by Jeff Pollard
“And that would be where?” Caroline asks.
“Follow me,” K says, planting feet on one wall and propelling himself through a hatch. Caroline follows. The US modules are attached by large rectangular hatches making it quite easy to move from one module to another, which Kingsley demonstrates rather effortlessly. Kingsley glides into the Destiny module. He continues straight ahead, gliding freely through the spacious module. Every wall is covered in equipment and storage.
“Do you know where you're going?” Caroline begs, looking up at the bottom of Kingsley's socks.
“Absolutely,” K replies, gliding into the next module, the Unity. K plants his hands against a dull pink wall and comes to a stop. Caroline catches up. “This is the Unity module, the first US module launched.
“That's great, so where's the bathroom?” Caroline asks.
“Which one?” K asks.
“The closest one,” Caroline replies quickly.
“Through there,” Kingsley points straight ahead through a narrow, off-center hatch. After gliding easily through the wide open rectangular hatches of the US segment, the transition to the Russian segment and the Zarya module is stark. The hatch is much smaller, it curves upwards, and bulky off-white storage bags lining the inside of this tunnel, making it quite a tight squeeze. At first glance it looks like maybe this hatch just leads to a small cargo ship used to store trash until it burns up. But no, this is the tunnel leading to the Zarya.
“Are you serious?” Caroline asks. “Is this like a hazing, is that going to take me to like an outhouse or something?”
“It's just two more modules ahead, the more you talk the longer it's gonna take,” K replies.
“Oh god,” Caroline says, pushing forward into the tunnel leading to the Zarya.
“Or you could use this one,” K says from behind her.
“What!?”
“That way,” K says, pointing to his right with one thumb.
“Seriously, don't fuck with me, my bladder is going to burst,” Caroline says.
“To Tranquility,” K reads aloud the sign on the right hatch. Caroline plants her feet and jumps to that hatch, hitting the opening sideways, whacking her shin on the wall.
“Ow,” she says without stopping, finding the bathroom which is about the size of an airplane lavatory, enclosed by a small door and with walls made of thin plastic. However, unlike an airplane, this lavatory is on the floor. Caroline glides inside, shutting the door behind her and re-orienting to a sideways bathroom. K floats with his feet by the lavatory door, waiting.
“K?” Caroline calls from behind the thin plastic door.
“Yeah?”
“How do I pee?”
“See the relief tube?” K asks.
“I can't pee in a tube,” Caroline calls back.
“We trained for this,” K says, exasperated.
“I wasn't there that day!”
“Take off the funnel,” K says.
“Funnel?”
“The cock nozzle,” K shouts.
“Okay,” Caroline says uneasily.
“There's a larger cup attachment, a pussy nozzle I guess you could call it. Should be in there somewhere.”
“I can't get the cock nozzle off,” Caroline says, “can you just do it?” She opens the door. Her flight suit pants are floating around her knees and her forehead has more worried wrinkles than it has ever had before.
“Nice diaper,” K says seductively.
“Don't fuck with me, my bladder is going to explode.”
“You can hold it for a few seconds more, you do Kegels.”
“K!?”
“Fine,” K reaches in, grabs the relief tube, twists the plastic funnel attachment off, then snaps on the Female Urine Containment System. “Now just press the FUCS to your lady parts.”
“The what!?”
“The pussy nozzle,” K replies, “and you want it to be snug, but not completely sealed against your skin.”
“Why?” Caroline asks, “and look away.” She shoves K and he floats away.
“Hit the suction button by the toilet,” K says, doing a slow backflip.
“Why do I want suction?” Caroline asks.
“So your pee doesn't float away,” K replies. “And that's why you don't want it sealed against your skin, unless you want your lady parts to triple in size.”
“Okay, okay, okay, ahhh,” Caroline finally gets some relief. It sounds a bit like the suction device dentists often use as her urine is sucked down the tube.
“And don't look down!” K shouts, suddenly remembering something.
“What!?”
