Shannon Lucid likes to read so much that when NASA asked what personal items she wanted on her stay aboard the Russian space station Mir in the mid-’90s, she requested mostly books. Not too picky, but living and training in Russia at the time, Shannon Lucid asked her English-major daughter to look around their house in Houston and choose titles that she likely hadn’t read, being busy as a scientist and astronaut, and to send them to NASA to be launched ahead of her mission. Oh, and the wordier, the better. Shannon Lucid was looking for the highest word count per pound because weight matters on top of a rocket.
Shannon Lucid was perhaps the most literary of all the astronauts. While on board Mir, during a six-month stay, she read fifty books, usually at night just before bed. These included Bleak House, Middlemarch, Pilgrim’s Progress, Mansfield Park, and a Flannery O’Connor anthology that she said always gave her something to think about the next day. Lucid fashioned old food boxes into shelves that she affixed to the wall of the science module, complete with stabilizing straps to keep the books from floating away.
She liked to write, too. Shannon Lucid corresponded regularly with her family, and she wrote reports for NASA about her experience on Mir. This was before the International Space Station existed, and NASA needed to know what worked and what didn’t on Mir. The details Shannon Lucid included were astute and unexpected. She noted, for instance, that you lose the calluses on the bottoms of your feet and gain calluses on the tops of your toes where the footholds rub. With her two Russian crewmates, Yuri with an i and Yury with a y, she discussed how such a detail might be used to write a space-based mystery.
Shannon Lucid also wrote about the emotional side of living and working so far away from home: reliable communication with family members was important, she concluded, and she wanted to highlight that her family valued being included in activities for the families of other NASA astronauts while she had been living in Russia.
While astronauts tend to be scientists, engineers, or pilots by trade, a significant portion of their work consists of writing in some form or another. On HI-SEAS, we maintained ongoing daily email threads with mission support—these were volunteers and HI-SEAS scientists who signed up to be waiting by their email in-boxes to help. Many of us also kept journals. We filed daily cooking reports with recipes and other food-based notes.
I personally wrote two weekly reports. One detailed my writing and reading, another logged my progress on my sleep study. Every week, as the crew correspondent, I wrote a blog post for Discover magazine; five times during the mission, I wrote for the Economist’s science blog. And near daily emails to Earth: my wife, my parents, my friends, my editors. These were my missives from Mars.
Technically speaking, the space stations that orbit Earth aren’t that far away from Earth. Mir circled at an altitude of 223 miles, slightly lower than the ISS, which didn’t exist until after the Russian station was decommissioned in 2001. That vertical distance, if kicked horizontal, is roughly New York City to Washington, D.C., just a few hours by train. So when sending an email to or from space, it gets there as fast as it would on Earth, no special delays. Astronauts on the ISS can use the internet, make voice calls, and have video conversations. It’s easy enough to keep in touch, schedule permitting.
But in 1996, Shannon Lucid didn’t have an internet connection. Her flight surgeon, who acted as a kind of astronaut advocate on the ground, helped her improvise her own comms from Mir using ham radio, which can transmit digital files wirelessly. Thus, using radio waves, she sent emails from her space-based computer to her flight surgeon in Houston, who then used the fledgling earthly internet to pass Lucid’s notes to their final destinations.
Mars communication would be an entirely different story. One of the main features of our isolation on Mars was the enforced lag in the speed of our electronic communications. HI-SEAS used a twenty-minute delay. This meant that the soonest we’d hear back about an email would be forty-ish minutes, or put another way, just inside two episodes of Who’s the Boss? without commercial breaks. We also didn’t have a working, real-time internet. This meant that we had to patiently request that mission support give us the internet manually, for instance by downloading and emailing us static webpages and files and episodes of Who’s the Boss? And while we could send voice and video messages over email, the lack of real-time communication—the thing so many of us are so accustomed to today with phone calls, text messages, DMs, FaceTime, and Skype—worked even better than the dome and the space suits and the remote location did in making me feel removed from Earth.
