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- Saddam's Palace has crystal chandeliers, marble floors, and a four-room suite for each of us, complete with Jacuzzi tubs.
- The building also has a banya, or Russian sauna, with a cold pool to jump into afterward.
- We all gather in the elaborate dining room for meals served on pressed white tablecloths and fine china, with a flat-screen TV on the wall that constantly plays old Russian movies the cosmonauts seem to love. The Russian food is good, but for Americans, it can start to get old after a while-borscht (a traditional soup made from beets) at nearly every meal, meat and potatoes, other kinds of meat and potatoes, everything covered with tons of dill.
- Gennady. What's with all the dill?
- What do you mean?
- You guys put dill on everything. Some of this food might actually be good if it weren't covered in dill.
- Ah, okay, I understand. It's from when the Russian diet consisted mostly of potatoes, cabbage, and vodka. Dill gets rid of farts.
- Later I Google it, and it's true. As it happens, getting rid of gas is a worthwhile goal before being sealed into a small tin can together ofr many hours, so I stop complaining about the dill.
- The day after we arrive in Baikonur we have the first fit check. This is our opportunity to get inside the Soyuz capsule while it's still in the hangar. In the cavernous hangar known as Building 254, we pull on our Sokol suits-always an awkward process. The only way into the suits is through the opening in the chest, so we have to slide our lower bodies into the chest hole, then struggle to fit our arms into the sleeves while blindly pulling the neck ring up over our heads. The chest opening is then gathered together and secured using very low-tech elastic bands. The first time I saw this, I couldn't believe those elastic bands were all that protected us from space.
- Once I got to the ISS, I learned the Russians use the exact same elastic bands to seal their garbage bags in space. In one sense I find this comical; in another way, I respect the efficiency of the Russian philosophy on tecjnology. If it works, why change it?
- The Sokol suit was designed as a rescue suit, which means that its only function is to save us in case of a fire or depressurization in the Soyuz. It's different from the spacesuit I will wear during spacewalks. That suit will be a little spaceship in its own right. The Sokol suit serves the same purpose as the orange NASA-designed pressure suit worn to fly the space shuttle after the Challenger disaster of 1986. Before that, shuttle astronauts wore simple cloth flight suits, as the Russians did before a depressurization accident killed three cosmonauts in 1971. Since then, cosmonauts (and any astronauts to join them in the Soyuz) have worn the Sokol suits. In a weird way, we are surrounded by the evidence of tragedies, too-late fixes that might have saved the astronauts and cosmonauts who took the sane risks we are taking and lost.
- Today is like a dress rehearsal: we suit up, perform leak checks, then get strapped into our custom-made seats, built from the plaster molds taken of our bodies.
- As much time as I have spent in the Soyuz simulators in Star City, I'm still amazed by how difficult it is to wedge myself and my Sokol suit into my seat. Each time, I have a moment of doubt whether I'm going to fit.
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