diving and starting my first lessons in Russian.

International Space Station, 8 January 2015

Orthodox Christmas also came and went without any deliveries from Father Christmas – or, more appropriately, Ded Moroz, Grandfather Frost, Russia’s traditional bringer of gifts. We’ve been waiting for him for some time now, on board a Dragon. On the other hand, this latest delay has given Terry, Butch and me some free time to join our Russian colleagues in a rather particular in-flight call: Father Yoav has put together a small choir from the monastery at Sergiev Posad, and they delight us from TsUP with a short Christmas concert, live on Space-to-Ground. At one point they even sing a moving rendition of a famous Italian Christmas song, ‘Tu scendi dalle stelle’, with perfect Italian pronunciation.

If Dragon had arrived in December, these weeks between one Christmas and the next would have seen us whirling around frenetically. Dragon’s mission lasts for a month, and in those few weeks, the loading and unloading of tonnes of material must be handled with great precision, and a great many experiments must be completed and the resulting samples sent back to Earth on Dragon itself. As things have turned out, this intense period has been delayed for a few weeks, so that it will overlap with other major events such as the departure of ATV and the spacewalks. In other words, we’re in for a couple of very challenging months.

In the meantime, we’ve had a relatively calm holiday season, and our schedule has been full of routine jobs. Thinking back on all the inspections, I’d say we’ve had the Space Station serviced. We’ve checked the condition of the emergency equipment, for example, and we’ve also collected water samples and measured the speed of the air flow around the ventilation grids in order to identify any clogged filters. It was also my job to measure the noise levels on the Station over twenty-four hours. We know very well that the noisiest area is Node 3, because of all the regenerative equipment for recycling urine and removing carbon dioxide, and for producing oxygen through water electrolysis. If you add to that someone running on T2, the noise becomes so deafening that the doctors recommend wearing some sort of noise protection, such as earplugs or headphones. I remind myself to be more diligent in the new year. Before now, I’ve only worn protection when I was the one running: custom headphones made for my ear canal, which really soften external noise while still allowing me to listen to music or film audio.

Music has also become part of my shower ritual, which now takes place in Node 3, in a secluded corner behind the toilet. Of course, it’s not very secluded if someone wants to go to the Cupola, which is right next to it, but I usually take my shower at the end of the day, right after the evening DPC, when I won’t be in the way. We say ‘take a shower’, but don’t imagine that we have running water. You fill a bag with warm water from the dispenser, and then you put some on a sort of disposable hand towel, and rub your skin with it. On-board supplies allow us a fresh towel every other day, and the same goes for the change of underwear. All things considered, I feel clean enough, but there’s no doubt that the shower up here is a rather modest pleasure. Still, it’s a pleasure, so much so that I sometimes linger longer than necessary, when nobody needs to access the Cupola. I like the idea of ending the workday like this, with the scent of soap, a view of the Earth gliding past the large windows, and a few songs. I always begin with the same one, Paolo Conte singing ‘Bartali’. It makes me feel really cheerful.

It’s a pain, though, to wash your hair, and the results are not all that satisfying, since it’s very difficult to remove the dirt and shampoo without a good rinse. That’s why I’m happy to have fairly short hair, though even styles like mine bring their challenges. My colleagues with long hair can just tie it back, and they don’t necessarily have to cut their hair up here. I have to cut mine periodically, and so the salon Chez Terry opened its doors in Node 3 on the first day of the new year. Terry has been duly trained for this delicate task. A few months ago I asked Alicia to schedule a training session at my hairdresser’s in Houston. Terry played along. Nim, my hairdresser, immediately recognized his natural talent, and Terry took his responsibility with all due seriousness: Nim takes about twenty minutes to cut my hair, yet Terry took two and a half hours. It’s true that things up here are quite complicated. I’m sure that even a professional hairdresser would find it difficult to style hair that doesn’t lie flat on the head and to hoover up the strands as soon as they’re cut. Besides, Terry feels the weight of his great responsibility: he’s convinced that I’m some sort of rock star in Italy, and that Italian women are all going to want my style. Actually, he might become famous as the inventor of my haircut: ‘It’s the Terry.’ I tried to explain to him how Italian women are some of the most elegant on the planet, and they’d hardly be likely to take lessons in style from someone who doesn’t even carry a hairbrush in her suitcase. But Terry is a man on a mission – and I’d say the result is more than respectable, so much so that for days I’ve been getting emails full of compliments. I have noticed, though, that these are only coming from our mutual friends …