Honestly, sometimes it felt pretty great. I liked the quiet, the permission to turn away from the chatter of news. And there was something too, in not needing to keep a social calendar up to date. Everyone knew I wasn’t home. But then there were other times when the distance felt bad. Sometimes very bad. Strange things happen when you’re so far away, like misunderstandings, paranoia, hurt, and anger. In any message, there’s the thing that’s written, the actual words, and there are the things unwritten. Perhaps the writer of the letter intends an omission, is possibly accustomed to working with subtext. Or they could just be careless, inadvertently leaving gaps for the reader to fill, a reader who, for any number of reasons, might pour in a concrete mix of wrong assumptions. Although historical evidence shows communication failures and frustrations are virtually inevitable, there is a particular category that interests Mars mission researchers called the “Us versus Them” phenomenon.
HI-SEAS and other Mars analogs, including Antarctic research stations, fall under the category of isolated, confined environments, or as NASA calls them, ICE. These remote outposts stress people out in particular, predictable ways—the kinds of stresses that will undoubtedly present themselves on a Mars mission. “Us versus Them” has been frequently documented under such conditions: when small isolated groups interact with interdependent or support groups, factions form. In our case, the researchers whose studies we were implementing inside the dome and the mission support staff on the other end of emails were the support groups. Often, despite close ties to people on the support teams, feelings of “they don’t understand what we’re experiencing and how much they’re asking of us” can show up pretty fast.
Once the mission started, we felt at times like research requests were piling on, that some mission supporters were less than supportive in helping us solve problems. More than once there were problems with critical systems including power and plumbing (we were the first HI-SEAS crew, kicking the tires). We spent a number of cold nights in the literal dark because the solar panels didn’t transfer as much power as expected and the backup generator broke. And then there were the plumbing issues. The wet wipes, we learned soon enough, should not be flushed because once flushed, they coalesced into a fabric bolus that clogs the pipe to the black water tank. Mission support fixed the problem within a day, but in the meantime Simon, the former soldier, made field toilets. He then loaded the double-lined black trash bags of human feces into large Rubbermaid bins that Kim Binsted picked up the next day and drove down the mountain to dispose of in a way, one supposes, consistent with their biohazard status. It was at these times when communication needed to be patient and cordial—and both the crew and mission support needed to believe that everyone was doing their best. This didn’t always happen.
Beyond mission-support frustrations, there were other, unexpected misunderstandings and confusions. One night, Sian hadn’t heard from her then-boyfriend-now-husband after he’d gone to a baseball game, and it was getting late on the East Coast. It wasn’t like him, she said, to not send just a little note before going to bed. Normally one of the most calmly rational among us, she began to imagine the worst. She emailed support for reports of car accidents in the area. Or, was there an attack on the stadium? Why did the most drastic scenarios somehow seem far more plausible than the fact that he had just forgotten to email, which we learned the next morning was actually the case.
It happened to me too, deep into the mission, when I hadn’t heard from my parents in more than a couple weeks. Their health and the health of my brother was always precarious, and I suspected something was wrong—either that they were withholding unpleasant news, which they’d done in the past, or they were overwhelmed by some other life events that kept them from responding.
Finally, on July 4, I received the following series of emails from my mother, edited for length and clarity. It is, I think, an important document in the discussion of long-distance correspondence.
Hi Katie this is mom I don’t know if this is the way to do this or not but I’m on my iPhone and I’m using Dragon and I think I’m gonna try and see if this sounds okay okay bye
Sent from my iPhone
One of the reasons you don’t hear from me is because when I sit down to type something I’m so lousy at it that I don’t type it and anyway I just have been a real slug lately I guess is the best way to say it I have slept several days all day I stayed up several nights my sleeping is in a terrible state I really need to get it under control but I went to bed early last night woke up early this morning and I just strolled around on the computer all day so I
Sent from my iPhone
Okay I see that I’m going to have to put in punctuation. Period,—those kinds of things I hope you were able to make out the previous message I did not stroll around the computer I played around with the computer but I didn’t stroll around with it.
