Relive ‘A Year in Space’ with astronaut Scott Kelly
In his new book, Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery (Knopf,
400 pp., eeeE out of four), Scott Kelly chronicles his life and his record-setting 340 days in space in 2015-16 aboard the International Space Station.
In a moment telling of the man, Kelly writes: “Climbing into a rocket that may kill me is both a confrontation of mortality and an adventure that makes me feel more alive than anything else I’ve ever experienced in life.”
A self-professed risk junkie since childhood, Kelly lives for the kind of adrenaline rush blasting off into space provides. So much so that this former U.S. Navy fighter pilot and test pilot has done it four times.
Kelly’s sense of adventure thrives on achieving what no others have done. His rocket-fueled bucket list includes Mars, and the
520 total days he has spent in space so far are about what it would take to land him on the Red Planet.
The turning point in Kelly’s life came when, as a directionless college student, he read Tom Wolfe’s NASA classic, The Right Stuff. It was a game changer for a blue-collar Jersey kid, the twin son of an alcoholic cop and resilient mother, and set him on the improbable path to outer space. From space, Kelly even placed a long-distance call to Wolfe to thank him.
Kelly’s space account begins at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center outside of Moscow, where all the logistics, routines and rituals take place for him and his cosmonaut colleagues. From there, he alternates chapters, shuffling his personal history with the year-in-space story.
As Kelly found out, spending that long in a metal container orbiting the Earth at 17,500 miles per hour is dizzying. Part of his mission was to reveal those mental and physical risks.
He begins the book with a family dinner at his Houston home
24 hours after returning from
340 days in space. Gravity weighing him down feels wrong. He takes three steps and stumbles. Every joint in his body hurts. He’s delirious, nauseated and feverish. His legs and ankles swell like water balloons. A rash all over his back feels on fire.
Kelly passes along light-years of fascinating trivia, such as that eating dill prevents inspace flatulence and that the smell of space is like sparklers on the Fourth of July. Some of the details only space nerds could love, from the space-travel procedurals and technicalities to the rigorous scientific tests and the logs tracking everything he ate and his every mood.
All challenges don’t take place up there: Kelly writes of the effects on his marriage and family. His sister-in-law, then-Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords — who is married to his identical twin brother, astronaut Mark Kelly — was shot in an assassination attempt while Scott Kelly circled about 250 miles above the Earth.
Kelly’s account is insightful, at times humorous, heart-tugging at others. And it’s inspiring enough to change the life of some lost kid, just like The Right Stuff did for him.