'It seemed like I'd lived there forever': Scott Kelly's return to Earth

'It seemed like I'd lived there forever': Scott Kelly's return to Earth, During his 340-day break in space, astronaut Scott Kelly kept up a corybantic agenda of experiments, spacewalks, and spaceship aliment – but that doesn’t beggarly that the time went by in a flash.

“The alone big abruptness was how continued a year is,” Kelly said Friday, three canicule afterwards abiding to Earth from the longest assignment anyone has anytime spent on the International Amplitude Station. “It seemed like I’d lived there forever.”

Scott’s identical accompanying Mark, a retired astronaut who batten generally to his brother during their about yearlong separation, gave a blunter account.

“Every time I would say to my brother, ‘A year is traveling by quickly,’ he would say, ‘No, it’s not,’ ” Mark Kelly said Friday.

Thanks to the mission he just finished, Scott Kelly has racked up 520 canicule off the planet, authoritative him the U.S. record-holder for the longest accumulative time in space. He aswell holds the almanac for the longest individual break in apogee of any American astronaut, a accomplishment of ability exceeded alone by a scattering of Russian and Soviet cosmonauts.

The acknowledgment to Earth, while actual welcome, was aswell added arduous than Kelly had expected. He acquainted bigger just afterwards landing than he did afterwards his six-month assignment on the amplitude base in 2010 to 2011, but the celebration was momentary. His anatomy and joints anguish abundant added this time around, he said, and there is a “burning sensation” in his derma from accepting abutting acquaintance already afresh with surfaces and materials. Sitting, continuing and sleeping are all uncomfortable.

“Adjusting to amplitude is easier than adjusting to Earth,” Kelly said at a annual appointment at NASA’s Johnson Amplitude Center in Houston. Unlike added afresh alternate astronauts who accepted altar to float, Kelly hasn’t alone anything. But he absent if he approved to bandy something assimilate a table, and his basketball skills, never great, are even worse than afore his mission. He expects the ability shock of getting aback on Earth, area the choices are amaranthine compared to the astringent restraints of the amplitude station, to hit home soon, but it hasn’t yet, he said.

In the concurrently he savored active baptize again, one of the amenities defective in space.

“You absolutely feel like you wish to jump in a pool, so I did,” said Kelly, whose Twitter annual includes a down-covered video of him falling into his home pool, acutely absolutely clothed. Just afterwards landing in Russia’s Soyuz spaceship in Kazakhstan Tuesday, he enjoyed a assistant – “so good,” he said -- in befitting with the apache apparel he donned aboard the amplitude base to hunt one of his aggregation mates through the laboratory.

Scott Kelly saw his brother continued abundant to apprehension that Mark has “got a bigger tan.” The brothers are the accountable of accelerated abstraction by scientists, who are comparing how Scott fared in amplitude while Mark backward on the ground. Scott acclaimed that he grew an inch and a bisected in orbit, acknowledgment to the addition of the analgesic cavalcade in weightlessness, but “gravity pushes you aback down to size,” he said, and now they are the aforementioned acme again.

Scott Kelly expects NASA won’t forward him to apogee again, not if there are so abounding added astronauts cat-and-mouse to fly. But even afterwards a accumulative 520 canicule in space, he’d like to acknowledgment some day, conceivably with one of the companies developing day-tripper flights.

“There ability be a charge for a guy like me” at one of those companies, he said. Or “maybe in the next 20 years you ability be able to buy a bargain admission and go for a little visit.”
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