42.

But it could be that we, who are earthbound creatures and have begun to act as though we were dwellers of the universe, will forever be unable to understand, that is, to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Namibia, November 2015

Yesterday a guide taught us to observe small desert animals: discreet, ingenious, tenacious, obstinately attached to the least chance of survival. Could I have imagined this abundance of life when I was admiring the Namibian desert from the Space Station? Or the day I saw it from the window of the Soyuz – my last extraterrestrial glimpse before returning to walk on the planet?

I didn’t walk immediately, that’s for sure. When they got us out of the descent module, which still smelled of burning, they carried us to large camp chairs. Brigitte gave me a quick check-up and some anti-sickness medicine as a precaution. I looked at the sky, so ostentatiously blue. The steppe, unusually green. The incredible number of people busying themselves around us. I was there, and I wasn’t there. Part of me was chatting with the people who were speaking to me, but another part still imagined herself on the Space Station, clinging desperately to memories of sensations, details and the slight, measured movements. Already I felt unable to evoke them with any precision. The faint breeze over the steppe was blowing them away.

In the nearby camp tent, Brigitte helped me to take off my Sokol suit, and someone else immediately came to take it away. It seemed a brutal separation, but I was in no condition to protest. The weight of matter was oppressive. There was a military helicopter outside, waiting to take me to the nearest airport, at Karaganda. So I took my first steps, supported on both sides, and my legs wobbled like toothpicks trying to sustain a boulder.

There was a cot ready for me in the helicopter. The mattress seemed so hard to me: too much pressure on my skin, which was used to tentative contact. As the sun set, I fell into a light sleep, though I often resurfaced, not to the point of complete wakefulness, but enough to incorporate my physical sensations into my dreams. In them, I found myself on board an aeroplane, and my body weight, exacerbated by my altered perception, was interpreted by my dreaming mind as a continuous manoeuvre at a high G load. Half asleep, I swore at an imaginary pilot: can’t you at least fly straight and level for a while? I woke up smiling. In over six months in space I hadn’t had a single noteworthy dream – or at least none I remembered. The return to gravity, though, immediately embedded itself in my dreamworld.

In Karaganda, while waiting around, I passed the first proof of fitness for terrestrial life, only just managing to avoid the classic mistake that betrays a long stay in space and a recent return to Earth. Brigitte had lent me her mobile so I could say hello to Lionel, without the rush of the brief call from the landing field. When I finished talking to him, I stretched out my arm towards Brigitte, firmly intending to let go of the phone and give it a gentle nudge in her direction. I stopped myself just in time.

After a brief welcoming ceremony and a few tests for balance and orthostatic tolerance, Terry and I said goodbye to Anton, who was leaving for Moscow. A few hours before, we were together in space; now we were separating like this, with a quick hug, and we’d see each other only a month later for the debriefs in Star City. Terry and I boarded a NASA plane equipped with two small beds for us to sleep on. In Scotland, the first stop on our return to Houston, we took a few steps around the tarmac. My balance was already much better and according to Brigitte I no longer had the wide-spaced legs of a baby just learning to walk. But it was so tiring! After circling the plane a few times I got back on it to sleep, and instead of stretching out on the bed in a controlled way, I ended up falling backwards onto the mattress, as if some giant hand had pushed me. My brain would need another few days to relearn how to correctly estimate efforts and recruit the right muscular strength.

—

As the cool of the evening falls over the desert, Lionel and I stand outside, waiting for an imminent Space Station flyover. I saw it one summer evening in Houston a little after my return, and after that I didn’t look for it any more, perhaps unconsciously afraid of reawakening my nostalgia, or maybe just distracted by the complications of life on Earth. In the first few days my workload was fairly light and still some way from the whirlwind of duties that would overwhelm me in the coming months, but tiredness was my constant companion. I slept a great deal, and my heartbeat was elevated even at rest, as if it were an effort simply to exist. My buttocks were sore when I sat, the soles of my feet ached as I walked and painful blisters formed on my tender skin. Wearing a regular bra made me feel breathless. A test on the vibration plate four days after my return indicated that my balance was still affected. Only after my second test a week later was I given permission to drive.

There’s the Space Station, a shining dot in the dusk, silent sentinel and guardian of six human lives in the hostile vacuum of space. Soon they’ll welcome another of the Shenanigans – Tim – and the United Kingdom is all abuzz. The great adventure is about to begin for him; the memories are beginning to fade for me. I try to remember how it felt in my body to float. I try to feel a push from the handrail in my muscles, or that light and precise touch with my feet that allowed me to do a somersault in mid-air in Node 1 and end up upside down right in front of the soup container. I try, but my life on the Space Station already has the hazy contours of a dream.

I can’t say if more than 3,000 orbits around the Earth left some trace on my body. I feel as though my joints have lost some of their elasticity and I have slight muscular aches more often, but if they aren’t the product of false memory or perception, should I put them down definitively to the months of weightlessness, or are they instead the natural result of the passage of time? I’m also uncertain about how this extraterrestrial experience has changed my way of thinking and feeling. I’m definitely calmer, but maybe this is simply the peaceful satisfaction you get when your dream is fulfilled, and your anxiety recedes. I believe I’m also a little less prone to allowing the need to feed my ego to get in the way of recognizing our shared humanity in the people I meet. But couldn’t this just be a hint of the wisdom that routinely compensates someone who’s nearly forty for the inevitable loss of physical strength? I do feel more profoundly convinced of the need for us all to live on this planet not as pretentious, quarrelsome passengers but as members of a crew on the same spaceship, loyal and ready to roll up our sleeves. Yet maybe this, too, is only the consequence of living in my time, a time in which it’s not necessary to go into space to understand that all seven billion of us humans – and soon many more – are interdependent.

I wasn’t expecting any blinding flashes of intuition after my mission in space, and I haven’t had any. I don’t know any more now than I did before about the meaning of human existence or the presence of extraterrestrial life. All the same, I can’t help but think, or at least sense, that this experience has brought about in me a certain heightened sensitivity, and prepared my spirit to understand what others may one day put into words. Virginia Woolf wrote that it’s the fire of genius that renders visible those premonitions Nature has traced in invisible ink on the walls of the mind. I hope that women and men of such genius will soon voyage into space, so that when I read them, I can exclaim, ‘But this is what I have always felt and known and desired!’fn1

Meanwhile, I’m waiting for my next mission, though without the anxiety that preceded the first one, and it’s still a privilege for me to contribute to human exploration in space. Aside from valid utilitarian considerations, and the legitimate goal of making our species multi-planetary to ensure its survival in the event of an unlikely but not impossible catastrophic asteroid collision, space exploration is for me a great adventure of the human spirit. It is a shared experience that nourishes our noblest side, raising us above our pettiness and boredom.

When I have the opportunity to leave once again, I’ll be ready to go, with new colleagues, maybe even a new spaceship. And who knows? Maybe one day, a new destination. In the clear desert sky, the Space Station disappears below the horizon. I look at the Moon, and allow myself to dream. Our human adventure has only just begun.