dal Washington Post
‘Touchdown!’ Scott Kelly returns to Earth with a fist-pump and a cult following.
Russia’s Soyuz TMA-18M space capsule carrying astronaut Scott Kelly and two Russian cosmonauts prepares to land in Kazakhstan on March 2. (Krill Kudryavtsev/Pool Photo via AP)
Just as the craft was about to touch the surface, six engines suddenly fired simultaneously, bringing the Soyuz descent module to a cushioned stop.
But after 340 days in space, anywhere on planet Earth felt like home.
Then he pumped his fist in celebration, zero-gravity-weakened muscles be damned.
Over the past 11 months, Kelly and Russian colleague Mikhail Kornienko have traveled 144 million miles through space, orbited the globe 5,440 times and experienced 10,880 sunrises and sunsets. Kelly’s 340-day stint in space is a record for an American astronaut, as is his total of 520 days spread over four missions.
Even more than his records, however, it’s Kelly’s attitude that has made him a crowd favorite back on the Big Blue Marble. He has performed death-defying spacewalks, successfully grown (and eaten) lettuce in outer space and chased a colleague around the International Space Station in a gorilla suit. He has chatted with everyone from President Obama and Stephen Colbert to school kids.
Perhaps most memorable of all, he has snapped more than 1,000 stunning photos of the planet, sharing them with his nearly 1 million Twitter followers with the hashtag “#yearinspace.”
And that’s what it felt like — for all of us.
“Talking to someone who’s in orbit. … It’s like I’m an astronaut right now,” gushed Colbert.
Kelly’s safe return Tuesday night is, therefore, a bit of a mixed blessing. We have regained an Earthling but lost a colorful and quirky view of our planet from 250 miles up.
His adventure began with a March 28, 2015, blastoff. But even before the rocket engines roared to life, Kelly was already broadcasting his extraterrestrial experience as no American astronaut had ever done before.
On Feb. 15, 2015, he posted a photo of himself sitting in a nearly empty NASA office with a sign that read, “BE BACK IN 365 DAYS.” The day before liftoff, he added: “Just awoke from pre-launch nap. Last time in bed for a year.”
Kelly made it feel as though we were in the cockpit with him. He was our ambassador to outer space.
The experience continued aboard the ISS. In his first tweet from space, he thanked first lady Michelle Obama for wishing him good luck.
“Thank you. Made it!” he wrote. “Moving into crew quarters on @space_station to begin my #yearinspace.”
More than a thousand tweets followed, almost everyone of them featuring a jarringly vivid photograph of the planet. From the space station, sheets of icebergs appeared to be shattered glass, deserts resembled beautiful tapestries and the Himalayas — the tallest mountains on Earth — looked like a weary world’s wrinkles.
Many of Kelly’s photos were unbelievable. Swirling red and green auroras seemed like scenes from “Star Trek.” The Milky Way was a sparkling sea of stars surrounding Scott. And every 90 minutes, he was treated to the most spectacular sunrise or sunset a human had ever seen.
A rare red aurora captured by Kelly during his 340 days aboard the International Space Station (Scott Kelly/NASA)
But he could also see the effects of humankind.
“Today we had this incredible pass over the Himalayas and to see all that pollution that is just riding up against the mountains from the south is just really, really … heartbreaking,” he told CNN’s Sanjay Gupta.
“Shocked & saddened by terrorist attacks on #Paris,” he tweeted as he soared above the stricken City of Light hours after the Nov. 13 attacks. “Standing with #France from @space_station. Our thoughts are [with] you.”
Even as his photos captured hearts and minds on Earth, Kelly still had a day job to do in space. Much of it involved helping NASA prepare to send astronauts to Mars in about 15 years.
In perhaps the most important experiment, Kelly served as a test subject for the long-term effects of living in outer space, where zero gravity slowly saps muscle strength and bone density. Kelly tested his own blood, performed ultrasounds on himself and got fellow ISS crew members to examine his eyes to see how he was coping with his year-long space sojourn. The results will be compared with those from his twin, Mark, a retired astronaut back on Earth.
“Scott’s the guinea pig in space, and I’m the guinea pig on Earth,” Mark Kelly said on the “Today” show. “We have a good sense of what it takes to fly in space for six months, but if one day we decide we want to go to Mars or some other destination in the solar system, we know what the engineering is to do that, we don’t know a lot about the human body. So Scott spending a year in space and NASA studying both of us, because we are genetically the same, that’s going to give NASA a lot of information to reach out into the solar system.”
Working a dozen hours a day, Kelly juggled other experiments.
