Out of Orbit by Chris Jones

isn’t pinned down takes flight, including poop. In other words, bowel evacuation in orbit is never a passive exercise—a certain velocity must be given to the offending projectile, enough to deliver it to the surface of the toilet’s bowl and make it stick. It’s just too bad that sometimes there isn’t enough gunpowder in the cannon.
    It was too bad, too, that the station was still without a shower. (It won’t arrive until one of the planned habitation modules makes the trip up.) Because water remains a scarce resource, crews have had to make do with a quick splash and a scrub-down with moist towelettes. Hence, there is a particular urgency when it comes to making a clean getaway from the can. For some astronauts, it’s enough to turn their guts into concrete.
    What goes in must eventually come out, however, a harsh reality in realms beyond the toilet—more specifically, in the end conethat caps Zvezda. Occasionally it served as a docking port for
Progress
—an unmanned Russian cargo ship used to ferry loads of food, clothing, spare parts, letters, and small gifts from home into the crew’s open arms—but most of the time, the hatch was filled with garbage, waiting to be taken out to the curb.
    With Expedition Five having bundled up their crushed cans and empty foil wrappers and taken them back down to earth, the passageway was clear, but that tidiness would last for only a short while. It didn’t take long for Expedition Six to begin filling up the station’s empty spaces, and not just with their trash. The men and women who had gone up before them had already left their own legacies, each one of their contributions layered on top of the last, like so much graffiti on a once white train. There was a silver ship’s bell mounted on a bracket in Destiny, across from Pettit’s sleeping compartment; a photograph, stuck on a bulkhead above the galley, of a white-bearded Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the father of modern space flight; and enough musical instruments to put on an impromptu concert, including an electronic keyboard and an acoustic guitar.
    Now it was up to Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit to make their own marks on station, to leave their own fingerprints, to find their own memories. It was up to them to furnish their new home, and to make it theirs alone.
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    It wasn’t always a conscious acquisition. There was the usual course of arcane experiments to run (most of them involved measuring the effects of weightlessness on various materials), and there was a demanding maintenance program that had to be kept up (batteries needed charging, computers needed rebooting, filters needed unclogging), but Expedition Six’s principal assignment was simply learning how to stay alive in space.
    For its truest believers, the International Space Station has always been an outpost, a stepping-stone, a pit stop. It is the means to learn how to live longer and better in space, and, someday, much farther away. It will take two years to travel to Mars and back, andbefore men can make that kind of trip, they first have to master less ambitious journeys; before miracles, there are errands to be run. Astronauts have to spend one, two, three, four months and more on station, testing their physical and psychological limits, learning like free divers how to push deeper and deeper each time out. Ultimately, they will need to find a way to live in space so happily that they will start to forget that they have ever missed earth, their days filled with the fundamentals of a new, weightless life. Expedition Six was charged with learning again how to brush their teeth, cut their hair, wash their clothes, the boring things that help anchor those magical moments that make life really worth living. And if they managed to do each of those boring things well enough, simply enough, Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit would have found an astronaut’s nirvana. They would have learned how to push through to the other side of the