41.

What is beautiful reminds us of nature as such – of what lies beyond the human and the made – and thereby stimulates and deepens our sense of the sheer spread and fullness of reality, inanimate as well as pulsing, that surrounds us all.

Susan Sontag, An Argument about Beauty

Soyuz TMA-15M, 11 June 2015

As soon as the hooks release their grip, the springs on the docking system give us a light push and a separation speed of around 12 centimetres per second. The undocking is barely perceptible. In the black and white image I see the hatch slowly becoming smaller. These first few minutes are critical. We’re in the immediate vicinity of the Space Station and we need to execute the separation manoeuvres correctly to prevent any collision: two brief burns of the attitude control thrusters of eight and thirty seconds respectively. If the computer doesn’t complete the burns as scheduled, we’ll have to intervene promptly in manual mode.

The second burn pushes us along the ISS, under it. The last thing I see of the Space Station is the external Japanese platform – and then my home for nearly seven months completely disappears from view. We’re now on a safe orbit. We’ll continue to move away from the ISS passively, so we can turn off the navigation computer. In a little over an hour, we’ll turn it back on to start up a new automatic sequence – the last one, which will send us plummeting towards Earth.

‘I can see you on the Space Station’s external cameras,’ Dima says in a chatty tone from Moscow.

Anton jokes, ‘I’m waving my wings, can you see?’, as if he were flying an airplane.

Dima keeps it up. ‘Yes, I can!’

Thanks to the radio relay offered by the ISS, we’ll be in constant communication with TsUP until the inevitable loss of contact while we go through the plasma shortly before landing.

Scott, Gennadi and Misha call us to say goodbye. ‘Fair winds and following seas,’ is Scott’s sailor’s blessing. ‘It’s been a pleasure spending time up here with you.’

Gennadi jumps in: ‘Samantha, you forgot your fleece!’

Oh dear, and I thought I’d erased all traces of my presence … ‘It’s for you, Gennadi. Just in case it gets cold!’

‘Ah, thanks!’

We won’t have much to do for a good hour apart from regular system checks, and then just waiting and joking around to pass the time.

‘Are we there yet?’ Terry mimics a whining child on a long car journey.

I offer to tell him a joke. ‘So there’s a Russian, an American and an Italian in a spaceship …’

Terry never stops reminding me to drink. I get him to pass me one of the water packets he keeps next to him, where there’s a little space.

When we restart the navigation computer, the Soyuz immediately begins scanning the horizon with its infrared sensors to orientate itself, as always, along the local vertical. The waiting continues for us, punctuated only by Anton’s radio updates with TsUP. When we are correctly orientated and ready for engine ignition, still some time away, Dima passes the microphone to Yuri Lonchakov, head of the cosmonaut training centre, for the traditional weather bulletin.

‘Good morning, Anton, Samantha and Terry. How is the mood on board?’

‘Good morning, Yuri Valentinovich. We’re all set on board. How’s the weather in our landing place?’

‘There’s a little wind, visibility greater than 10 kilometres, clear skies. It’s warm, 28° C.’

With these conditions the search and rescue teams will have no difficulty in getting to us. The only danger, it seems, is posed by the lakes that have formed on the steppe over the past few days after a period of unusually intense rain. They’ve told us not to worry: the recovery teams are prepared for a water rescue. I suspect that this scenario is quite unlikely, but it’s nice to know that the rescuers are prepared for all eventualities.

After what seems an interminable wait, it’s finally time for the engine burn. Dima reminds us to provide detailed commentary.

‘Astrey, three minutes to go before the braking burn. Anton, we’re expecting a periodic report from you on the deceleration. Samantha, you’ll report on the engine operating pressures.’

‘TsUP, from Astrey 1, copy. We’re back in the light. Through the periscope I have visual confirmation of the correct braking attitude along the local vertical. We’re ready for the engine burn. Samantha, you have the control screen, I have the manoeuvres screen.’

