My year — floating in a tin can
This isn’t your usual astronaut’s memoir. Retired astronaut Scott Kelly recounts diving into the rubbish on the International Space Station for discarded meals after a supply capsule was destroyed and ending up with “some dude’s used underwear” in his hands. He writes about the congestion, headaches and burning eyes he endured from high carbon dioxide levels and the feeling no one cared at Mission Control in Houston.
In his book, Kelly tells how prostate cancer surgery almost got him banned from space station duty, and how his vision problem during an earlier spaceflight almost cost him the mission, which spanned from March 2015 to March 2016.
He tells how he visited a tattoo parlour before launch and got black dots all over his body to make it easier to take ultrasound tests in orbit, and how he fashioned extra puke bags for a nauseous crewmate.
Kelly said his goal in writing Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery was to tell the whole story.
So many other Nasa astronauts’ memoirs “focus on the good stuff and not necessarily the personal things that happened in their lives, things they might not be proud of, things that we all have that makes us normal, relatable people”, he said.
“So I felt like sharing is good, but . . . the bad stuff, too, makes the story more believable.”
In the book, he writes about a little-known incident that he says occurred during his first space station stint in 2010, when a Russian cosmonaut came untethered during a spacewalk and began floating away. Luckily, Oleg Skripochka hit an antenna that bounced him back towards the space station, enabling him to grab on and save his life, according to Kelly.
Even though he was aboard the space station at the time, Kelly said he didn’t learn about it until five years later, when it casually came up in conversation with other cosmonauts. “I was like really? Holy crap. Crazy,” Kelly said.
He remembered Skripochka had looked shaken, but thought it was because it was his first spacewalk.
“I’ve often pondered what we would have done if we’d known he was drifting irretrievably away from the station,” Kelly writes. “It probably would have been possible to tie his family into the comm system in his spacesuit so they could say goodbye before the rising CO or oxygen deprivation caused him to lose consciousness — not something I wanted to spend a lot of time thinking about as my own spacewalk was approaching.”
Published by Knopf , Endurance is being published with a version for children, My Journey to the Stars, put out by Penguin Random House.
The 53-year-old Kelly said he didn’t discover his passion for aviation and space until reading Tom Wolfe’s 1979 book The Right Stuff in college. Kelly writes that he was a terrible student and likely suffered from attention deficit disorder.
The former spaceman also tells how he initially didn’t want “that space station stink” on him — getting space station assignments — for fear it would limit his shuttle-flying opportunities. He flew twice on space shuttles and had two extended stays at the space station, sharing the entire 340-day mission, his last, with Russian Mikhail Kornienko.
Asked if it was difficult exposing his weaknesses when astronauts are supposed to be perfect or close to it, Kelly replied, “Naw, I feel like I’m like a below-average guy doing slightly above-average stuff.”
Now retired, Kelly said he missed being in space. Of course, when he was in space, he missed Earth. He credits that saying to a Russian crewmate, Gennady Padalka, the world’s most experienced spaceman, and isn’t sure the saying made it into the book.
“I need to write a sequel of all the stuff I left out.”