Sent from my iPhone
I also discovered the Dragon program only records a certain amount and then it stops even if it’s in midsentence so I want to tell you about something I did in genealogy but I think I’m at the end of the amount that it’s going to record so I’ll have to finish telling you about it in the next installment okay
Sent from my iPhone
Okay here’s the genealogy thing my grandma Rose had a brother named Ed and uncle Ed was always a great mystery we never knew what happened to a go-ahead he was always out west somewhere always out west we thought that was a little strange so the 1940 census has come out and I decided to see if I could find him because I had found him in the 1920 census and had not found him in the 1930 census this will have to wait I think Dragon is done
Sent from my iPhone
So I looked him up in the 1940 census and I find him in Marin County in California San Rafael is the name of the town and he’s in San Quentin prison I was a little surprised by that and I found his inmate number but I haven’t been able to find out any other information like what he did or not anyway this is indeed a great mystery so I thought I’m gonna have to do some more research on this and it occurred to me that and Helen the only living member of my mothers family might have
Sent from my iPhone
Okay so I think and Helen probably knows the story so I called her and I asked her what she knew about uncle Ed and she said oh he was out West someplace and that’s all I know and I said well are you sure grandma didn’t say something to you about where he was Outwest she said no I don’t think so so I said well I found him in the 1940 senses and she said oh really where was he and I said well he was at San Quentin in prison now I don’t know if you know and calendar
Sent from my iPhone
I really must speak more distinctly ignore the word calendar I don’t know where that came from anyway and Helen said oh that’s free d*ck Chillis my mother never said anything to me about uncle Ed being in prison I’m sure she would’ve told me if she knew so I said well that’s probably true and then she said to me I think it’s wrong of you to look into this and I said really and she said yes this is shameful I
Sent from my iPhone
I think I have the wrong address on the last e-mail so I’m going to record the information over again and Helen said to me I don’t want you to tell anyone about this I think it would be very upsetting to the younger ones I said to her I think it’s probably more upsetting to you then it would be to them because T U he’s a person of living memory but to the younger ones it would just be ancient history she said what do you mean ancient history and I said to her well after all you are 90s
Sent from my iPhone
I said after all you are 97 years old and uncle Ed would have been 122 so I think to the younger generation that’s probably ancient history well needless to say and Helen is really p*ssed at me that’s T I SS ED she’s very upset with me so I managed to create a little bit of a rift with my oldest living relative
Sent from my iPhone
Dragon pics out the most unusual things to misspell when I spelled out p*ssed it came back with a T not a PE anyway does this format drive you crazy I hope not it’s a little strange though anyway send me back a message and let me know if this is an okay format for you because it certainly gives me the chance to say a lot more than I would ever feel like typing love you dear bye-bye
Sent from my iPhone
Many discussions could blossom from this email in eleven parts, including genealogy obsessions and my great aunt’s shame around and desire to keep hidden the fact of an incarcerated relative. But what I felt at the time of receipt was something else. I wondered which errors in the text were my mother’s and which belonged to the software. Sure I could find humor in it, but in my faraway state, I also found the garbled messages deeply unsettling. It was as if the pen had turned treasonous and unruly, not completely in service of the hand that held it, and that the pen itself had something to say about what was real, something that wouldn’t have been written in the actual text. It wanted to remind me that my mother, as she’s gotten older, mispronounces and forgets more words, and as her hands have gotten shakier so has her voice. Though I should have been heartened that she was taking up a new technology, with enthusiasm even, the mediator seemed cruel, like it was mocking her even as she was training it to understand her better. I was glad for the messages, sure, but I despaired at a truth they forced me to see, one that I’m often trying to ignore, and that is that as my parents age, everything—the fact of daily living—is increasingly becoming harder than it once was. It felt to me as though this technology, like a jerk, wanted me to consider my parents’ mortality when, at such a distance, that was the last thing I wanted to do.
