Endurance Scott Kelly Quotes

I've learned that most problems aren't rocket science, but when they are rocket science, you should ask a rocket scientist. In other words, I don't know everything, so I've learned to seek advice and counsel and to listen to experts.

I've learned from watching my mother train to become a police officer that small steps add to giant leaps.

I've learned that an achievement that seems to have been accomplished by one person probably has hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people's minds and work behind it, and I've learned that it's a privilege to be the embodiment of that work.

If you were doing something safe, something you already knew could be done, you were wasting time.

Only later, when the Twitter chat is over, do I have the chance to reflect that I just experienced being trolled, in space, by the second man on the moon, while also engaging in a Twitter conversation with the president.

Unlike NASA, the Russians don’t feel the drama of the countdown is necessary.

Here, in a book, I found something I’d thought I would never find: an ambition.

If NASA were to train an astronaut how to mail a package, they would take a box, put an object in the box, show you the route to the post office, and send you on your way with postage. The Russians would start in the forest with a discussion on the species of tree used to create the pulp that will make up the box, then go into excruciating detail on the history of box making.

It drives me nuts that our food specialist insist on giving us the same number of chocolate, vanilla, and butterscotch puddings, when the laws of physics dictate chocolate will disappear much faster. No one gets a vanilla craving in space (or on earth).

I clean up, putting all the tools and instruments back where they belong, remembering that a tool in the wrong place is no better than a tool we don’t have.

There is a fine line between ritual and superstition, and in a life-threatening business such as spaceflight, superstition can be comforting even to the nonbeliever.

You know,” Gennady says, “it will really suck if we get hit by this satellite.” “Da,” Misha agrees. “Will suck.

I miss the sound of children playing, which always sounds the same no matter their language.

I think of a saying I once heard that was attributed to the Navy SEALs: “Slow is efficient. Efficient is fast. Slow is fast.

Working with the right person can make the toughest day go well, and working with the wrong person can make the simplest task excruciatingly difficult.

What is it worth to see two former bitter enemies transform weapons into transport for exploration and the pursuit of scientific knowledge? What is it worth to see former enemy nations turn their warriors into crewmates and lifelong friends? This is impossible to put a dollar figure on, but to me it’s one of the things that makes this project worth the expense, even worth risking our lives.

I've heard it said that the children of conflict seekers are raised to have the emotional control their parents lack and then some -that fighters raise peacemakers.

Astronaut hopefuls have an acronym at NASA, just like everything else: ASHOs, pronounced “ass-hoes,” but as if an L had been conveniently placed between the O and the E.

I preferred a shorter, more compelling quotation: “The sea is selective, slow at recognition of effort and aptitude, but fast at sinking the unfit.

There is a saying in the Navy about mistakes: “There are those who have and those who will.

I’ve learned that most problems aren’t rocket science, but when they are rocket science, you should ask a rocket scientist.

The sea is selective, slow at recognition of effort and aptitude, but fast at sinking the unfit.

The sun rises; forty-five minutes later, the sun sets.

As bad as your parents may be at their worst, they are the only parents you’ll ever have.

Ah, okay, I understand,” Gennady says, nodding, his signature smile starting to emerge. “It’s from when the Russian diet consisted mostly of potatoes, cabbage, and vodka. Dill gets rid of farts.

When I look around, all I see is black. Maybe I’m looking right at the Earth and not seeing any lights because we’re passing over the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean, or perhaps I’m just looking at space.

I pay close attention to the primaries of both parties, and though I don’t tend to be a worrier, I start to worry. Sometimes before going to sleep I look out the windows of the Cupola at the planet below. What the hell is going on down there?

The things we want to say to our loved ones before we might be about to die in a fireball above Kazakhstan are not the things we would want to say while the assembled press from a number of countries listen from rows of chairs and write down our every word.