“You're wearing a camera on your head,” K replies.
“Oh god.”
“So that's a hell of a day to be absent,” K replies.
“Didn't you notice I wasn't there?” Caroline asks, still peeing.
“I thought they separated the men and women for that training.”
“Why would they separate us?”
“Well, you see the toilet, yeah, it's a bit more complicated to poop in zero-g. Apparently some people have trouble with their aim, so we trained on a model of that toilet that has a camera in the bottom. They call it the asshole centering cam. And yeah, we looked at our own b-holes. So uh, you know, good luck if you have to poop. You done yet? I need to go too,” K says.
“Still going. I don't think I've ever peed this much in my life.”
“That's because your bladder fills from the outside in while in space. You don't feel any pressure at all since there's no gravity pushing that liquid down to exert a force on your bladder's wall. So it just keeps filling and filling and you don't feel anything until it's completely full, and then it's like a water balloon being overfilled.”
“It's still coming out!” Caroline is alarmed. “I'm not like peeing out spinal fluid or something right?”
“I'd hope not.”
“K!?”
“What?”
“I'm still going.”
“And?”
“It didn't feel like I had to pee this much. This might be some kind of record.”
“As I said, you can't feel how full your bladder is until it's basically full. So you just have to go pee regularly even if it doesn't feel like you have to. You're a lady, isn't that what you do normally anyway? Are you done?”
“I think so,” Caroline says. “How do I wash my hands?”
“Why, did you pee on your hands?”
“I touched a cock nozzle,” Caroline protests.
“True enough. There's wet wipes and towels stowed in there.”
“I see them,” Caroline says testily. Caroline breathes a sigh of relief as she floats away. K hurriedly gets in the lavatory after her, switching the nozzles out and then relieving himself.
There are actually few windows in the station. Most of the cabin is walled off by equipment storage, bungee cords holding back cameras, numerous laptop computers and lab equipment. There are of course a number of windows, but they aren't mounted all over the station as several of the modules have no windows at all. However, there is one module, called the Cupola, which is the station's window on the world. The Cupola lives on the Earth-facing side of the station, mounted to the bottom of the Tranquility module, just a few feet away from one of the two onboard lavatories. The Cupola is a small module but with quite a specific and valuable purpose. The Cupola is a bit like a glass bubble sticking out the bottom of the station. It consists of seven thick glass windows: a circular center window, and six trapezoidal side windows mounted on the hexagonal Cupola. Each of the windows has an external shutter that can close over the windows to protect them from micrometeorites. It is about two meters in diameter and 1.5 meters tall. It's not large enough for an astronaut to enter, so much as they float with their upper half inside the cupola and their feet dangling up into the Tranquility.
In contrast to the artificial lighting and serious lack of windows in the rest of the station, the Cupola at the end of the Tranquility le
ts in bright and natural light that draws Caroline's attention. Because of changing orientations, Caroline floats up into the Cupola, only to discover the Earth is above her. She's overwhelmed by a combination of awe and vertigo. She can see from horizon to horizon, except for a few places where other station components like the nearby docked Soyuz blocks her view. Kingsley floats up beside her.
Caroline simply looks to K with her jaw hanging open. No words. Looking straight through the center window they see the Eastern Mediterranean. In moments Greece and Turkey silently give way to Cyprus, then Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait and northern Saudi Arabia.
“You can see the Tigris and Euphrates,” K says. “You can really see the ancient delta too. Four thousand years ago the first set of laws were codified by the first true civilization right there, around those rivers. Thousands, perhaps millions of years, humans spent all of their time just surviving, foraging and hunting. It wasn't until they discovered they could cultivate just a few thousand years ago, right down there, that any of them actually had free time or the freedom to do something other than scrounge up food. That flood plain enabled specialization, people who would just try to figure out how to make better tools, discover mathematics, or study the stars. The Earth was here for four billion years, and in all that time, no creatures had ever figured out what the Earth was, until she gave humans the luxury of free time. Think of all the thousands of generations that looked up, wondering what was up there. And here we are, looking back. We'll never appreciate just how amazing this is.”