The word “weltschmerz” translates literally from the German as “world pain.” It can be a weary or pessimistic feeling about life, an apathetic or vaguely yearning attitude. The definition I tend to think of most, though, is the feeling of an expectation thwarted, a forced reckoning with the reality of a situation, or the way things really are. These days, as so much of so many people’s time is spent with computers and phones and the online portals and software that mediate our social interactions, I’d like to propose a related concept of “technoschmerz.” We expect technology to do one thing, but then it does another, less satisfying thing. Specifically it might show us a truth of a situation, one that’s usually hidden. In the mismatch between what we expect technology to do, which is to connect us better—more efficiently and effectively, make things clearer—and what it has the potential to do, which is to separate us—sometimes creating confusing situations, emotional rifts, and anxiety—comes anguish. And within this anguish is technoschmerz.
It happens often, actually, and not just to lonely astronauts who miss their spouses, children, parents, friends, or lovers. We see it when a friend takes too long to respond to a text, when a politically aggressive cousin posts an opinion on Facebook, when an algorithm reminds us of a dead loved one’s birthday, and when comment sections begin to roil. Technoschmerz lives within the dropped calls, the spotty cell signal, the too-quickly-drained battery. It’s in the glitchy app, the crashed hard drive, the forgotten password, the confusing interface. It’s everywhere.
I think of future astronauts on their way to Mars. For them, technoschmerz would likely be especially pronounced as they fly from home at twelve thousand miles per hour, surrounded and protected by, interacting with, and betting their lives on some of the most complex technologies ever invented, humanity’s own message and messengers. How separate would their technology make us feel from them? How separate would they feel from us?
Like Lucid, I also brought a box of books. Titles included but were not limited to, Alfred Lansing’s Endurance, Mark Jarman’s poetry collection Bone Fires, Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Are You My Mother? and that stack of old New Yorkers. I didn’t know what I’d be in the mood for, and when I found it mostly wasn’t anything from the box, I bought e-books to read on my phone like the sci-fi classic Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Submergence by J. M. Ledgard, and Speedboat by Renata Adler.
Though obviously these texts weren’t letters addressed specifically to me, I count them as correspondences in the way all texts are—films, poems, paintings, diaries, music, reports, surveys, sculpture, workout videos, video games, email, physical books, message-board posts, photographs, and the rest. They all capture the world, a reality collated as information, channeled through a team or person, a creator or curator, produced within the context of a procedure that originated at some point with an impulse to bind and preserve experiences, emotions, and thoughts. Before this encapsulation—in word, sound, image, object, number, video, or game-play—there was nothing. After capture: a representation. From representation follows an asynchronous exchange across time and space: the transmission. And finally, a reception, an unfurling, a blossoming, or an explosion of meaning at the point of reader, the receiver of the text. The text can be made by one for a singular receiver or it can be made by one or many for the many. It’s a kind of information theory, not unlike the computer code that allows spacecraft like Curiosity roving Mars or Juno spinning Jupiter or New Horizons flying past Pluto, or the Voyager probes zipping out beyond the beyond, to send us pictures, spectra, and timestamps from their journeys.
Some correspondences persist longer than others. On this planet right now there exists The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Sumerian tales of Inanna, The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, the Hebrew Bible, The Upanishads, Sappho’s fragments, Tao Te Ching, Beowulf, The Romance of Three Kingdoms, The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, and Tony Danza and Judith Light’s Who’s the Boss?
The poet Francis Ponge wrote that he preferred human-size monuments over larger ones, that man should strive for “shells of his own size,” a concept which can apply to the vessels we inhabit such as homes, spacecraft, or space suits, all of which are monuments of a kind. Or his monument shells could apply to something else entirely. In Partisan of Things, Ponge writes:
I have no admiration for those like the Pharaohs who forced the multitude to build monuments to themselves alone. I would have preferred that he employ his multitude in a work not much bigger or no more bigger than his own body … That’s why I admire certain controlled writers or musicians—Bach, Rameau, Malherbe, Horace, Mallarmé—the writers more than all the others because their monument is made from the common true secretions of mollusky man, from the thing best proportioned to and conditioned by his body, and yet more different from his form than can be conceived. I’m talking about words.