I smell something strangely familiar and unmistakable, a strong burned metal smell, like the smell of sparklers on the Fourth of July. Objects that have been exposed to the vacuum of space have this unique smell on them, like the smell of welding—the smell of space.

As we start the journey, translating hand over hand along the rails, I notice again how much damage has been done to the outside of the station by micrometeoroids and orbital debris. It’s remarkable to see the pits in the metal handrails going all the way through like bullet holes. I’m shocked again to see them.

At NASA, we talk about “expeditionary behavior,” which is a loose term for being able to take care of yourself, take care of others, help out when it’s needed, stay out of the way when necessary—a combination of soft skills that’s difficult to define, hard to teach, and a significant challenge when they are lacking.

Early in our two-week quarantine I go out to the banya to find a naked Misha beating on a naked Gennady with birch branches. The first time I saw this scene I was a bit taken aback, but once I experienced the banya myself, followed by a dip in a freezing cold pool of water and a homemade Russian beer, I completely understood the appeal.

The ISS is a remarkable achievement of technology and international cooperation. It has been inhabited nonstop since November 2, 2000; put another way, it has been more than fourteen years since all humans were on the Earth at once. It is by far the longest-inhabited structure in space and has been visited by more than two hundred people from sixteen nations. It’s the largest peacetime international project in history.

In my half-awake state it occurs to me that one day we’re all going to be dead, that we will all be dead much longer than we were alive. In a sense I feel I know what it will be like, because we were all “dead” once, before we were born. For each of us, there was a moment when we became self-aware, realized that we were alive, and the nothingness before that wasn’t particularly objectionable. This thought, strange as it may be, is reassuring.

I turn off the light and close my eyes. Sleeping while floating isn’t easy, especially when you’re out of practice. Even though my eyes are closed, cosmic flashes occasionally light up my field of vision, the result of radiation striking my retinas, creating the illusion of light. This phenomenon was first noticed by astronauts during the Apollo era, and its cause still isn’t thoroughly understood. I’ll get used to this, too, but for now the flashes are an alarming reminder of the radiation zipping through my brain.

Earth’s atmosphere is naturally resistant to objects entering from space. Moving at the high speed of orbit, any object will create friction with the air—enough friction that most objects simply burn up from the heat. This is a fact that generally works to our advantage, as it protects the planet from the many meteoroids and orbital debris that would otherwise rain down unexpectedly. And we take advantage of it when we fill visiting vehicles with trash and then set them loose to burn up in the atmosphere. But it’s also what makes a return from space so difficult and dangerous.

Gennady, Misha, and I all served in our militaries before being chosen to fly in space, and though it’s something we never talk about, we all know we could have been ordered to kill one another. Now we are taking part in the largest peaceful international collaboration in history. When people ask whether the space station is worth the expense, this is something I always point out. What is it worth to see two former bitter enemies transform weapons into transport for exploration and the pursuit of scientific knowledge? What is it worth to see former enemy nations turn their warriors into crewmates and lifelong friends? This is impossible to put a dollar figure on, but to me it’s one of the things that makes this project worth the expense, even worth risking our lives.

We step into our little boxes and wait for the head of the Russian space agency to ask us each in turn, again, if we are ready for our flight. It’s sort of like getting married, except whenever you’re asked a question you say, “We are ready for the flight” instead of “I do.” I’m sure the American rituals would seem just as alien to the Russians: before flying on the space shuttle, we would get suited up in our orange launch-and-entry suits, stand around a table in the Operations and Checkout Building, and then play a very specific version of lowball poker. We couldn’t go out to the launchpad until the commander had lost a round (by getting the highest hand), using up his or her bad luck for the day. No one remembers exactly how this tradition got started. Probably some crew did it first and came back alive, so everyone else had to do it too.