There’s been a huge influx of emails over the holiday period. Not only have I been exchanging holiday greetings, I’ve also tried to send my family and friends photos of the personal objects they sent up here with me with the Earth’s horizon in the background. I wanted to take these pictures as soon as I could, and then put the things back in the Soyuz so they wouldn’t be left behind in the event of an emergency evacuation. In the first few weeks, though, I was reluctant to take them out of their sealed bag. These things are precious, both in sentimental terms and often also materially, and some are no bigger than a coin. It wouldn’t take much to lose one: a moment of distraction while they float in the Cupola, a moment of looking away to change a setting on my camera, and then a ring, a small medal or a bracelet could float away and get swallowed up in a crack and disappear behind a rack for ever. Yes, possibly for ever, since there are definitely hidden corners on board that won’t be seen or touched until the Space Station has had its day, and its final duty is to slip down through the atmosphere, disintegrate and burn up. Bits of it will surely land on Earth, or hopefully in the sea, since the debris is expected to fall into the ocean on re-entry. Maybe that lost ring or medal, having survived the flames and the impact, will be found among the debris. Who knows what story it might tell an explorer who dredged it up one day? And what a fabulous circular story it would be if that lost object were the piece of stromatolite Lionel gave me, a sedimentary structure deposited over the young Earth by the first and simplest forms of microbial life on our planet. Billions of years later, I’m taking a picture of it against a background of that blue atmosphere, which the stromatolite helped to enrich with oxygen.

The nights are back. The stars have appeared once more, and with them the sparkling cities, their intricate strands of light mapping out the human presence on the continents, so difficult to make out during the day. I’ve missed the nights so much. There is a particular optical illusion I love to indulge in when we’re flying over the ocean, and the clouds are glowing with the reflected light of the Moon. When I’ve been in the Cupola for a while, with my head down towards the planet, for anyone looking in from outside, the Earth is my sky, a sky full of swiftly coursing clouds. At the same time, space acquires depth, and I’m immersed in a black sea, swimming with the stars. All I have to do to encourage this illusion, I’ve learned, is look towards the Russian segment of the Space Station, with its irregular shape and rugged features. Then the Station becomes a vessel from antiquity, worn out by the years, yet fearless, and I slip through the darkness in this vessel, mapping my way by the stars, as in ancient times. What a presence the night sky must have been for our ancestors, when any light produced by humans was faint and dim, when you navigated by the constellations, and their rising and their setting fixed the rhythms of life and work. What awe, what questions the firmament must have raised, what a sense of wonder sprang from it, taking shape in myth, poetry, philosophy – and eventually in science. Science thrives on questions. It has no answers that cannot be improved upon. With slow and patient labour, it alleviates humanity’s material sufferings, affords us longer and more comfortable lives, more sophisticated and efficient ways of living together. But it doesn’t eliminate the darkness. On the contrary. As light is shed in an increasingly wide patch of knowledge, the border line to the darkness surrounding us only expands. The more we learn, the bigger the mystery grows. There’s nothing arrogant about science. It observes and measures, hazards explanations and predictions, makes errors and corrects itself. But it also lucidly embraces limits and uncertainty. It refuses to surrender to the inexplicable, but it also knows that the road to complete understanding may be so long that it’s foolish to imagine an end to it.

For those who are tempted to presume they can explain everything or who entertain the illusion that they’re in control of their own lives: the firmament is a teacher both humbling and consoling. Perhaps it is something like the relationship the religious have with God. I haven’t considered myself a believer for a long time. The faith I inherited did not survive my adolescence, and I’d have a very hard time today imagining God as a person or religion as anything different from a human construct, a product of human history. This doesn’t upset me: I have faith in secular ethics, and I’ve seen virtue and nastiness displayed more or less equally, whether people are religious or not. But it’s true that I envy the religious their ease in making contact with the transcendent. Those who, like me, don’t attend church, synagogue, mosque or temple should at least visit the vault of heaven as often as possible.