It’s a seemingly insignificant braking – not even 2 per cent of our velocity: we’re slowing down by only 128 metres per second. That’s it. This is all we need in order to touch down on Earth in less than an hour. The engine ignites on schedule, and with a dull roar. Months ago, during the rendezvous manoeuvres, I barely felt the little thrust, but after six months in space my body is sensitive to even such a slight deceleration. All my attention is focused on the operating pressures. I’m determined to spot any off-nominal value immediately. Anton keeps an eye on the deceleration and the orientation. When he states that we’ve slowed by 74 metres per second, we know that the die is cast: even if we turned off the engine at this point, there’s no way we’d stay in orbit. By now we’re on the route to re-entry. It’s irrevocable, and if there were to be a failure at this stage, we’d absolutely have to complete the braking burn, resorting to manual mode or the attitude thrusters as necessary.

Four minutes have gone by. We are getting close to the end of the burn and we prepare to intervene if the computer doesn’t send the shutdown command as expected. In Soyuz jargon, this is called the ‘main command’, as it’s so important to shut down the engine on time. If you decelerate more than necessary, there’s no way to turn back. Fortunately, our Soyuz continues to work impeccably, and the pressures in the injectors fall exactly as planned, following the main command. I’m waiting now for a sequence of three alarms, and I’m ready to shut them off using my baton.

First alarm: activation of the thermocouples. In some failure scenarios, these thermocouples would start the separation of the Soyuz modules once a certain increase in temperature was recorded as we passed through the atmosphere. I turn it off. Second alarm: activation of the automatic separation sequence, which will conclude in twenty minutes with the explosion of the pyrotechnic charges. I turn it off. Third alarm: opening of the orbital module’s pressure relief valve. Off.

‘The pressure is going down,’ I report to Anton. We let all the air out of the orbital module so that there won’t be any thrusts at the moment of separation. The pressure in our descent module remains stable, an implicit reassurance that the hatch is not leaking. I see a lot of Earth outside the window, because we’ve lowered the ‘nose’ towards the planet: we’re pointing down now, instead of flying streamlined along our orbit. It’s a way of facilitating the distancing between components when our spaceship splits into three parts: however fond we might be of the orbital module and the service module, we don’t want to see them up close once we’ve separated from them.

After the braking burn, our orbit lowers inexorably, and through our headphones we hear interference from Earth radio stations, a sort of serendipitous musical welcome. Through the window, the Earth looks closer and closer, and the proximity has an alienating effect. For months I’ve admired a distant bas-relief, in which every movement was masked by distance and blurred by speed. Now that I’m re-entering the scene, being close to it unravels the familiar canvas of the planet, breaking it up into details. After we’ve crossed the Atlantic, I catch sight of a familiar landscape: below us is the Namibian desert, striped with red and strangely near, but always unmistakable. It’s the last bit of the planet I recognize from space. I know I won’t have any way to look for other familiar places: we’ll shortly enter the atmosphere, and events will follow one after another right until we hit the ground. I’ll be with humans again, like an ant that rejoins her community on the anthill after a furtive flight on an eagle’s wings.

‘Three minutes until separation. Are you ready to go for a ride on the American mountains?’ Anton asks cheerfully. Terry and I both know he means a rollercoaster ride.

‘Anton, in Italy we actually call them Russian mountains.’

We lower the visors on our helmets. We’ve been wearing our gloves since leaving the ISS, and our suits are therefore completely sealed and connected to the oxygen feed: if the cabin should lose pressure, they’ll automatically inflate. At the appointed time, the pyrotechnic charges explode with a series of dull bangs and in so doing separate the three components of our spaceship. The thermal blanket around the descent module also detaches. I’ve waited for that moment with my eyes fixed outside in order to see it fly off, any part of it, not wanting to miss anything about this extraordinary descent. I see it move off, hesitate and turn back towards us as if to go back to its place. Then it detaches again and disappears for ever.

We have no immediate confirmation of the separation, but we’ll soon find out if it’s gone well. Only the descent module has the shape, the distribution of mass and the heat shield necessary to withstand the extremely high temperatures of atmospheric re-entry. As we slow down, we’ll transfer to the surrounding air the energy stored in our tremendous speed; the energy the rocket transmitted to us months ago; the energy from 300 tonnes of propellant, transformed into nine minutes of formidable thrust. Of course, the atmosphere has no clear borders. As we descend, it gets progressively less rarefied and offers more and more resistance to our course. When the deceleration crosses a certain threshold, our Soyuz determines that atmospheric contact has occurred and it begins the automatic guided re-entry. Our two command and control displays switch to the descent screen. It shows a delay of five seconds: the computer will have to compensate by flying on a slightly steeper trajectory.