It wasn’t until years later that I understood that a management failure doomed Challenger as much as the O-ring failure. Engineers working on the solid rocket boosters had raised concerns multiple times about the performance of the O-rings in cold weather. In a teleconference the night before Challenger’s launch, they had desperately tried to talk NASA managers into delaying the mission until the weather got warmer. Those engineers’ recommendations were not only ignored, they were left out of reports sent to the higher-level managers who made the final decision about whether or not to launch. They knew nothing about the O-ring problems or the engineers’ warnings, and neither did the astronauts who were risking their lives. The presidential commission that investigated the disaster recommended fixes to the solid rocket boosters, but more important, they recommended broad changes to the decision-making process at NASA, recommendations that changed the culture at NASA—at least for a while.

Later, as I reflect on the situation, I realize that if the satellite had in fact hit us, we probably wouldn’t even have known it. When an aircraft flies into a mountain in bad weather, at five hundred miles per hour, there is little left to tell the story of what went wrong: this crash would have taken place at a speed seventy times that. When I used to work on investigations of aircraft mishaps as a Navy test pilot, I would sometimes reflect that a crew might never have known that anything had gone wrong. Misha, Gennady, and I would have gone from grumbling to one another in our cold Soyuz to being blasted in a million directions as diffused atoms, all in the space of a millisecond. Our neurological systems would not even have had time to process the incoming data into conscious thought. The energy involved in a collision between two large objects at 35,000 miles per hour would be similar to that of a nuclear bomb. I think of that time I almost flew an F-14 into the water and would have disappeared without a trace. I don’t know whether this comforts me or disturbs me.

Everything changed that afternoon when I picked up The Right Stuff.

I thought the submarine environment would be a useful analogy for the space station in a number of ways, and I especially wanted my colleagues to get an up-close look at how the Navy deals with CO2. What we learned on that trip was illuminating: the Navy has their submarines turn on their air scrubbers when the CO2 concentration rises above two millimeters of mercury, even though the scrubbers are noisy and risk giving away the submarine’s location. By comparison, the international agreement on ISS says the CO2 is acceptable up to six millimeters of mercury! The submarine’s chief engineering officer explained to us that the symptoms of high CO2 posed a threat to their work, so keeping that level low was a priority. I felt that NASA should be thinking of it the same way. When I prepared for my first flight on the ISS, I got acquainted with a new carbon dioxide removal system. The lithium hydroxide cartridges were foolproof and reliable, but that system depended on cartridges that were to be thrown away after use—not very practical, since hundreds of cartridges would be required to get through a single six-month mission. So instead we now have a device called the carbon dioxide removal assembly, or CDRA, pronounced “seedra,” and it has become the bane of my existence. There are two of them—one in the U.S. lab and one in Node 3. Each weighs about five hundred pounds and looks something like a car engine. Covered in greenish brown insulation, the Seedra is a collection of electronic boxes, sensors, heaters, valves, fans, and absorbent beds. The absorbent beds use a zeolite crystal to separate the CO2 from the air, after which the lab Seedra dumps the CO2 out into space through a vacuum valve, while the Node 3 Seedra combines oxygen drawn from the CO2 with leftover hydrogen from our oxygen-generating system in a device called Sabatier. The result is water—which we drink—and methane, which is also vented overboard.

The Russian managers claim that the CO2 should be kept high deliberately because it helps to protect the crew from harmful effects of radiation. If there is any scientific basis for this claim, I have yet to see it. And because (I suspect) the cosmonauts are docked pay for complaining, they don’t complain.

