Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery

by Scott Kelly

In a weird way, we are surrounded by the evidence of tragedies, too-late fixes that might have saved the astronauts and cosmonauts who took the same risks we are taking and lost.

What is it worth to see two former bitter enemies transform their weapons into transport for exploration and the pursuit of scientific knowledge? What is it worth to see former enemy nations turn their warriors into crewmates and lifelong friends?

it has been more than fourteen years since all humans were on the Earth at once.

I’m not religious, but I always say that when you’re getting ready to be rocketed into space, a blessing can’t hurt.

“The sea is selective, slow at recognition of effort and aptitude, but fast at sinking the unfit.”

2012 they became the first private company to reach the International Space Station.

strange phenomenon when people watch movies in space: we instinctually move to a position that looks like lying down with relation to the screen. In weightlessness our positions make no difference in the way we feel physically, but the association between lying down and relaxing is so strong that I actually feel more relaxed when I get into this position.

think about the schoolchildren who saw their experiments blow up on Orbital, rebuilt them, and saw them blow up on SpaceX.

mission control has me spend more than two hours preparing for that eventuality; the Russian approach is to say fuck it and spend what might be their last twenty minutes having lunch.

The Russian space agency’s goal is always to get the job done as cheaply and efficiently as possible,

now I was looking at my own asshole. It was not a view I had ever seen before (and hope never to see again), and I didn’t have much time to contemplate it before the image became an interior view.

On a ten-day shuttle mission, everyone would be hanging by the windows as much as possible, oohing and aahing.

he decided the drain catheter was ready to come out. Standing in my living room, he simply yanked it out with all his might, and without much warning. I had no idea the thing was three feet long until I saw, and felt, it being ripped out of my body. I felt like I was William Wallace getting eviscerated in the movie Braveheart.

I feel like Leonardo DiCaprio at the bow of the Titanic, and I’m king of the world.

part of their system of culpability—everyone involved in training needs to certify that the crew was taught everything they could possibly need to know. If anything should go wrong, it must then be the crew’s fault.

A FEW DAYS after I returned to Earth,

On his fourth flight, in 2008, Yuri’s Soyuz landed so far from his intended touchdown point, the local Kazakh farmers who came upon his steaming spacecraft had no idea what it was. When he and his two female crewmates, Peggy Whitson and Yi So-yeon, emerged from the capsule, the Kazakhs mistook him for an alien god who had come from space with his own supply of women. Had the rescue forces not arrived, I suspect the farmers would have appointed him their leader.

One of the first things Tim Peake does when he gets on board is to open up a package of bonus food that came with him, select a BLT sandwich (a “bacon sarnie” in British English), and eat it, pieces of bacon floating out tantalizingly in every direction. Tim doesn’t realize that this sandwich, from the European Space Agency, is not available to the rest of us. We haven’t had a proper sandwich in months (for me, nine months), so watching him eat it is a very special form of torture.

After a lot of questions, I eventually tell them, “The trash fairy must have come in the middle of the night.”

NASA plans for everything—we even have an early pregnancy test and a body bag.

“Slow is efficient. Efficient is fast. Slow is fast.”

I’ve decided what Space Gorilla’s first adventure will be: I hide in Tim Kopra’s crew quarters and wait for him to come along. When he opens the door, I pop out and scare the shit out of him.