I already feel forcefully pressed into my seat and I’m amazed to read a bare 0.8 Gs. Less than 1 G, therefore less than my normal weight on Earth. We’ll get to about 4 Gs, and not just once. I remind myself that my body has not become more fragile; it’s the same body that took 8 Gs in the centrifuge with no problem, even if my brain now registers a single G as an oppressive pressure on my limbs. As the deceleration slowly presses me into the seat, I tighten straps as much as I can before it reaches the point where it’s difficult to move my arm. The light plays across our cramped cabin as the computer rolls us about our axis, as it must do to keep us on the right trajectory for our re-entry.

Our heat shield is cutting a swathe through the air, and the atmosphere closes again over us after our passage, like the sea over a sinking ship. The air is resisting our intrusion, slowing our course with the violence of a hundred hands pressing on my chest. Then it heats up until it flares and sparkles. Bursts of yellow, orange and vermilion flicker around the heat shield, wrap around our bell-shaped husk and dart past the window like flaming tongues whipped by the wind. The heat blackens the window from the outside, gradually muting the iridescent palette until only the faint glow of burning charcoal peeps through. We’re a lump of humanity enclosed in a fiery arrow.

Anton continues to provide commentary on the course of our re-entry aloud, even though no one can hear him now. After about six minutes and a second peak of more than 4 Gs, the deceleration tapers off, and my breathing becomes easier. By now we’ve lost most of our speed, and before long the parachute will open, the last critical event in this crazy descent. The sound of the wind is louder and stronger, a whoosh of air that lashes what’s left of our little spaceship. I’ve heard many times that the opening of the parachute is the most violent moment of the re-entry, even more so than the impact with the ground. To keep my head from banging or bouncing, I push hard to settle my neck into the curve of the seat and wait. For a few seconds there’s an inexplicable popping, like hail on a metal canopy, and then the drogue parachute opens. After the first jolt, we’re suddenly battered here and there for ten seconds before another, more violent backlash accompanies the opening of the main parachute. Further brusque, haphazard oscillations follow until the capsule stabilizes, and we continue our descent, hanging peacefully under a canopy of 1,000 square metres. We’re at less than 10 kilometres in altitude, where passenger planes fly: we’ve gone back to being Earth creatures.

Anton reminds us to tighten our straps, and I keep pulling stubbornly, in case there might be a few millimetres to gain. Then I place the checklist against my chest and cross my arms over it, trying to keep my elbows from sticking out. Nothing should get in the way of the seats’ movement when the shock absorber is extended at the end of a final, rapid automatic sequence. First, a valve opens with a hiss, putting our cabin in communication with the outside, and then what remains of the heat shield is ejected to expose the retrorockets that will soften our impact with the ground. The outside windows, now blackened, detach, allowing the light of this beautiful Earth day to storm through. And finally, the seats’ shock absorbers suddenly extend, and in a fraction of a second, I find myself a few centimetres from the control panel.

We soon hear the voices of the search and rescue team over the radio. They’ve seen us and when we’re close to impact, they begin calling out our altitude: ‘Four hundred metres.’

I force myself to look ahead, resisting the temptation to watch the ground approaching.

‘Three hundred metres.’

For one last time I make sure that the whole of my spinal column fits snugly into the seat.

‘Two hundred metres.’

Arms tight across my chest, teeth clenched.

‘Prepare for landing!’

A sudden spark outside the window, like a flash of lightning, accompanies the ignition of the retrorockets. And then, impact with the ground, abrupt but not rough. The capsule wobbles, as if it’s about to fall over, before it finds its balance standing upright. We wait a few moments to ensure that we’re standing still. We are: it’s a windless, late afternoon in Kazakhstan. I quickly take stock of my physical symptoms and find that the only painful spot is my nose: the impact caused me to bang my head against the visor of my helmet. Nothing serious. I’m sure it’s not bleeding. No big deal, I think. I expected worse.

Terry, Anton and I raise our visors and join hands, still gloved, as we welcome each other back to Earth. My arms are heavy, my body’s a boulder. My head is on the verge of spinning. And yet from outside comes the smell of grass.