Facts About Scott Kelly And His Year In Space

Scott Kelly’s Early Life And NASA Career

Scott Kelly began his career with the U.S. Navy as a fighter pilot and completed tours abroad aboard aircraft carriers (performing more than 250 carrier landings) before working as a Navy test pilot.

Scott was selected by NASA to join the Astronaut Corps in April 1996 with his first spaceflight as pilot of Space Shuttle Discovery, during STS-103 in December 1999; a servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.

Eight years later following the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, Scott Kelly would be the mission commander of STS-118; a 12-day Space Shuttle Endeavour mission to the ISS.

Scott Kelly's third spaceflight was as commander of Expedition 26 on the ISS which was a long-duration mission that lasted 5 months, 1 week.

At the beginning of 2015, Scott Kelly would begin his 4^th and final spaceflight, the so-called ‘Year In Space’ (in truth it was only 340 days – 11 months) along with a Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) cosmonaut Mikhail Korniyenko.

At one point Scott Kelly held the record for most days in space by an American; this record has since been broken.

Year In Space Mission Aboard ISS!

For the ISS year-long mission, the objective was to collect scientific data important to the future long-duration human exploration of our solar system (like missions to Mars) by better understanding how the human body reacts and adapts to the harsh environment of space.

Scott Kelly would meticulously record his activity, conduct medical tests on himself in space while his twin brother, former astronaut Mark Kelly (incidentally the Kelly twins are the only siblings to have travelled in space) also participated in the comparative medical study.

At the conclusion of the ‘Year In Space’ mission, Scott Kelly had spent 340 consecutive days in space which included 5,440 orbits of Earth and three spacewalks.

Life After NASA

At the beginning of April 2016, astronaut Scott Kelly retired from NASA. He released his memoirs entitled ‘Endurance: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery’, where you can read about Scott’s NASA career and his reflections upon his ‘Year In Space’ mission!