Anton welcomes us. He flew MiGs in the Russian Air Force before being selected as a cosmonaut, making him one of the people I might have found myself face-to-face with in combat had geopolitics in the early 1990s played out differently. He is solid and dependable, both physically and technically. He has a goofy sense of humor and is a close talker, even for a Russian. He has a halting way of speaking English with pauses in unusual places in his sentences, but I’m sure my Russian sounds far worse. I once asked Anton what he would have done if his MiG-21 and my F-14 had been flying straight at each other on some fateful day—how would he have maneuvered his airplane to get an advantage on me? When I was training and flying as a Navy fighter pilot, these questions about MiGs and their capabilities consumed my fellow pilots and me. All we knew then was guesswork based on military intelligence. As it turns out, the same guesswork was happening on the Soviet side.

esprit de corps

In fact, there is much crossover between these categories of research. If we can learn how to counteract the devastating impact of bone loss in microgravity, the solutions may well be applied to osteoporosis and other bone diseases. If we can learn how to keep our hearts healthy in space, that knowledge will be useful for heart health on Earth. The effects of living in space look a lot like those of aging, which affect us all. The lettuce we will grow later in the year is a study for future space travel—astronauts on their way to Mars will have no fresh food but what they can grow—but it is also teaching us more about growing food efficiently on Earth. The closed water system developed for the ISS, where we process our urine into clean water, is crucial for getting to Mars, but it also has promising implications for treating water on Earth, especially in places where clean water is scarce. This overlapping of scientific goals isn’t new—when Captain Cook traveled the Pacific it was for the purpose of exploration, but the scientists traveling with him picked up plants along the way and revolutionized the field of botany. Was the purpose of Cook’s expedition scientific or exploratory? Does it matter, ultimately? It will be remembered for both, and I hope the same is true of my time on the space station.

I committed the emergency procedures to memory as I’d been told to. If the instructor asked me what I would do if I lost an engine on the T-34, I could tell him, “Put the PCL idle, T-handle down clip in place, standby fuel pump on, starter on, monitor N1 and ITT for start indications, starter off when ITT peaks or no indication of start.” I haven’t flown the T-34 for nearly thirty years, and I only flew it a total of seventy hours, but I can still rattle this off without thinking. I could still recover from the loss of an engine, or a range of other emergencies, in that plane.

Our bodies are smart about getting rid of what’s not needed, and my body has started to notice that my bones are not needed in zero gravity. Not having to support our weight, we lose muscle as well. Sometimes I reflect that future generations may live their whole lives in space, and they won’t need their bones at all. They will be able to live as invertebrates. But I plan to return to Earth, so I must work out six days a week.

Soon, we are moving, the motion lulling us into a contemplative trance. After a while, the bus slows, then comes to a stop well before the launchpad. We nod at one another, step off, and take up our positions. We’ve all undone the rubber-band seals that had been so carefully and publicly leak-checked just an hour before. I center myself in front of the right rear tire and reach into my Sokol suit. I don’t really have to pee, but it’s a tradition: When Yuri Gagarin was on his way to the launchpad for his historic first spaceflight, he asked to pull over—right about here—and peed on the right rear tire of the bus. Then he went to space and came back alive. So now we all must do the same. The tradition is so well respected that women space travelers bring a bottle of urine or water to splash on the tire rather than getting entirely out of their suits.

The biggest concern is food getting stuck on the hatch seal between modules, one of which is right by the table where we eat. We need to be able to close and seal that hatch quickly in an emergency.

All of this coordinating with sites all over the world might sound time-consuming, and it can be, but no one would ever suggest changing it. With so many space agencies cooperating, it’s important that everyone knows what everyone else is doing. Plans can change quickly, and a misunderstanding could be costly, or deadly. We do this whole circuit of control centers both morning and evening, five days a week.

For some people who hope to fly in space, language can be a challenge. We all have to be able to speak at least one second language (I’ve been studying Russian for years, and my cosmonaut crewmates speak my language much better than I speak theirs), but the European and Japanese astronauts have the added burden of learning two languages if they don’t already speak English or Russian.

The capcom speaking to us on the ground today is David Saint-Jacques, a Canadian astronaut. The term “capcom” is left over from the early days of Mercury when the astronauts went to space in capsules—one person in mission control was designated the “capsule communicator,” the sole person in voice contact with the astronaut in space. “Capsule communicator” was shortened to “capcom,” and the name stuck.

