A LEGACY OF ENDURANCE
After finding inspiration in a book, Scott Kelly’s life soars
Scott Kelly is used to people confusing him with his twin brother, Mark.
The brothers are both engineers, U.S. Navy captains and retired NASA astronauts — and, well, they do look just alike.
“It used to be that people would think I was Mark,” Scott Kelly said last week. “But after I spent a year in space, now it’s gone to where more people think Mark is me.”
In 2015 and 2016, Kelly spent 340 days on a mission to the International Space Station. The trip was a test of endurance, both physically and psychologically. Back on Earth now, he’s written a memoir that tells the story of his NASA career, his adventures in zero-gravity and his unlikely shift from underperformer to space station commander.
It was “The Right Stuff ” that made Kelly want to be an astronaut.
As a kid growing up in New Jersey, he was a terrible student. He couldn’t sit still, hated to read and didn’t know how to study. He graduated in the bottom half of his class and got rejection letters from every college he applied to except one.
But then, one day early in his freshman year, Kelly went to the campus book-
store for candy and picked up a copy of “The Right Stuff,” Tom Wolfe’s space race book about the test pilots chosen for the country’s first manned spaceflight. He opened it up and everything changed.
“I bought the book and lay on my unmade dorm room bed reading it for the rest of the day, heart pounding,” he writes in his memoir, “Endurance.” “This wasn’t just an exciting adventure story. This was something more like a life plan.”
For Kelly, it was the danger that made the story so irresistible, “the idea of doing something immensely difficult, risking your life for it, and surviving.”
From an early age, he had loved risk and danger; by age 6, he was climbing up drainpipes and flying down hills on his bike. “If you were doing something safe, something you already knew could be done, you were wasting time,” he said.
But the idea of being a test pilot, maybe even going to space — that was danger with a purpose, and it put Kelly’s mind into focus. He learned how to study, earned an engineering degree, joined the Navy and learned how to fly fighter jets.
Naturally, fighter jets weren’t dangerous enough to satisfy him. So Kelly set his sights on a NASA career.
He spent 20 years with NASA, making four spaceflights and serving as commander of the International Space Station. He has spent 520 days in space, seen thousands of orbital sunrises, commanded a shuttle and walked in the void of space.
Much of “Endurance” is about the realities of life in that environment — the mundane activities like eating, walking and toothbrushing that become fascinating in zero gravity. At Friday-night dinners on the space station, the astronauts and their Russian counterparts shared treats such as caviar and canned trout, holding it all on the table with Velcro and duct tape.
While that can be fascinating to those of us who are earthbound, it’s also difficult to imagine just how long a year can feel when you’re trapped on a space station far from Earth, away from loved ones, stifled by limited freedom and privacy. On a quiet night three months into the mission, Kelly wonders: “What have I gotten myself into?”
And it’s not dare devil exciting, but Kelly also has risked his health for the sake of research — one major purpose of his year on the space station was to determine what happens to the human body when it’s in space for a long time. He lost bone mass in space, has developed vision problems and has been exposed to 30 times the radiation we’re exposed to on Earth — the equivalent of 10 chest Xrays every day.
“It’s something I’ll live with the rest of my life, not understanding exactly what kind of physical things could happen to me later in life,” Kelly said. The fact that fruit and vegetables rot faster in space isn’t comforting, he writes; “seeing the process makes me worry that the same thing is happening to my own cells.”
In “Endurance,” Kelly doesn’t hold back from complaining that NASA was unconcerned with high carbon dioxide levels in the space station, which made crew members feel foggy and gave them headaches. He’s just as honest about his own shortcomings — the end of his first marriage, the troubles in his relationship with his daughter.
“I think some people might cringe a little bit, but I think it’s OK,” Kelly said. He recalls another astronaut’s biography, which detailed the author’s NASA career but failed to mention he was married for 20 years and had children. “I wasn’t going to do that.”
Kelly gives readers fun tidbits from his life, too: his friendship with Houston entrepreneur Tilman Fertitta, his Twitter exchange with Barack Obama, his young daughter’s conversation with John Glenn. He describes his brother Mark’s attempts to send him a gorilla suit in a SpaceX care package: “There’s never been a gorilla suit in space before. You’re getting a gorilla suit.”
He recalls feeling too far away in 2011, when a call came to the space station that his sister-in-law, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, had been shot in the head in a Tucson, Ariz., parking lot where she was meeting with constituents. “As astronauts, Mark and I had been confronted with the risks of flying in space,” he writes. “None of us could have imagined that it would be Gabby, not Mark, whose work nearly cost her her life.”
Kelly even discusses why he and his longtime partner, Amiko Kauderer, a NASA public affairs officer, haven’t married: “we don’t seem to see the point in it.” That changed, by the way, as “Endurance” came together; the couple has been engaged since March, and Kelly said they’ll probably marry next year.
Kelly, now 53, is officially retired from space travel. But he’s not seeking thrills to replace that rush.
“For me, the ‘flying in space’ part was such an adrenaline rush that it seems like everything else pales in comparison,” he said. He’s content to stay
on Earth.
“It’s not like I have a desire to get decked out in a wingsuit and go jumping off a mountain like Batman,” he said. “I don’t feel like I need to find a replacement for it.”
“Endurance” will be intriguing to anyone excited by NASA, space travel and the International Space Station. But there’s more to it, Kelly believes. “I think it’s also a story of a kid who couldn’t do his homework, who had ADHD, and with something that inspired him, was able to change his life.”