Endurance

by Scott Kelly Doubleday 400pp £20 The Week Bookshop £17

Between 2015 and 2016, the US astronaut Scott Kelly spent 340 consecutive days on the International Space Station, as part of a research project into the physical effects of long-term living in zero gravity. Endurance, his account of the experience, is a “small classic of exploration as well as space literature”, said Nilanjana Roy in the Financial Times. Kelly brings to life the “wonder and awe” of being in space, as well as the “rough parts of living in confined quarters in an alien element” – such as having to clean up a “gallon-sized ball of urine mixed with acid” after a “toilet mishap”. And he recounts how the mission left him a physical wreck, with aching joints and muscle, constant nausea and severely swollen legs.

Kelly, a “tough-as-tungsten” military type, grew up in a working-class New Jersey family, said Giles Whittell in The Times. A poor student, he dedicated himself to becoming an astronaut after reading The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe’s celebrated account of 1970s space exploration. Written in a laconic, “space weary” style, Endurance is a book likely to challenge the optimism of “space enthusiasts”. Kelly reveals the International Space Station to be a “smelly, beaten-up” place where the carbon dioxide scrubbers don’t work properly (causing “headaches, grumpiness and impaired cognition”) and whose “external surfaces are pitted by 15 years of micrometeoroid strikes”. Nor are space walks the “joyous cosmic dance we used to see on Newsround” – instead, they’re “incredibly dangerous and tiring”. Reading Endurance, the realisation dawns that, if flights to Mars ever do become possible, they will be “lonely, boring and uncomfortable” – and “not obviously worth it for the few bursts of excitement and discovery” they will yield.