For Ponge, it is our suits of language that house us; they are his preferred monuments.
Every day on Mars, Sian opened a new note or package. She had brought with her a big box stuffed with these daily gifts from her best friend, a woman she had traveled the world with, played hockey with, and in whom she’d found a kindred spirit in boldness and exploration. There were photographs, handwritten notes, painted pictures, little trinkets. For 120 days, Sian unwrapped these correspondences. She also watched police procedurals like NCIS, which she had downloaded to her iPad, usually watching them while walking on the treadmill for her daily exercise at a speedy clip of 4.5 miles per hour.
Simon emailed friends and family but said he preferred less communication to more. In his experience deployed, he found he didn’t have time or energy for regular updates and didn’t want to burden people back home with the expectation of sustained correspondence. He also played video games like BioShock and Baldur’s Gate, often late into the night.
Angelo would also stay up late, sometimes until two a.m., responding to emails from acquaintances and friends. He’d email with journalists, future collaborators on art projects, mentors, mentees. His correspondence tendrils seemed extensive and kinetic. He also played video games like Crysis into the night, headphones on, which he said calmed him before bed.
Oleg’s correspondences were a mystery to me. I don’t know who Oleg communicated with or what he read or watched on his own time, though he did share videos with the crew of his skydiving adventures.
Yajaira corresponded with her husband regularly over email. She also responded often to media inquiries because of her interest in science and space outreach. Before the mission, she had appeared on Puerto Rican talk shows and gave interviews to magazines and newspapers. She had an audience that was hungry for her accounts of life on Mars.
The emails that Jill and I shared during the mission were, by far, my most important reading material at that time. Before the mission, she had, with the help of our other writer friends, collected 120 poems—one for each day of the mission—that had something to do with space or Mars or the moon. These were the basis of our near-daily correspondence, a sustaining force for me, a mix of diary, sounding board, reading material, and private literary salon. These emails, the poems in them, and our discussions, played a significant role in how I came to read and write poetry.
Collectively we had our movie nights, which felt like messages from our past selves—favorite films from another time and another planet—shared with the group. I brought science-y flicks: Moon, Gattaca, and Real Genius, and also Burn After Reading and an episode of the Dutch political drama Borgen. Other screenings included Stargate, Solaris, and The House Bunny, a 2008 comedy about a Playboy Bunny who aged out of the mansion and found herself revamping a college sorority populated by unpopular young women. That was Simon’s choice. There are so few comedies with female leads, he said, and he thought this one was pretty good.
On these nights, every Wednesday and Saturday, we would often make popcorn and tuck into our snack boxes to eat Famous Amos cookies or Oreos or peanuts or dried apricots or Kellogg’s Rice Krispies Treats, make hot chocolate or tea, and settle into the inflatable furniture that normally lined the contour of the habitat, but was easily moved in front of the screen. We watched the movies using a projector. Some of the people involved in designing HI-SEAS thought that a projector was an extravagance, but I am grateful that Kim Binsted held firm. We also used it for research presentations, personal photo slideshows, and workout videos. P90X was by far the most popular workout video on our crew—Angelo and I were fast workout partners, motivating each other throughout the mission—but I also became smitten with a yoga DVD, gifted to us by Neil Scheibelhut, one of the mission support staff who was so unfailingly prompt and kind in his correspondence that he quickly endeared himself to us. Neil, a student at the University of Hawai‘i at the time who would later participate in a follow-up HI-SEAS mission, lived in Hilo, but would make the drive up for maintenance runs. He was often responsible for removing trash, making sure gray and black water tanks were emptied regularly—he was the one who ultimately unclogged the line—and he would make sure that we had enough water to drink and to bathe, to wash dishes, to mop floors and do laundry. He and his girlfriend at the time, a yoga instructor, had made the video, filmed on gorgeous Hawaiian beaches. Neil’s calm voice narrates the instruction. Over the months, though I never emailed directly with him, strange as it sounds, through this video and by his caretaking, I began to consider Neil a good friend. And after the mission, when we did finally meet, he was as warm and kind as I’d imagined. Years later, his is still my yoga workout of choice.
