Scott Kelly didn’t start having second thoughts about his first space flight until he was already bolted into the space shuttle’s cockpit.
Kelly, who at one point held the record for the most time in space by an American astronaut with 520 total days, spoke at Mississippi State University on Thursday evening.
During his talk, Kelly spoke about his first flight, STS-103 on the Space Shuttle Discovery in December 1999.
He said the astronauts climbed aboard the shuttle. As a pilot, he was seated at the front. A countdown clock ticked away as the launch approached.
“At nine minutes that clock stops to give you time to catch up if you’re behind on whatever you’re doing,” he said. “It’s also the time you think, ‘Man this is really stupid.’ Launching into space for the first time, you never really believe you’re going to end up in that position. But you can’t get out — you’re strapped in, the hatch is bolted closed. Plus it would look really silly being the first astronaut ever running away from the rocket.”
Once the clock hit zero, the shuttle launched to space, propelled by millions of pounds of thrust from its engines and two solid rocket boosters strapped to the side of a massive fuel tank.
“It feels like the hand of God is lifting you off of that launch pad and throwing you into space,” Kelly said. “I know you’ve seen the shuttle launch — maybe some people have seen it in person or definitely on television. It looks like the shuttle lifts off the pad slowly. When you’re inside, there is nothing slow about that. You get the feeling you’re going somewhere — you’re not sure where you’re going, but you know you’re not coming back to Florida.”
Kelly flew on STS-118 in August 2007 and Expedition 25/26 aboard the International Space Station from October 2010 to March 2011.
In March 2015, Kelly launched aboard a Soyuz rocket with Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Korniyenko for a yearlong mission aboard the International Space Station. They remained there until March 2016.
The best part of flying in space
During his talk, Kelly urged the audience to take up challenges.
He said he was always a lackluster student and graduated in the bottom half of his high school class. In college — he mistakenly enrolled at the University of Maryland Baltimore County after thinking he was applying to the main campus at College Park — he was flirting with dropping out until he happened upon the book “The Right Stuff” by Tom Wolfe, detailing the work of the military pilots who ultimately became the crews of the first Mercury program flights.
That sparked an interest in flight for Kelly, so he joined the Navy. He said he wasn’t a very good pilot at first — nearly crashing into the side of an aircraft carrier in an F-14 Tomcat on a practice landing.
Those early days were a far cry from where he ended up, flying the Space Shuttle, one of the most complicated pieces of technology on — or in this case off — the planet.
“How good we can become at something has nothing to do with how good we are when we start and I’m a prime example of this,” Kelly said. “How much achievement we have has absolutely no reflection of where we start if we just really work and absolutely never, ever give up.”
Still, Kelly said those trips to space, once he started taking them, were difficult. His year in space was hard on his body. He said part of the trip was to determine what challenges astronauts on a mission to Mars might face. He said astronauts lose bone mass and muscle mass from being in space without gravity.
Upon returning from his year aboard the International Space Station, Kelly said, his skin would break out in hives from prolonged contact with things like bed surfaces and his joints were stiff and it was hard to lift himself up for a time.
But those challenges, he said, are worth it.
“People often ask me, ‘What is the best part of flying in space?'” Kelly said. “‘Is it the launch? Is it the landing? Is it floating around in zero gravity? Is it looking out a planet Earth, which is incredibly beautiful?’
“All those things are great,” he continued. “But the best part about this job for me is that it’s really, really hard. Floating in space and living there for a year is a hard thing to do.”
Takeaways from space
Kelly said he enjoyed his time aboard the space station, though it came with challenges. He spent time doing research, taking care of the stations and fixing things as they broke.
Time in space gave him a deep respect for the planet, and he said he noticed changes — such as a significant reduction in rain forests in some areas of South America — between his first flight and his last, 17 years later. Some parts of Asia, he said, are constantly covered in pollution.
“I’m a big believer in going to Mars, but we’re not all going to Mars someday,” he said. “Some people will live on Mars, but most of us will live on Earth and it will always be easier to take care of this planet than making another one on Mars that’s a place for all of us.”
NASA studied him and his twin brother, Mark — who was also an astronaut — for the genetic effects of being in space. Kelly’s DNA changed 7 percent while he was in space.
“This hasn’t gone back to normal, even to this day,” Kelly said. “It happened while I was in space. NASA’s not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing. Hopefully, it’s not a bad thing but it’s definitely another area we need to study much further as we have people spend more and more time in space.”
He said the space station — several modules of which were built on Earth and never put together until they arrived in orbit — inspired him about what humanity is capable of.
“This space station — this is the hardest thing we’ve ever done,” Kelly said. “Harder than going to the Moon, I think. If we can do this, we can do anything.”
Alex Holloway was formerly a reporter with The Dispatch.
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