Part of our training in advance of flying on the shuttle was meant to let us experience and recognize the symptoms of high CO2; we each went into a booth in the flight medicine clinic to put on a breathing mask that gave us slowly increasing levels of carbon dioxide.

Progress is the same rocket that launches the manned Soyuz. Our three new crewmates, due up in a little less than a month on May 26, are about to trust their lives to the same hardware and software. The Russian space agency must investigate what went wrong and make sure there won’t be a recurrence. That will interfere with our schedule up here, but no one wants to fly on a Soyuz that’s going to do the same thing this Progress did. It would make for a horrible death, spinning out of control in low Earth orbit knowing you will soon be dead from CO2 asphyxiation or oxygen deprivation, after which our corpses would orbit the Earth until they burn up in the atmosphere months later.

A USEFUL WAY to think of an orbiting object like the International Space Station is that it is going fast enough that the force of gravity keeps it curving around the Earth. We think of objects in orbit as being stable, staying at the same distance above the planet, but in reality the small amount of atmospheric drag that exists at 250 miles above the Earth’s surface pulls on us even when we are whizzing along at 17,500 miles per hour. Without intervention our orbit would tighten until we eventually crashed into the Earth’s surface. This will be allowed to happen some day when NASA and our international partners decide that the station has finished its useful life. It will be deorbited in a controlled manner to make sure that when it hits the planet, it will be in a safe area in the Pacific Ocean, and I hope to be there to watch. This is how the Russian space station Mir ended its life.

When Samantha was ten years old, she asked me at dinner one evening what religion we were. “Our religion is ‘Be nice to other people and eat all your vegetables,’ ” I said. I was pleased with myself for describing my religious beliefs so concisely and that she was satisfied with it. I respect people of faith, including an aunt who is a nun, but I’ve never felt that faith myself.

The leading hypothesis is that increased pressure in the cerebral fluid surrounding our brains is causing the vision changes. In space, we don’t have gravity to pull blood, cerebral fluid, lymphatic fluid, mucus, water in our cells, and other fluids to the lower half of our bodies like we are used to. So the cerebral fluid does not drain properly and tends to increase the pressure in our heads. We adjust over the first few weeks in space and pee away a lot of the excess, but the full-head sensation never completely goes away. It feels a little like standing on your head twenty-four hours a day—mild pressure in your ears, congestion, round face, flushed skin. As with so many other aspects of human anatomy, the delicate structures of our heads evolved under Earth’s gravity and don’t always respond well to having it taken away.

We also talk about our evolving relationships with the various control centers—Houston, Moscow, Europe, Japan—and how much the mutual adoration society, as I call it, has gotten out of control. It seems that no one can do anything, either in space or on the ground, without receiving a short speech of appreciation: “Thank you for all your hard work and your time on this, awesome job, we appreciate it.” Then the speech has to be repeated back: “No, thank you, you guys have been just awesome, we appreciate all your hard work,” ad nauseam. It all comes from a well-meaning place, but I think it’s a waste of time. I’ve often had the experience of finishing up some task and then moving on to the next thing, when a “thank you” speech comes back at me. This requires that I stop what I’m doing to float back to the mic, acknowledge those thanks, and return them in roughly equal proportions—multiple times a day. If you consider the cost of constructing and maintaining the space station, the mutual adoration society probably costs taxpayers millions of dollars a year. I’m already thinking about putting a stop to it when Terry, Samantha, and Anton leave.

We call Samantha over so she can hear it too, and I describe what my experience had been last time: As we slammed into the atmosphere, the capsule was engulfed in a bright orange plasma, which is a little disconcerting, sort of like having your face a few inches away from a window while on the other side someone is trying to get at you with a blowtorch.

I hear them talking to one another this way, trading idle work chat and calling out numbers to the control center, almost all the way to the ground. If I didn’t know what they were doing—falling like a meteor at supersonic speed toward the planet’s surface—I could never have guessed.

