35.

And then I fix my eyes on those lights

that seem pin-pricks,

yet are so vast in form

that earth and sea are really a pin-prick

to them: to whom man,

and this globe where man is nothing

are completely unknown

Giacomo Leopardi, The Wild Broom

International Space Station, 10 February 2015

Illuminated by the newly risen Sun, Dragon stands out clearly against the Earth, which is still cloaked in darkness. I’m tempted to say it’s hanging off the end of the robotic arm SSRMS, but ‘hanging’ seems a misleading term to me: it smacks too much of gravity. I could let Dragon go – actually I’ll do that in a few moments, and it certainly won’t fall to Earth. It will keep floating with us on a nearly identical orbit to ours, only about 10 metres lower.

Here we go: I push the release button, which loosens the firm grip of the end effector. Dragon is now no longer of a piece with the Space Station; it’s an independent satellite of the Earth. Soon it will start moving on its own relative to us, obeying the inexorable laws of orbital mechanics, at first imperceptibly, and then more and more noticeably. We won’t wait for it to happen, though. I pull the left-hand controller towards me very gently, in order to avoid oscillations, and the robotic arm starts moving, slowly, slowly. When I have visual confirmation that the end effector is clear of the pin, I move the SSRMS away with greater speed, leaving Dragon to float on its own.

There’s something unreal about seeing it out there, with its two clearly distinct parts: the unpressurized section, a chunky white can with two extended solar panels, and on top of that, the habitable compartment, bell-shaped and gradually narrowing towards the hatch; we were floating in it until only yesterday. There are almost two tonnes of cargo inside, all neatly packed, the result of a month’s intense activity here on the Space Station and thousands of hours’ work done by many people on Earth, most of whom we don’t know. Who knows how many eyes are trained on Dragon right now, watching its departure with a sense of involvement that goes far beyond simple curiosity? And how many will be following its re-entry through the atmosphere, waiting anxiously for news of its splashdown? For our part, we’d be very interested to hear what the specialists think of our work. We hope it will be something like, ‘Wow, look how well Dragon is packed! Not a single loose strap, not a bag out of place.’

‘Indeed! And the work Terry and Butch did on the hatch with tape? Exceptional! Not a drop of water got in after splashdown.’

Well, you’d have to be a fly on the wall in the meeting room, since if there are any loose straps or untidy bags, they might not tell us. I get the sense that the people communicating with us from Earth are quick to compliment us but reluctant to point out our mistakes unless they have some immediate impact on the mission. It’s not that they’re obsequious – definitely not – but I think they try hard not to make us feel guilty or embarrassed. They don’t want us to worry. I understand this, and it’s no doubt a good thing, but sometimes I feel like they say, ‘Great work!’ too often. In any case, eventually we’ll be getting honest feedback, ultimately from the astronaut evaluation board, after the mission.

‘Go for Dragon depart,’ I say to Terry. I’ve retracted the robotic arm, and it’s now at a secure distance of 4.5 metres, to judge by sight. Terry sends the departure command, and Dragon turns on its thrusters for its first departure burn. It moves slowly against the background of the western Pacific, over which the Sun is unfurling its light. Only yesterday it was still part of the Space Station, and now it’s an inaccessible shell, a delivery from space to Earth, carefully prepared by the only human beings not currently located on the planet.

I must say, I actually feel some relief watching Dragon leave for Earth.

The past month has been a sort of mission within the mission, with long working hours. I’m always quite tired at night here on the Space Station, maybe because we have such regimented days, and maybe also because of the elevated CO₂ levels. But lately I’m exhausted by the end of the day. For Butch and me, the final surprise came on Sunday morning when we removed an FPS (Fan Pump Separator), a critical component providing circulation of air and cooling water in the EMU. That FPS had failed during a routine test of the suit the week before, and we had to send it to Earth urgently on Dragon so the issue could be investigated.

Butch and I aren’t new to this work: last December we replaced the FPS in the suit Terry will use in a few weeks. It’s a delicate matter: for reasons that are not entirely clear, these units have been breaking down frequently. The idea of replacing them in orbit would probably have made EVA specialists faint from shock a few years ago, when all suits were serviced on Earth by highly trained technicians working in a clean room. When the Space Shuttle was retired, the possibility of regularly rotating the suits disappeared with it. They had to try and make the best of things and let the astronauts on board carry out periodic suit maintenance as well as less critical repairs. Until, a little while ago, someone replaced an FPS for the first time, a procedure often described as brain surgery on the suit. On Earth, it would probably be a maintenance operation like any other, somewhat long and complex, but manageable. Up here, though, we have to grapple with weightlessness. While most of the equipment we use on board was conceived from the outset for maintenance in orbit – for example, using captive fasteners that unscrew but don’t come loose – the EMU suit was heartlessly designed to be disassembled only where nothing floats. Packed as it is with tiny, almost inaccessible screws and a half dozen washers each, losing one – which could float into the suit and remain hidden inside it – is all it would take to put your spacewalking colleague in danger. So it hardly needs saying that we take all necessary precautions: we use sheets of lint-free paper to cover access to the inside of the suit; we aim a vacuum cleaner at the site we’re working on and cover the hose with a piece of fabric so that any stray screws or washers floating around will be caught; and we transmit live images of our work to Houston, where a room full of specialists sit and watch attentively. Replacing the FPS in Terry’s suit last December took a day and a half; we needed several hours just to gather all the specific tools. To my great relief, a series of checks the next day confirmed that it was working well. The suit is ready for Terry’s spacewalk in a few weeks. It’s going to be another hellish time, with three EVAs in fewer than ten days. A heavy burden for Terry and Butch, certainly, but I know very well that they’re going to be difficult days for me, too, and not only professionally. More than anything else, they’ll be difficult emotionally.

