CHAPTER 10 DAY IN THE LIFE: PREPARING FOR THE UNEXPECTED 184 “Well that can’t be right . . .” Captain Barry “Butch” Wilmore, Expedition 41 and 42 “It was January 14, 2015. There I was in the corner of Node 2, completely focused on the highly classified and highly volatile secret government experiment attached to the Maintenance Work Station before me, when all of a sudden . . .” If I were writing a novel or memoir, I might take the liberty to embellish the details a bit, as I did in the preceding sentence. Instead of working on a “highly volatile secret government experiment,” however, I was floating in the overhead of Node 2, digging through a 1.0 cargo transfer bag where my excess clothing was stored, trying to find some clean skivvies—that’s Navy speak for underwear— when all of a sudden . . . OK, it wasn’t sudden either. It was just the emergency warning tone. I say “just” because we’d had several of them in the preceding days. All of the warnings turned out to be false alarms as several of the highly sensitive sensors, which detect smoke in both the Russian Segment and Node 3, had annunciated. None of them had actually been smoke or fire—just dust kicked up by work that was taking place in the vicinity of the sensors. As the current station commander, I reminded the crew that one false alarm, or even several, does not mean that the next one will be false too. We had to maintain our vigilance and treat every emergency as real, and keep stepping through our memorized procedures. With this in mind, when the tone annunciated waaank whoop waaank (it’s difficult to describe a tone on paper), I stuffed my skivvie bag back into my clothing cargo transfer bag and quickly floated to the emergency panel, where I expected to see another “Fire” caution light. The only other lights are: “∆P/∆T”, which is short for cabin depress or leak and “TOX”, which is short for an ammonia leak (Chapter 19). On Earth, a bit of ammonia in cleaning solution disinfects and helps get rid of tough kitchen stains, leaving that clean smell. The ammonia on station, however, interacts with water loops, which cycle inside of station and pick up heat. The loops then transfer that heat into the ammonia that flows to radiators on the outside of station, which dispel the heat into the vacuum of space (Chapter 11). The smell of ammonia, which should be outside the station, means it has found its way inside the station. Even brief exposure could mean returning to Earth as special cargo rather than as a crew member. Thus, when I finally focused on the emergency panel and saw “TOX” illuminated, my initial thought was, “Well, that can’t be right. We’ve never had that emergency on the ISS because that means . . . ammonia!” That thought lasted about a nanosecond as the next thing I knew I was yelling, “Masks!” Without any of us even being aware, the training we’d gone over and over and over for years kicked in. Russians don’t use ammonia to dispel heat, so if we could get there and close the hatch, we could isolate ourselves from the potential toxic environment brewing in the US Segment. With protective mask in place, I grabbed two of my incapacitated crew members, quickly put masks on them, strapped them to my back, and continued translating toward the Russian Segment . . . OK, I didn’t do that either. Each crew member immediately donned protective masks and began translating toward the Russian Segment, thus implementing the memorized response. Via procedure, I ensured all personnel were on the Russian side of the Node 1 Aft Hatch before beginning the process of closing the hatch and thereby isolating ourselves from the US On-orbit Segment. As I locked the hatch closed, I remember peering through the small window in the center of the hatch and thinking, “I wonder if we’ll ever go back in there again.”