“It’s a remote place, and it’s a tough environment because you can never leave, there is no running water, there is a lot of work to do, you’re always at work,” he told the “Today” show.
He grew lettuce in zero gravity and under ultraviolet light, and he recorded himself eating his bizarre crop, tweeting: “It was one small bite for man, one giant leap for #NASAVEGGIE and our #JourneytoMars.”
His effort to grow zinnia flowers was not so successful, at least at first. The plants were overtaken by mold, forcing Kelly to cut off parts and improvise techniques to restore their health.
“Our plants aren’t looking too good. Would be a problem on Mars. I’m going to have to channel my inner Mark Watney,” he tweeted in reference to the blockbuster movie “The Martian.” In the movie, Watney, an astronaut played by Matt Damon, is stranded on Mars, where he devises an ingenious, and disgusting, way to grow potatoes.
When Kelly’s zinnias finally bloomed in mid-January, the blossoms made headlines around the world.
“There are a lot of parallels with that movie to living in space for a long period of time, including growing things in an extreme environment,” Kelly told CNN.
In fact, Kelly’s year in space didn’t just coincide with the movie’s release, it also coincided with a surge in American interest in space exploration. Photos of Mars taken by the Curiosity rover helped reignite interest in visiting the fourth planet from the sun. Meanwhile, the New Horizons probe snapped such amazing photos of Pluto that people became nostalgic for the days when it was called a planet.
Nothing humanized the cold, silent environs of outer space like Kelly and his social media posts, however. He documented the strange space food he mixed into seemingly nauseating combinations. He slurped espresso from an experimental machine on National Coffee Day. He wore a creepy mask on Halloween. And, of course, he chased a colleague around the ISS in a gorilla suit … just because.
He also exchanged hilarious tweets with famous admirers, none bigger than the commander in chief.
In nearly every tweet, Instagram, interview or Facebook post, Kelly appeared to be having fun. He celebrated his 52nd birthday and the ISS’s 15th anniversary in space. He did countless flips and donned virtual reality glasses. He even joked with Reddit users during an Ask Me Anything chat about playing pranks on his fellow astronauts.
By the time his 340 days drew near, Kelly appeared to be getting nostalgic.
“Leaving this amazing facility is going to be tough because I’ll probably never see it again,” he told CNN. “I don’t expect I will. I’ve flown in space four times now. So it’s going to be hard in that respect. I certainly look forward to going back to Earth. I’ve been up here for a long time. Sometimes, I think about it, and I feel like I’ve lived my whole life up here.”
In his last couple of days, Kelly re-posted his favorite photos and took some final ones, too.
“Likely my last pic of the #moon from space,” he tweeted before going to bed for the final time in space. The next morning, he snapped five photos of his last sunrise.
“Thanks for following our #YearInSpace,” he wrote in his last tweet from the ISS. “The journey isn’t over. Follow me as I rediscover #Earth! See you down below!”
Then he, Kornienko and another, more recently arrived Russian cosmonaut named Sergey Volkov climbed into the Soyuz descent module and began the journey back to Earth.
Video cameras aboard the space station captured the capsule slowly drifting away into the inky darkness.
After about three hours, the capsule began to jettison unneeded parts. First, orbital and propulsion modules. Then, the spacecraft’s two solar sail-like arrays.
The Soyuz plunged faster and faster toward Earth. By the time it reached the atmosphere, it had reached a speed of 17,500 mph. At about 400,000 feet, the thickening atmosphere caused the Soyuz’s outer heat shield to glow red hot.
Fifteen minutes before landing, the first of a series of increasingly large parachutes popped out to slow its fall.
A small crowd had gathered in the bleak emptiness of Kazakhstan’s southern steppe to greet the returning astronauts. They watched the Soyuz glide down toward the ground.
Then, in a last-second burst of rocket fuel, the module’s landing engines flared and the Soyuz came to Earth with a thud.
“They did it,” said NASA spokesman Rob Navias. “They are home after a year in space and they stuck the landing.”
Kelly squinted in the morning light as he climbed out of the cramped capsule. He had flown over Kazakhstan — like everywhere else on Earth — 5,440 times at an altitude of 250 miles. Now a ground crew swaddled him like a child in a giant blanket and set him on the snow-dusted ground.
His twin brother welcomed him back to Earth by playfully calling him an “alien” on Twitter. His sister-in-law, former Arizona congresswoman Gabriel Giffords, added that she was “excited to welcome him back in Houston,” where Kelly’s girlfriend and two daughters were waiting for him.
A battery of tests also awaits the record-breaking returned astronaut.
In an interview last week, however, Kelly revealed he has another, more personal priority.
“I’m going to go home and jump in my pool,” he said.
