I’ve learned that voluntary spinal taps are not much fun.
I’ve learned a new empathy for other people, including people I don’t know and people I disagree with. I’ve started letting people know I appreciate them, which can sometimes freak them out at first. It’s a bit out of character. But it’s something I’m glad to have gained and hope to keep.
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I TOLD my flight surgeon Steve I felt well enough to get right to work immediately upon returning from space, and I did, but within a few days I felt much worse. This is what it means to have allowed my body to be used for science. I will continue to be a test subject for the rest of my life.
A few months later, I felt distinctly better. I will continue to participate in the Twins Study as Mark and I age. Science is a slow-moving process, and it may be years before any great understanding or breakthrough is reached from the data. Sometimes the questions science asks are answered by other questions. This doesn’t particularly bother me—I will leave the science up to the scientists. For me, it’s worth it to have contributed to advancing human knowledge, even if it’s only a step on a much longer journey.
I’ve been traveling the country and the world talking about my experiences in space. It’s gratifying to see how curious people are about my mission, how much children instinctively feel the excitement and wonder of spaceflight, and how many people think, as I do, that Mars is the next step.
In the summer, my father was diagnosed with throat cancer and began receiving radiation therapy. In October, he became much more ill. One evening, Amiko got a phone call from him, which wasn’t unusual. He had depended on her support a great deal while I was in space, and they had continued to talk often. But that day, he didn’t want anything in particular.
“I just wanted to let you know how much I love you, sweetheart,” he told her. “I’m just so glad you and Scott have each other. You’ve accomplished so much together, and all the stuff you’ve been through—it was all worth it.” Amiko thought this was out of character for him, but she said he sounded much better than he had in a while. A few days later, he took a turn for the worse, and while Mark, Amiko, and I were all out of the country, he died in the intensive care unit with my daughter Samantha by his side, four and a half years after my mother. I was grateful Samantha could be there with him.
I’m convinced he lived to see my mission through and to celebrate my return. It was a big deal to him to support Mark and me and to celebrate our accomplishments, and he was proud of all of his granddaughters, whom he adored. Like most people, he had mellowed with age, and we had a much improved relationship toward the end of his life.
In my computer, I have a file of all the images my crewmates and I took on the International Space Station during the time I was there. When I’m trying to remember some detail from the mission, sometimes I click through them. It can be overwhelming, because there are so many of them—half a million—but often a picture of a specific person on a specific day will bring back a flood of sense memory, and I will suddenly remember the smell of the space station, or the laughter of my crewmates, or the texture of the quilted walls inside my CQ.
One night, I click through the images late at night after Amiko is asleep: an image of Misha and Sergey in the Russian service module, smiling, getting ready for a Friday night dinner; an image of Samantha Cristoforetti running on the treadmill on the wall, grinning; an image of a purple-and-green aurora that I took in the middle of the night; an image of the eye of a hurricane taken from above; an image of a dirty filter vent just before I threw it away, containing a snarl of dust, lint, and one really long blond hair that must have come from Karen Nyberg, who left the station more than a year before I got there; a series of images of the connectors on the Seedra Terry and I took while we were in the process of fixing it so the ground could see how it was looking; an image of an iPad floating in the Cupola displaying a snapshot of a newborn baby I don’t know, majestic cloud formations visible below; an image of Tim Peake preparing his spacesuit for his first spacewalk, the Union Jack visible on the shoulder of the suit, a huge boyish grin on his face; a picture of Kjell flying through the U.S. lab like Superman; a picture of Gennady and me chatting in Node 1, just enjoying the moment and each other’s company. A year is made up of a million of these, and I could never have captured them all.
One image that doesn’t exist in my computer but that I will always remember is the view from the Soyuz window as Sergey, Misha, and I backed away from the International Space Station. As well as I know the inside of the station, I’ve only seen the outside a handful of times. It’s a strange sight, glinting in the reflected sunlight, as long as a football field, its solar arrays spread out more than half an acre. It’s a completely unique structure, assembled by spacewalkers flying around the Earth at 17,500 miles per hour in a vacuum, in extremes of temperature of plus and minus 270 degrees, the work of fifteen different nations over eighteen years, thousands of people speaking different languages and using different engineering methods and standards. In some cases the station’s modules never touched one another while on Earth, but they all fit together perfectly in space.
As we backed away, I knew I would never see it again, this place where I’d spent more than five hundred days of my life. We will never have a space station like this again in my lifetime, and I will always be grateful for the part I’ve played in its life. In a world of compromise and uncertainty, this space station is a triumph of engineering and cooperation. Putting it into orbit—making it work and keeping it working—is the hardest thing that human beings have ever done, and it stands as proof that when we set our minds to something hard, when we work together, we can do anything, including solving our problems here on Earth.
I also know that if we want to go to Mars, it will be very, very difficult, it will cost a great deal of money, and it may cost human lives. But I know now that if we decide to do it, we can.