“I see they've found the cupola already,” Michael Hopkins says as he leads Richard and Arnold on a quick tour.
“Get out,” Arnold Schwarzenegger orders everyone. “I've got to pee.”
“Just close the door Conan,” K replies. Arnold angles into the lavatory, but has trouble orienting himself, as he entered it upside down, he struggles to flip around, then tries to shut the door only to whack it back open with his elbow as he is practically too wide for it.
“Get out!” Arnold shouts.
Caroline and K glide past and back to the Unity module, but K adds, “I'll be back,” as they leave.
“Follow me to Russia segment,” Oleg says, leading the tour into the off-center tunnel lined with white bags at the for end of the Unity module.
The Russian modules were more physically constrained by their launches and thus are smaller in diameter. The walls are covered almost completely in Velcro, and the storage containers lining the outside intrude further into the internal volume, leaving them much more cramped. The lighting is more yellow and the walls are a yellowish dirty-looking off-white. The walls are cluttered, looking like the home of space hoarders, with every square inch of the walls covered in cables, tubes, equipment floating yet attached. It feels like you're going to crash into some vital piece of equipment at any moment. It also has a stale smell and the ambient noise of the station is quite a bit louder, sounding like the cabin of a passenger airliner as you hear machines whirring and loud fans circulating air.
“This is Zarya, it was first module launched in 1998,” Oleg says loudly as he leads the tour. “This is where we have dinner table,” Oleg says, pointing to a large table with many bungee cords and Velcro patches to anchor spoons and food pouches and such. Above the table are several bottles of sauces Velcroed to the wall. “And shower,” he says, pointing to a mirror with toothbrushes, shaving kits, wash cloths, and a water dispenser handy.
“Follow me,” Oleg says, gliding forward to the next module. “This is Zvezda servicing module, it has engine for station to boost into higher orbit.” At the end of the module is a small hatch leading to an area with many storage bags floating behind bungee cords. “This is Progress module, this is garbage truck.” Oleg reaches into the Progress, which is basically an unmanned version of the Soyuz spacecraft, and pulls out a metal cylinder about the size of an oxygen tank a scuba diver would wear. “This is the solid waste. Here, hold it,” he passes the cylinder toward Caroline.
“Solid waste?” Caroline asks as she grabs the cylinder.
“It's a poop tube,” Kingsley replies. Caroline just lets go of the cylinder, leaving it floating in front of her. Oleg and Sergey have quite a laugh at her expense.
“Yes, it's poop,” Oleg replies, taking the cylinder back and placing it safely under a bungee cord, “and we put that in garbage truck here, and when it leaves it will burn up in atmosphere, so when you're on Earth and you see shooting star, that's just cosmonaut poop.”
“Now if you look down,” Sergey says, “You'll find Poisk airlock,” he leads the group. They float past two Russian space suits. “These are our suits for spacewalk, and you go into that airlock and you can go outside. And down here,” he says floating farther down, into a small hatch. “This is Soyuz.”
The Soyuz's hatch is quite narrow and so the hatch cover can't open very far into the orbital module, which leaves the docking probe sticking out directly into your path as you try to enter the Soyuz. Oleg and Sergey squeeze past the docking probe into the orbital module.
“This is where you live on Soyuz, with toilet and some room to move around,” Oleg says, but the Soyuz Orbital Module is extremely small, barely fitting two people in it, and they have to squeeze past their empty space suits to enter the Soyuz Descent Module. Again the hatch into the descent module won't open very far, and it's so shallow that Oleg can't float around the hatch to get into his seat, he has to actually push the hatch most of the way closed to get past it. Oleg and Sergey squeeze into their seats, where they are elbow to elbow, and supplies in white bags are bungeed all around them, except for directly in front of them where their control panels for piloting the Soyuz are located. It really looks like just about the smallest space you could fit three men laying next to each other, it is incredibly cramped. Kingsley, Caroline, and Richard have to take turns just looking through the hatch since it's too close for them to all see at once.