I’ve noticed a strange phenomenon when people watch movies in space: we instinctually move to a position that looks like lying down with relation to the screen. In weightlessness our positions make no difference in the way we feel physically, but the association between lying down and relaxing is so strong that I actually feel more relaxed when I get into this position.

The film was great—we were impressed by how real the ISS looked, and the five of us were an unusually tough audience in that regard. It was a bit like watching a film of your own house burning while you’re inside it.

While I’m cleaning and then moving the kabin, the ground is taking care of “safing” the equipment, which means making sure everything I will be working on is powered down correctly so I don’t electrocute myself or cause an electrical short. (The risk of electrocution is ever present on the space station, especially on the U.S. side. We use 120-volt power, which is more dangerous than the 28 volts used on the Russian segment. We train for the possibility of electrocution and often practice advanced cardiac life support on board, using a defibrillator and heart medications meant to be injected into the shinbone.)

Scott,” Misha says with a note of excitement in his voice, “we did it!” “Misha,” I answer, “we had no choice!

Getting ready on the day of launch takes much longer than you’d think it would, like so many aspects of spaceflight. First I take a final trip to the banya to relax, then go through the preflight enema ritual—our guts shut down in space initially, so the Russians encourage us to get things cleaned out ahead of time. The cosmonauts have their doctors do this, with warm water and rubber hoses, but I opt for the drugstore type in private, which lets me maintain a comfortable friendship with my flight surgeon. I savor a bath in the Jacuzzi tub, then a nap (because our launch is scheduled for 1:42 a.m. local time). When I wake, I take a shower, lingering awhile. I know how much I’ll miss the feeling of water for the next year. The Russian flight surgeon we call “Dr. No” shows up shortly after I’m out of the shower. He is called Dr. No because he gets to decide whether our families can see us once we’re in quarantine. His decisions are arbitrary, sometimes mean-spirited, and absolute. He is here to wipe down our entire bodies with alcohol wipes. The original idea behind the alcohol swab-down was to kill any germs trying to stow away with space travelers, but now it seems like just another ritual. After a champagne toast with senior management and our significant others, we sit in silence for a minute, a Russian tradition before a long trip. As we leave the building, a Russian Orthodox priest will bless us and throw holy water into each of our faces. Every cosmonaut since Yuri Gagarin has gone through each of these steps, so we will go through them, too. I’m not religious, but I always say that when you’re getting ready to be rocketed into space, a blessing can’t hurt.

Russian mission control warns us it’s one minute to launch. On an American spacecraft, we would already know because we’d see the countdown clock ticking backward toward zero. Unlike NASA, the Russians don’t feel the drama of the countdown is necessary.

Our zero-g talisman, a stuffed snowman belonging to Gennady’s youngest daughter, floats on a string. We are in weightlessness. This is the moment we call MECO, pronounced “mee-ko,” which stands for “main engine cutoff.” It’s always a shock. The spacecraft is now in orbit around the Earth. After having been subjected to such strong and strange forces, the sudden quiet and stillness feel unnatural.

Mark realized then that if he wanted to do something with his life more exciting or lucrative than welding, he had better improve his grades. So he got his ass in gear and did, starting that day. I have no recollection of this conversation, as I was probably looking out the window at a squirrel.

My gotovy,” Gennady responds into his headset. We are ready.

Fucking blya,” Gennady groans. Fucking bullshit.

We live in the space station, the way you live in a building. We work in it, the way scientists work in a laboratory, and we also work on it, the way mechanics work on a boat, if the boat were adrift in international waters and the Coast Guard had no way to reach it.

She became one of very few women to pass the test, and that made a big impression on Mark and me: she had decided on a goal that seemed like it might not be possible, and she had achieved it through sheer force of determination and the support of people around her.

