Scott Kelly Spent a Year in Space- Find out how feel that was

 Astronaut  Scott Kelly snapped a selfie with a view of Earth from the  International Space Station. Kelly holds the record for the longest  single spaceflight by a NASA astronaut. 

 

What does it feel like to blast off from Earth in a rocket, knowing  that you will not see your family, feel the wind on your face, or taste  fresh-cooked food for a whole year?

Scott Kelly, the first NASA astronaut to spend close to a year on the International Space Station (ISS), describes how strange it was in Endurance, his new book. But he emphasizes the scientific benefits of his marathon space voyage. By comparing Kelly with his earthbound twin brother Mark, scientists were able to gather priceless information about the psychological and physiological effects of long-term space travel—information that will be crucial if we ever make the journey to Mars. [Read an excerpt from Kelly’s memoir of spending a year in space.]

 

There’s an amazing moment in your book, Scott, when you lose your  orientation in the dark during a spacewalk. Put us inside that moment  and describe how it felt.

I was on my second spacewalk. It was long and tiring and toward the  end of it, when we were heading back inside to the airlock, ground  control asked me to do some other activity to check a valve. Even though  I was tired, I let him know that I could do it. You don’t know what  else could wind up going wrong so you’ve got to rise to the occasion.

I started heading to the work site on the other side of the truss, an  area I wasn’t familiar with, and I got completely lost in space and  disoriented, and turned upside down. It took me a while to figure out  where I was. It’s not like you’re lost and you can’t find your way home.  I never felt like I was in any kind of risk. But at the same time, it  was not a great feeling.

 Eventually the sun came  up. [Laughs] Before that I was able to see some lights over my head  which I thought was the sky, but it wasn’t. It was the Earth. When I saw  them, I realized that I was flying over the Middle East. I could see  the Arabian [Persian] Gulf, which is very distinctive from space, even  at night. 

 You talk very  prosaically about this. But for most of us the idea of being upside  down, outside a spacecraft at night, sounds terrifying! 

 eah, but I’ve been doing  this job for nearly 20 years. Even though I hadn’t done a whole lot of  space walks before, I was familiar with living in this risky  environment. If you took the average person, put them in a space suit  and threw them outside the space station with no previous training or  experience, that would be, like you said, terrifying.
 

One of the things you notice is that there are a lot of dings and, in  some cases, holes going through hand rails and other metal structures,  on the outside of the space station. The space station gets hit a lot!  Fortunately, we have some good debris shields and nothing has ever  penetrated the hull but there’s a lot of stuff flying around out there.  And if one of those things hit you in the face or somewhere else on your  suit, it would do some severe damage to you and your suit, which is  filled with 100 percent oxygen.

The view of Earth from the outside is incredible. It makes you feel  like you are experiencing the full majesty of planet Earth and it’s just  incredible. Those images of sunrises and sunsets, the blue of the Earth  and city lights at night, as seen through my visor, is something that  will hopefully be ingrained upon my brain for the rest of my life.... (sort)