Scott Kelly

Scott Kelly was, by his own repeated account, a mediocre student throughout school in West Orange, New Jersey, unable to focus on textbooks and drifting through his first year of college with poor grades. What changed him was picking up Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff in a campus bookstore one afternoon and reading it in a single sitting; he decided on the spot he wanted the life it described. He finished a degree in electrical engineering at the State University of New York Maritime College in 1987, more focused than he had ever been, was commissioned in the Navy, trained as a naval aviator, and flew F-14 Tomcats before graduating from the Navy's Test Pilot School in 1994. NASA selected him as an astronaut in April 1996, in the same class as his identical twin brother, Mark — the first set of siblings NASA had ever chosen together.

Kelly flew to space four times over seventeen years: as pilot on the STS-103 shuttle mission that serviced the Hubble Space Telescope in December 1999, as commander of STS-118 to the International Space Station in 2007, and as a station flight engineer and later commander during Expedition 25 and 26 in 2010 and 2011. His defining flight came last, from March 2015 to March 2016, when he and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko spent 340 consecutive days aboard the International Space Station — at the time the longest single spaceflight by an American — undertaken specifically to study what a full year in microgravity does to a human body ahead of any future Mars mission. He retired from NASA in April 2016 having logged 520 cumulative days in space.

The year in orbit measurably changed Kelly's body against the same body sitting still on Earth: his telomeres lengthened in space and shortened back down within days of landing, roughly seven percent of his gene expression stayed altered months after he returned, and his bone density and vision were affected in ways researchers still do not fully understand for missions longer than a year, such as a multi-year Mars trip would require. The most decorated astronaut of his generation also built an online reputation harder to reconcile with the disciplined test-pilot image: in 2018 he tweeted a Churchill line about magnanimity in victory with a jab that "those days are over," and was pushed into a public apology after the backlash cited Churchill's own record, including his role in the wartime Bengal famine. In 2022, as the war in Ukraine began, NASA had to ask him to stand down from a public Twitter feud with the head of Russia's space agency.

Kelly has spent the years since retirement translating fame into a public role he is still defining: a bestselling memoir, Endurance, in 2017; a United Nations "Champion for Space" appointment; and, since October 2022, an ambassadorship for UNITED24, the Ukrainian government's fundraising platform for medical aid, which put him back in the middle of the same kind of politically charged online arguments that had gotten him in trouble years earlier. His twin, Mark, converted comparable fame into a U.S. Senate seat from Arizona in 2020; Scott has stayed out of elected politics while becoming, depending on which feed a reader follows, either a credible science communicator willing to take a public stand or a retired astronaut who cannot resist an argument he does not need to have. Which version holds up longer is not yet decided.

Scott Kelly's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• STS-103 mission
  Pilot on the shuttle mission that serviced the Hubble Space Telescope 1999
• STS-118 mission
  Commanded the shuttle mission to the International Space Station 2007
• Expedition 25/26 mission
  ISS flight engineer, then station commander 2010
• Year-long ISS mission (Expeditions 43-46) mission
  340 consecutive days with cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko 2015
• Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery book
  Memoir 2017
• NASA Twins Study discovery
  Comparative genetic and physiological study with twin Mark Kelly, published in Science 2019

• February 21, 1964 aged 0 Born in Orange, New Jersey
• 1987 aged ~23 Graduates from SUNY Maritime College with a degree in electrical engineering
• 1994 aged ~30 Graduates from the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School
• April 1996 aged 32 Selected as a NASA astronaut alongside twin brother Mark
• December 1999 aged 35 Serves as pilot on STS-103, servicing the Hubble Space Telescope
• August 2007 aged 43 Commands STS-118 to the International Space Station
• March 2015 – March 2016 aged ~51 Spends 340 consecutive days aboard the ISS in the Year-long mission
• April 1, 2016 aged 52 Retires from NASA
• October 2022 aged 58 Becomes a UNITED24 ambassador for Ukraine

• John Glenn 1921–2016
  First American to orbit Earth and later the oldest person to fly in space at age 77. predecessor astronaut generation
• Buzz Aldrin b. 1930
  Apollo 11 lunar module pilot and second person to walk on the Moon. predecessor astronaut generation
• Neil Armstrong 1930–2012
  Astronaut who commanded Apollo 11 and became the first person to set foot on the lunar surface. predecessor astronaut generation
• Peggy Whitson b. 1960
  NASA astronaut who holds the American record for most cumulative days in space. colleague of