Something seems out of the ordinary, and after a bit I realize what it is. “There’s no debris,” I point out to Gennady and Misha, and they agree it’s strange. Usually MECO reveals what junk has been lurking in the spacecraft, held in their hiding places by gravity—random tiny nuts and bolts, staples, metal shavings, plastic flotsam, hairs, dust—what we call foreign object debris, and of course NASA has an acronym for it: FOD. There were people at the Kennedy Space Center whose entire job was to keep this stuff out of the space shuttles. Having spent time in the hangar where the Soyuz spacecraft are maintained and prepared for flight, and having observed that it’s not very clean compared to the space shuttle’s Orbiter Processing Facility, I’m impressed that the Russians have somehow maintained a high standard of FOD avoidance.

It was Friday night, so after dropping our bags we went straight to Shep’s Bar, actually just the remodeled basement of Cottage 3. The place was named for Bill Shepherd, a NASA veteran of three space shuttle flights who was now in Star City training to become the first commander of the International Space Station. He was also a former Navy SEAL who was legendary for saying in his astronaut interview, when asked what he could do better than anyone else in the room, “Kill people with my knife.

The landing phase was the most challenging for the commander and pilot. When the space shuttle hit the air molecules of the outer atmosphere at 17,500 miles per hour, the resulting friction created heat of more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. We had to do everything right and trust that the insulating tiles on the space shuttle would protect us.

My philosophy is that for complicated jobs, if you aren't ahead of schedule, you're already behind.

Slow is efficient. Efficient is fast. Slow is fast.

The swim requirements were even harder. We had to be able to swim a mile and tread water for fifteen minutes, in full flight suit and boots. I got through the mile easily, but I found treading water murderously difficult. Other guys seemed to be naturally buoyant; I seem to have the buoyancy of a brick. I practiced and practiced and was finally able to pass the requirement, though just barely.

Everything else I’d done in my life up to this point, like working as an EMT, had been choices that had played to my strengths and hadn’t particularly challenged my weaknesses. This new goal was going to expose every weakness I had.

towed a banner the others were trying to shoot at. These exercises were done using real bullets, which seems like a terrible idea,

YOU

We have a unique vantage point here aboard the International Space Station. As I look out the window, I see a very beautiful planet that seems inviting and peaceful. Unfortunately, it is not.

In the cavernous hangar known as Building 254 we pull on our Sokol suits... The chest opening is then sealed through a disconcertingly low-tech process of gathering the edges of the fabric together and securing them with elastic bands... Once I got to the space station, I learned the Russians use the exact same rubber bands to seal their garbage bags in space.

Gennady, Misha, and I all served in our militaries before being chosen to fly in space, and though it's something we never talked about, we all know we could have been ordered to kill one another. Now we are taking part in the largest peaceful international collaboration in history.

Often when I do interviews and press events from space, I’m asked what I miss about Earth. I have a few answers I always reach for that make sense in any context: I mention rain, spending time with my family, relaxing at home. Those are always true. But throughout the day, from moment to moment, I’m aware of missing all sorts of random things that don’t even necessarily rise to the surface of my consciousness. I miss cooking. I miss chopping fresh food, the smell vegetables give up when you first slice into them. I miss the smell of the unwashed skins of fruit, the sight of fresh produce piled high in grocery stores. I miss grocery stores, the shelves of bright colors and the glossy tile floors and the strangers wandering the aisles. I miss people. I miss the experience of meeting new people and getting to know them, learning about a life different from my own, hearing about things people experienced that I haven’t. I miss the sound of children playing, which always sounds the same no matter their language. I miss the sound of people talking and laughing in another room. I miss rooms. I miss doors and door frames and the creak of wood floorboards when people walk around in old buildings. I miss sitting on my couch, sitting on a chair, sitting on a bar stool. I miss the feeling of resting after opposing gravity all day. I miss the rustle of papers, the flap of book pages turning. I miss drinking from a glass. I miss setting things down on a table and having them stay there. I miss the sudden chill of wind on my back, the warmth of sun on my face. I miss showers. I miss running water in all its forms: washing my face, washing my hands. I miss sleeping in a bed—the feel of sheets, the heft of a comforter, the welcoming curve of a pillow. I miss the colors of clouds at different times of day and the variety of sunrises and sunsets on Earth.

