Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery

by Scott Kelly

Even the sensation of gravity holding me in my chair feels strange, and every time I put a glass or fork down on the table there’s a part of my mind that is looking for a dot of Velcro or a strip of duct tape to hold it in place.

NASA has accomplished the assembly of the International Space Station, the hardest thing human beings have ever achieved.

Ask Pete why this is so.

will, we hope, leave the ground, with us riding on top of it, at twenty-five times the speed of sound.

“Time to Say Goodbye” by Sarah Brightman,

“Zazhiganiye,” mission control says. Ignition.

going from still to the speed of sound in a minute—is heart pounding

they each had some kind of goal. Now I’d found mine too, and it was a great feeling.

I counted myself lucky to have picked up a book that showed me my life’s goals so clearly, and I intended to fulfill them.

following directions gave me stability.

a tool in the wrong place is no better than a tool we don’t have.

We know there are trillions of stars, more than the number of grains of sand on planet Earth.

“Our religion is ‘Be nice to other people and eat all your vegetables,’

In today’s society, our children are in desperate need of role models to inspire and motivate them to excel in sciences and math.

Desperate need of role models? Sure, because we are pushed in fifty different directions at the same time, we are tugged at by commercial enterprises reaching into our pockets for our money. We are commodities. ....