“Soyuz is pretty snug,” Oleg says, “as you can see, and it gets even more small when we put on our flight suits, so it can be very tight in here. If you'll back up so we can get out,” Oleg asks. “Go ahead and go up and you'll see the other airlock and the identical docking port, that is where the next Soyuz will dock with the next crew.”
Oleg, Sergey, and Michael have been in space for four months. The ISS crew rotation is rather simple. Each crew of three stays on the station for around 5-6 months, and their stay overlaps with the previous and next crews for all but the middle month. When they launched, Oleg, Sergey, and Michael met up with Fyodor Yurchikhin of the RSA, Karen Nyberg of NASA, and Luca Parmitano of the ESA. This six person crew, called Expedition 37, worked together for about two-and-a-half months. Then the previous crew, Fyodor, Karen, and Luca, got back in their Soyuz and returned to Earth, landing in Kazakhstan. Oleg, Sergey, and Michael would then be on their own for about a month before the next launch, which would bring up Koichi Wakata of JAXA, Richard Mastracchio of NASA and Mikhail Tyurin of the RSA. Together, this new six person crew, called Expedition 38 would live and work together for several months before Oleg, Sergey, and Michael would return to Earth, leaving the new crew alone for about a month, before they would be joined by the next crew, and that new crew of six would be called Expedition 39.
So the Expedition 38 crew of Oleg, Sergey, and Michael have been in space for some time with a fellow crew of three, and now for a few weeks just the three of them. They are quite excited about being joined by visitors, especially Michael who has spent the last few weeks with two native Russian speakers. All Soyuz passengers are forced to learn Russian, since the Soyuz capsule's instruments are all in Russian, and of course to be able to communicate with their fellow 'nauts. But there's nothing to make you feel more at home like being joined by fellow English speakers, especially the likes of Kingsley, Richard, and Arnold. That is if you can call how Arnold speaks English.
“What did I miss,” Arnold asks, floating into the Zvezda, having just now caught up.
“
That was a long potty break,” K says.
“You guys just left me, I didn't know which way to go, or which way was up, but I found this tunnel which I thought would be to the basement, and then I found you.”
“Great story Hercules,” K says.
“Let's go back and check out the Cupola now that Hercules is done peeing,” Michael says, jumping and leading the way back to the US segment.
“It's Conan,” Arnold says.
“Whatever you say...Danny DeVito's brother, Arnold DeVito,” Kingsley replies deadpan.
Michael Hopkins leads the tour back to the Tranquility module and the Cupola. He points to a treadmill that's next to the toilet, but the floor of the treadmill is 90 degrees offset from the floor of its neighboring toilet.
“This is the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill,” Michael says. “You strap in, and then you are bungeed to the treadmill so it's like you have some gravity. And we do this because when you spend time in space, your muscles and bones atrophy because they aren't used.”
“Tell them why it's called the Combined Operational Load Bearing whatever,” K says.
“NASA held an online vote to name this module, eventually settling on Tranquility, named for the Apollo 11 Lunar Module. However, Stephen Colbert directed his audience to write-in Colbert as the name for the module, and that won. But NASA decided that it was a little too embarrassing so they named this treadmill for him instead.”
“That's why you don't let the Internet name things,” Caroline replies.
“You're lucky it didn't end up being named Masturbation Module,” Arnold jokes.
“That's not really the kind of thing Internet voters would get behind,” K replies. “More likely they would have voted for like 'Bieber is gay.'”
“Serenity was second,” Michael adds.
“From Firefly?” K asks. Michael nods. “That show sucked.”
“You shut your filthy whore mouth,” Michael protests.
“Alright,” K says, a bit shocked.
“I'm just saying, that was a good show,” Michael says.
“What on Earth are you people talking about?” Richard Branson asks, pushing past the group and heading for the Cupola.
