The veteran of four space flights and the record holder for spending 365 consecutive days in space, Scott Kelly has experienced things very few have. Not only this, his style of narration mixed with humour, awe and scare is perspiring to digest.
That he considers a stage for an Astronaut as humiliating is a frank disclosure I have never heard of when enema was said to be done to remove the entire stuff of the rectum. This has to be done as the rocket 'take-off' to 'induction' in the orbit is very risky and requires a crawling time-consuming event. Thus Alan shepherd, he writes, was the first ever Astronaut to leave the Earth in wet pants - as he sat in the rocket to be launched which underwent several delays, to avoid abort, and that lead to excessive time being spent inside the capsule for long. The rocket, the author defines is a barely controlled bomb, on which astronauts sit with a header that communicates with the ground control for manouver.
As all the American shuttles have been grounded, they rely upon the Russian system of launch that is Soyuz. For this Kelly writes that there is a lot of training both in the US and Russia. The Russians are considered as staunch followers of traditions. One such mention is about the compulsory peeing on the back Tyre of the vehicle in which the space-men are taken from the final quarter to the launch site. It was done so because Yuri Gagarin returned successfully after a launch and he did this act before his launch - for women astronauts a container is given to collect and pour.
Up there, 400 km above Earth, things are not easy for him. In micro-gravity one would often feel like always standing upside down because blood never 'seems' coming down. Everything flies until it was fixed to some place (Velcro here is very significantly used). Food and water droplets took all positions. Kelly praises the body's attitude towards this gravity when bone began losing its mass as 'it felt' that it was no longer needed to muster mass. Whenever the 'Carbon-dioxide' absorber slowed down in need of re-filling of the equipment, eyes were found blurred (nystagmus). However eye-blurring was not the same in the case with female astronauts. That is the reason why a female astronaut has been selected to be first to Mars by 2020!
Tread mill that is used in aiding digestion and metabolism was found to be risky. A slightest misuse, it might probably shoot off leading to many a dwindle inside the ISS, fears Kelly.
His happier moment was when President Obama tweeted a few statements in his praise. Buzz Aldrin joined the tweet telling the President that while Kelly was just 249 miles above the Earth, he went to about 23900 miles to reach Moon. This was a troll Kelly felt later in the ISS. However, he came up with a data that might have been a fitting reply to Buzz - that he had traveled more than 200 million miles when he reached 520 days in space! The urge to foresee a return troll in a rhetoric flavour for Buzz is the hallmark of Scott Kelly.
This stunning memoir is a must-read, and that's coming from someone who rarely reads nonfiction! Endurance is split between chapters detailing his year on the International Space Station and a broader view of his life journey up to the launch of that mission. The road to become astronaut is the toughest anyone can think (with a twin Mark Kelly also being a competitor and a pointer towards his frequent quarreling parents which later subsided). At an interview before his selection as astronaut he was asked if he would prefer 'stealing' over 'kicking a dog'. He chose 'stealing' to which a psychoanalyst graded that he was trying to tell what the analyst 'wanted to hear'. His gathering of nerves during a flight landing over a ship at the sea, flying helicopters near the crash site of Columbia (At the disaster site he even found a 'Canon' Printer which was without a single scratch), a surgery for stone removal were some of the challenging events in his life.
There's enough technical detail in Endurance to satisfy space and tech nerds, but it's described in lay terms that will make every reader glued to the book until finished. This is a thriller.