Hi folks,
How are you all holding up?
As we move into the dreaded third quarter, with comms delay imminent, I hope you’re ready for a challenging phase of the mission. After the breaking-in issues of the first month, and the hassles of the second, I’m sure you don’t want to hear this, but this is the hard part. You will be (if you’re not already) stressed, tired and dispirited. You’re a long way into the mission, but the end is still a long way to go. The potential for crew-ground disconnect and other communication problems is very high. We in mission support will do everything we can to help you, but we’re very aware that our help might not be sufficient, and that we will occasionally (hopefully not often!) drop the ball.
I don’t have any magic solutions, although if HI-SEAS lives up to its potential, we will be able to offer some useful strategies to future astronauts on long-duration missions. That’s the prize to keep your eye on! You were picked for this crew because you are astronaut-like in background and attitude. If you’re having a tough time, it’s not a weakness on your part—it’s because times are tough. As you cope and (hopefully) thrive, notice what works and what doesn’t. Surveys and instrumentation provide important data, but often don’t capture the key lessons.
Finally: we’re very proud of you. You are an awesome crew, and I can’t wait to shake your hands when you come “back to Earth.”
Brave hearts!
Kim
“We felt this was a sacred trust, that here we were, half a dozen very flawed human beings with huge holes in our knowledge of all these subjects, building a cultural Noah’s Ark,” said Ann Druyan, the creative director of the Golden Record, in a 2007 interview. The Golden Record, a copper phonograph record protected by a gold-plated cover, is a correspondence from humanity to who knows who. One copy is affixed to Voyager 1 and another is on Voyager 2, both of which launched in 1977 to study Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, but are now well beyond even Pluto.
The record holds 1) music such as the 2,500-year-old Chinese song, “Flowering Streams,” a Navajo Night Chant, Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, the pan flute from the Solomon Islands, 2) images (encoded in the audio) such as a leaf, a seashore, a group of children, dancers from Bali, the sun, a factory interior, diagrams of DNA, and 3) Earth sounds, including greetings in fifty-five different languages, whale song, a mother’s first words to her baby, a train, crickets.
Etched in the cover are pictographic instructions for the speed with which to play the record (one revolution every 3.6 seconds), the time (coded in 0.7 billionths of a second), so chosen for the length of time associated with a changing energy state of the hydrogen atom—a physical standard that makes a cosmically universal clock. The cover also features a pulsar map that points to the location of Earth. There is a stylus for playback.
“It was a chance to tell something of what life on Earth was like to beings perhaps a thousand million years from now because the Voyager engineers were saying this record will have a shelf life of a billion years. If that doesn’t raise goose bumps you’d have to be made of wood,” Druyan said.
When people talk about the Voyager spacecraft, they’re usually referring to Voyager 1, since its path has sent it the farthest and fastest from Earth. It’s now officially in interstellar space, beyond the influence of our sun’s magnetic field and the flow of solar material. By 2025, Voyager will no longer have enough power for its scientific instruments. They will shut down and the craft will cease to send messages back home, which, at that point will take seventeen hours to reach us. Then, in 40,000 years, Voyager will fly by another star or at least pass within 1.6 light-years of it. The star, named Gliese 445, is 17.6 light-years away from Earth.
