He became a test pilot and, finally, an astronaut.Īnd here’s the fun part: He was selected for the same astronaut class as his twin brother. And he made his way through a funnel of achievements: Chosen as a Navy pilot, then as a fighter pilot, he learned to land fighter jets on the rolling deck of an aircraft carrier at night - a type of flying even more harrowing than landing a space shuttle. He would transfer to a school he actually intended to attend, the State University of New York Maritime College. He would learn to focus on goals and achieve them. By exploring space, he could combine his love of challenge and adventure with real purpose.
“We both got stitches so often we sometimes would have the stitches from the previous injury removed during the same visit new stitches were put in,” he tells us. Growing up in West Orange, New Jersey, Scott Kelly and his twin brother, Mark, were adventuresome - even foolhardy. The path of Scott Kelly into space, and his four spaceflights, including his last marathon mission of 340 days on the International Space Station, are the story of “Endurance: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery,” which he wrote with Margaret Lazarus Dean. And when he was done, his life had purpose: He wanted to be an astronaut. The first pages gripped Kelly, with their vivid description of a test-flight disaster and the charred pilot, his head knocked to pieces “like a melon.” He read the book straight through. The book was “ The Right Stuff,” Tom Wolfe’s history of the Mercury astronauts. He was something of a knucklehead, he admits when he applied to college at the University of Maryland, he didn’t notice that he had accidentally applied to attend the Baltimore campus instead of the main campus in College Park. He had been a distractible, diffident student who stared out of classroom windows. BOOK REVIEW - “Endurance: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery,” by Scott Kelly (Knopf, 387 pages).
0 kommentar(er)