International Space Station, 15 February 2015

As expected, Dragon splashed down off the coast of Los Angeles a few hours after leaving the Space Station. Thanks to one of Terry’s friends, we received photos, almost in real time, of the capsule suspended from three parachutes at the moment it splashed down in a rather turbulent sea. Seeing the photos gave me a sense of ‘mission accomplished’, at least for now. The next Dragon will arrive in a couple of months, and this time I’ll be at the command of the robotic arm to capture it.

With any luck, we’ll be able to take photos of the end of ATV-5 Georges Lemaître’s mission ourselves. It undocked yesterday after a few suspenseful days due to a failure in one of its four power distribution units. As a European astronaut, it was down to me to close the hatch of this last ATV, symbolically putting an end to the programme, but Butch is the uncontested hero of ATV-5. He took it upon himself to dispose of the greatest possible amount of the rubbish and packing material, and he often worked tirelessly in his free time filling up any remaining space, always coordinating with ATV Control Centre in Toulouse. The vast internal volume of ATV-5, so empty a few months ago that, as a newcomer to space, I struggled to find enough handholds, was so full by the time of its departure that the six of us could barely get into it for a souvenir photo.

Butch is in the Cupola with Terry and me, and we’re all intently focused on the horizon. Georges Lemaître is re-entering the atmosphere at this very moment, and Houston has told us that if we look in the right direction, we should be able to see the smoke trail the instant it begins to disintegrate and burn up. Only a few minutes ago, Toulouse sent the last command to ATV, to turn on the thrusters that will make it spin, in such a way as to offer maximum resistance to the atmosphere. ATV’s last act is a controlled suicide. Rather than a smoke trail, what we see are two white puffs outlined against the black of space and far above the variegated strokes of blue and azure that envelop the planet. The atmosphere, we know, is much thicker than that thin, luminous mantle. It’s in the upper atmosphere, invisible to the eyes, that Georges Lemaître has met its fate.

The departures of Dragon and ATV in rapid succession have made me think about how much of my time on board has already gone by. I realize, with some anguish, that I’ve almost reached the turning point of my mission. In three months – barely three – I’ll be back on Earth, dragging my weight around effortfully on my legs. And the Space Station will continue its laps, a dot in the evening sky, heedless to the absence of the umpteenth earthling who stopped here and stayed for a while, no different from those who came before or those who will come after her. Other astronauts will take care of humanity’s outpost in space.

The Space Station isn’t on a journey. There’s no departure and no arrival. The on-board activities go beyond the limits of a single expedition, and every crew takes the baton from the previous one and passes it on to the next, in a relay that has been going on now for nearly fifteen years. Fifteen years of uninterrupted human presence in space. Or at least fifteen years in Earth orbit, because when it comes down to it, we’re all in space. The space that bends and expands, suffused with a melody reaching us from about 14 billion years ago in the form of cosmic background radiation. How our vision of the universe has changed in a few hundred years, or just in the last century! This very year, we’re celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the theory of relativity, which radically changed our understanding of space, time and gravity. I’ll never cease to be amazed at the capacity for imagination or abstraction in the most brilliant human minds. The rest of us try to plod along, slowly. Already in ancient Greece, the astronomer Aristarchus developed a heliocentric model, or the idea of the solar system with the Earth rotating around the Sun. And Eratosthenes was able to calculate the circumference of the Earth with surprising accuracy. More than 2,000 years have passed and a few – though happily, very few – still believe the Earth is flat. That’s what we humans are like: some of us are capable of scaling the heights of rational thought, and others are imprisoned by delusions and fallacies. Most of us fall somewhere in between, sometimes winning, other times losing in our daily struggle to think clearly.

In all this, the scientific method is a formidable ally, with field-tested value. We can only admire the predictive capacity of contemporary science, which has provided the foundation for fast and furious technological development, to which we owe the comfort of our homes and an average lifespan that has nearly doubled in just a century. If we can manage to placate the demons of the human heart, to survive our own power to create and destroy, what else might we come to understand about the fabric of the universe? Will our children and their children smile at our actual convictions – as we do at our parents’ naivety in these matters? Will future generations be any better at reconciling humanism with our marginality in an indifferent universe? With our living in a solar system like many others, on one peripheral arm of a galaxy like so many others? When I looked at the sky as a child, I was simultaneously frightened and fascinated by the staggering number of stars in the universe. Thousands of billions of billions … how can we grasp the meaning of such a number? These days I know how to write it as a power of ten, how to think of it as order of magnitude, and how to represent it on a logarithmic scale. But how can I truly grasp it, even when I strain my small human brain? Is it possible to conceive 14 billion years, the estimated age of the universe, more or less, when the span of my own life is at most a century, and my species has handed down its own history for only 5,000 years? We’re just the blink of a star. They die giving birth to the atoms we’re made of, but they know nothing of human doings and are indifferent to our flashes of greatness, and the depth of our egos. Perhaps if we looked at things from a cosmic perspective, we’d be more likely to forgive each other our pettiness, to help each other live peacefully during our brief time on Earth.