After that, the spaceship, the Golden Record, and humanity’s message in waveforms embedded on a flat circle zooming through the interstellar medium will end up in the constellation Ophiuchus, the serpent bearer, which straddles the celestial equator. We know that there are planets around at least fifteen of those stars. But are those planets inhabited by any creature that could detect a tiny spacecraft zipping through their neighborhood at 38,000 miles per hour? And then reel it in? And then play the record? Or does Voyager just keep flying, encountering nothing, only emptiness, for billions of years? Statistically, of course, the latter.
But if uncorked and decoded (imagine!), the Golden Record might tell not only the story of some parts of Earth and its creatures within some sliver of time, but, in a way, also the love story of Annie Druyan and Carl Sagan, who chaired the committee that pulled the record together. In June of 1977, in the middle of the project, Druyan and Sagan, after having been friends for years, declared their love to each other. Two days after, Druyan provided biometric signatures during a meditation—her eye movement, her brain waves, her heartbeat—for the record. “Part of what I was thinking in this meditation was about the wonder of love, and of being in love,” she said.
Emily Dickinson wrote, “A letter always seemed to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend.” A body in space located where no body could exist, the Golden Record is a love letter meant to live beyond our solar system, and likely even outlast our species. With no specific destination, no reader in mind, it is perhaps the most hopeful human-crafted correspondence in the universe.
A couple of days before the mission started, our crew was blessed by local kupunas and cultural practitioners, Kimo Pihana and Koa Rice. Pihana had worked as a sailor, a soldier, a refinery worker, a ranger, and ultimately a cultural practitioner on the mountain Mauna Kea. Rice, also a cultural practitioner and science advocate, had led the discussion with our crew before the mission about ancient Hawaiian astronomy. During this blessing, we stood on lava rocks, circling these elders as they sang Hawaiian songs and spoke directly to us in English. Kimo issued a warning I didn’t quite believe at the time. “What you’re doing is hard,” he said. “It’s not easy to be so far away from your family and friends. You’ll be lonely. Sometimes you’ll feel like crying. Cry if you need to cry.” I was moved by these words, and the generosity and humanity behind them. Tearing up only a little bit, I looked around to my crewmates, but none seemed to be quite as affected.
During the mission, I did cry, outright, without reserve, three times worth noting. Once in late April, only a couple weeks in, after receiving an email from a friend, a running buddy who I had regularly seen multiple times a week for years. She was the friend, other than Jill, I talked to and saw the most. She had written to say that she and her husband and their new baby would soon be moving to San Diego to be closer to family. I took the news, which I saw while checking my email during the morning meeting, hard. As my crewmates took turns detailing their plans for the day, I finally understood what it would be to return “home” to a place that wasn’t the same as I’d left it. No one noticed the tears. I left the table to quietly sob in the bathroom.
Maybe I could have made San Francisco a better place for my friend and her family? I felt like I hadn’t done enough to help after her son was born. He had colic, brutally, and she had endured post-partum depression. I was less than attentive, wrapping up writing projects before heading off to play make-believe on Mars. Even now, I still feel I should have done it differently. But there, on that mountain, inside that dome, I was already sitting with regrets and self-pity. The city would be so much emptier without her and I was lonelier already.
The second time came on my birthday. Jill had put together a surprise multimedia package for me—a pdf of notes and pictures she’d collected from our friends and families as well as short videos some of them made, a little digital surprise party. It was an overwhelming display of affection and a reminder that so many people loved me, and they were excitedly awaiting my return. To be honest, I was embarrassed by the outpouring, that kind of love and the deserving of it.
The third time was after an email exchange with Jill late into the mission. This one I shared with Yajaira and Angelo, the two on the crew who were most receptive to emotionally pitched conversations. The upshot was that I had written Jill about possible future travel after I came back—not immediately, but still, it would likely mean more time apart—inspired in part by the others on the crew who’d talked of their own plans.