I’ve learned that grass smells great and wind feels amazing and rain is a miracle. I will try to remember how magical these things are for the rest of my life.

Sleeping while floating isn’t easy, especially when you’re out of practice. Even though my eyes are closed, cosmic flashes occasionally light up my field of vision, the result of radiation striking my retinas, creating the illusion of light. This phenomenon was first noticed by astronauts during the Apollo era, and its cause still isn’t thoroughly understood. I’ll get used to this, too, but for now the flashes are an alarming reminder of the radiation zipping through my brain.

I think about the schoolchildren who saw their experiments blow up on Orbital, rebuilt them, and saw them blow up on SpaceX. I hope they will get a third chance. There is a lesson here, I guess, about risk and resilience, about endurance and trying again.

It’s a strange feeling, this nostalgia in advance, nostalgia for things I’m still experiencing every day and that often, right now, annoy me.

When people ask whether the space station is worth the expense, this is something I always point out. What is it worth to see two former bitter enemies transform weapons into transport for exploration and the pursuit of scientific knowledge? What is it worth to see former enemy nations turn their warriors into crewmates and lifelong friends? This is impossible to put a dollar figure on, but to me it’s one of the things that makes this project worth the expense, even worth risking our lives.

I’ve never had a problem with Terry on this issue or any other. I’ve found him to be consistently competent, and as a leader, he is a consensus builder rather than an authoritarian. Since I’ve been up here and have been commander, he has always been respectful of my previous experience, always open to suggestions about how to do things better without getting defensive or competitive. He loves baseball, so there’s always a game on some laptop, especially when the Astros or the Orioles are playing. I’ve gotten used to the rhythm of the nine-inning

Working through this together is time-consuming, but it will be worth it in the long run.

A man must shape himself to a new mark directly the old one goes to ground.

On my last flight to the space station, a mission of 159 days, I lost bone mass, my muscles atrophied, and my blood redistributed itself in my body, which strained and shrank the walls of my heart. More troubling, I experienced problems with my vision, as many other astronauts have. I have been exposed to more than thirty times the radiation of a person on Earth, equivalent to about ten chest X-rays every day. This exposure will increase my risk of a fatal cancer for the rest of my life. None of this compares, though, to the most troubling risk: that something bad could happen to someone I love while I'm in space with no way for me to come home.

Everywhere I looked, I saw students who could listen to an hour-long lecture, asking intelligent questions and writing things down. They turned in homework assignments on time, correctly done. They took a textbook and lecture notes and did something they called “studying.” They were then able to do well on exams. I had no idea how to do any of this. If you’ve never felt this way, it’s hard to express how awful it is.

Most people would not have gotten past the setbacks she'd faced, but through intelligence, grit, and fierce determination, she had made the life for herself that she wanted.

The closed water system developed for the ISS, where we process our urine into clean water, is crucial for getting to Mars, but it also has promising implications for treating water on Earth, especially in places where clean water is scarce. This overlapping of scientific goals isn’t new—when Captain Cook traveled the Pacific it was for the purpose of exploration, but the scientists traveling with him picked up plants along the way and revolutionized the field of botany. Was the purpose of Cook’s expedition scientific or exploratory? Does it matter, ultimately? It will be remembered for both, and I hope the same is true of my time on the space station.

If you consider the cost of constructing and maintaining the space station, the mutual adoration society probably costs taxpayers millions of dollars a year.

I’ve learned that an achievement that seems to have been accomplished by one person probably has hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people’s minds and work behind it, and I’ve learned that it’s a privilege to be the embodiment of that work.