After almost four months of waiting for your partner to return, how would you have responded to such an email? I didn’t really know what it was like for Jill. She would write to me about day-to-day triumphs and anxieties, but the language we shared hadn’t yet developed to acknowledge a truth of our situations, about what we’d ultimately come to want and need from our relationship. I remember that for weeks after Mars we would bump into each other in our kitchen and not in the cute way. How we’d talk over each other in conversations then stutter to silence, waiting, feeling wrong and wronged. I know I sensed the return wouldn’t be easy, especially after I’d written of my desire to travel more, and I think I was scared and frustrated by her email response. Why should this be so hard?
The 2013 HI-SEAS mission wasn’t the reason Jill and I decided to part in 2018. Though in scanning those emails, I can see signatures coded within that reveal some truths of our ending—some sensitivities, some careful wording that showed us both wondering toward other possibilities. As with anything written, hindsight provides context for the subtext of a message—the future-present, if you let it, becomes a great illuminator of the past.
I don’t remember exactly the relationship wisdom that Angelo and Yajaira imparted that day, but I do remember they were patient and kind, sitting with me for more than an hour as I poured it all out. I felt like I was able to say everything I needed to say and their friendship and witness consoled me.
Shannon Lucid’s library, only ever meant to be temporary, eventually burned. But first it froze. Its remnants now lie at the bottom of the Pacific, near Nadi, Fiji. Nothing similar in scale, of course, to the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, but still a drama worth telling.
Lucid had left all her books for future Mir astronauts, but two missions after hers, during a manual docking, a resupply vehicle crashed into the module where the library was kept. The collision had as much to do with economics in post-Soviet Russia as anything else. Previously, the supply pods had automatically docked with the space station using a system called Kurs, built in Kiev. But after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Kiev became the capital of an independent Ukraine, the government of which steadily raised the price of Kurs by 400 percent. The Russian space agency decided it would go without the automation in future dockings and wanted to test a new procedure, leaving it up to the cosmonauts and astronauts on board to guide the resupply pod to the station.
Around noon on June 25, 1997, the resupply vehicle, moving at about three meters per second, suddenly revealed itself out a space station window just before it slammed into a solar panel and ricocheted into the station. Almost immediately, the crew felt the pressure change in their ears—they needed to seal the compartment off fast before they ran out of air. And they did, preserving oxygen in the rest of the station, but all experiments and personal effects in that module, including those books, were lost to the cold vacuum of space.
Mir flew for only another four years. On March 23, 2001, to begin its planned de-orbit, Russian ground control remotely fired its engines to stop its forward motion. The space station began its fall to Earth. As it fell, friction from the atmosphere burned it, then aerodynamic forces sheared off the solar panels. The main modules, superheated and buckling, eventually broke apart. If you were in the South Pacific watching, you would have seen fireballs of various sizes rain down, accompanied by sonic booms, as an estimated twenty tons of material squelched into the ocean.
The library burned. But what words can last forever? Ponge, taking a long view, writes:
Oh Louvre of language, which may become a home, after the end of the race—perhaps for the other guests, some monkeys for example, or some bird, or some superior being, like the crustacean that substitutes itself for the mollusk in the periwinkle shell. And then, in the twilight of the animals, the wind and the tiny grains of sand slowly penetrate it, while on dry land it still shines and erodes, becoming brilliant as it crumbles; oh sterile immaterial dust, oh brilliant residue, although endlessly tumbled and crushed between cutting blades of the air and sea. At last! No one is there, nothing can reform the sand, not even glass, and it’s all over.
Our sun’s nuclear furnace is running on about five billion more years of fuel. Or at least that’s the estimate for when it will enter its red giant phase, so swollen that it swallows Earth, etc. So it will burn, yes, with certainty, though Earth has the potential to become a scorcher at the rate it’s going before our ballooning star can get to it. Nothing lasts forever.
Lately, I’ve found solace in thinking about the Golden Record, encoded with some of our planet’s sounds and images, with human biosignatures, a kind of metaphysical love. It fixes me onto a grand timeline that somehow, counterintuitively even, makes me feel less insignificant—part of something larger, in any case, with or without corporeal friend.