Scott Joseph Kelly

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Scott Kelly
Scott Kelly
Country: United States
Organization: NASA
selected on May 1, 1996
(16th NASA Group)
Calls: 4 space flights
Start of the
first space flight:
December 20, 1999
Landing of the
last space flight:
March 2, 2016
Time in space: 520d 10h 33min
EVA inserts: 3
EVA total duration: 18h 20min
retired on April 1, 2016
Space flights

Scott Joseph Kelly (born February 21, 1964 in Orange , New Jersey , USA ) is a former American astronaut . His twin brother, Mark , who was six minutes older, was also a spaceman. With 520 days in space, Scott Kelly is NASA's most experienced astronaut.

Life

Kelly was born in Orange, grew up and went to school in West Orange, a few kilometers away . He and his Georgia- born wife, Leslie, have two children.

Kelly graduated from Mountain High School in West Orange in 1982. In New York he began to study electrical engineering. The Maritime College of the State University of New York (SUNY) in Throgs Neck awarded him a bachelor's degree in May 1987 . He then did pilot training on a T-34 "Mentor" propeller plane at Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida . This was followed by training on jet aircraft at Naval Air Station Beeville in Texas .

Kelly was assigned to the VF-143 "Pukin 'Dogs" squadron after completing an advanced course on the F-14 "Tomcat" aircraft . The VF-143 is based at Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach, Virginia , and forms with other units the Carrier Air Wing Seven (CVW-7). In 1990 Kelly was with the VF-143 on board the aircraft carrier "USS Dwight D. Eisenhower" between March and September on its sixth mission in the Mediterranean. After an order on the Naval Air Station Fallon in Nevada in May 1991 CVW-7 was sent with the "USS Eisenhower" to support the "Operation Desert Storm" . At the end of September 1991 they ran out to the Persian Gulf . After the end of the combat mission in the Second Gulf War , the squadron took part in a NATO exercise on its way back to the USA in March 1992 . The "USS Eisenhower" was part of "Teamwork 92", which was held for two weeks in the fjords of Norway. Before Kelly left the VF-143, he took part in August 1992 on the maiden voyage of the "USS George Washington" , which had just been put into service .

From January 1993 he attended the US Naval Test Pilot School (USNTPS) in Patuxent River, Maryland , and was trained as a test pilot. Kelly then worked with his brother on the Strike Aircraft Test Squadron, which is with the USNTPS. He tested modifications for the aircraft types F-14 "Tomcat" and F / A-18 "Hornet" . He then continued his studies and received a Masters in Aviation Systems from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville in 1996 .

Astronaut activity

education

Scott Kelly was just finishing his final exams when NASA selected him in 1996 for the 16th astronaut group, the largest group since the legendary "Thirty Five New Guys" in 1978 with a strength of 35 candidates. Kelly was one of a total of 2,432 candidates who met the formal selection criteria. This resulted in 123 finalists who visited the Johnson Space Center in Houston between October 1995 and February 1996 for interviews and medical examinations.

For the first time in NASA history, the Kellys twins made it to the final round of the astronaut selection and were nominated. Scott and his identical twin brother, Mark, are trained marine and test pilots and were 32 years old when the 16th Astronaut Group was introduced in May 1996. (The average age of the 1996 group was 36 years).

In mid-August 1996, Mark and Scott Kelly, along with the 42 other applicants - 10 pilots (including the two Kellys), 25 mission specialists, and 9 international aspirants - began basic two-year training. After his basic training as a shuttle pilot, Scott Kelly was employed in the space systems department of the astronauts office from autumn 1998.

First flight: With the space shuttle to the Hubble telescope

In mid-March 1999, Kelly was set up as a pilot for his first mission: STS-103 was a maintenance and repair mission for the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and took place in December 1999. Exactly two days after take-off, the Discovery had come so close to the HST that it could be captured and locked in the payload bay. Over the next few days, three spacecraft operations (EVAs) followed , during which four astronauts carried out the necessary repairs. After eight days, the flight ended with a night landing. Incidentally, after Apollo 8 in 1968 and Skylab 4 in 1973, STS-103 was the third mission in which American space travelers spent Christmas in space.

In 2000 Kelly worked as a liaison officer for NASA (Director of Operations) in Star City near Moscow. At the end of March 2001 he was nominated as reserve astronaut for his colleague Peggy Whitson for the 5th ISS permanent crew . He trained with her, but was not used.

Aquarius underwater laboratory

Scott Kelly, who has been a trained scuba diver since August 1979, has already entered the water twice for NASA. Together with astronaut Rex Walheim and four other volunteers, he spent a week and a half in the underwater laboratory " Aquarius " in September 2002 . In April 2005 he returned to the underwater world for two days with Michael Gernhardt, among others . These two excursions took place as part of the NEEMO program. The US space agency has been carrying out these "NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations" for years. NASA signed a cooperation agreement with the American weather service NOAA , which owns the laboratory off the coast of Florida . The Aquarius is an 80-ton steel structure that has been anchored to the seabed at a depth of 18 meters six kilometers off the coast of Key Largo since 1987 . The spatial conditions correspond roughly to those of the Zvezda module of the ISS.

Second flight: Commander of the space shuttle

In mid-December 2002, Kelly was appointed as the commander of STS-118 . The mission originally planned for November 2003 had to be postponed six months earlier because of the Columbia crash . The flight took place in August 2007.

Third flight: six months on the ISS

Scott Kelly conducted a long-term stay aboard the International Space Station (ISS). He was assigned to ISS expeditions 25 and 26 and was on board the space station from October 2010 to March 2011, taking command from November 2010. The return flight took place with Soyuz TMA-01M , the first of the improved TMA-M series of the Soyuz spacecraft.

Fourth flight: twelve months on the ISS

Kelly during his second EVA on November 6, 2015

Together with Mikhail Kornijenko , he stayed on the ISS for almost a year from March 28, 2015 in order to test the effects of weightlessness on the human body for a longer period as part of the NASA Twins Study . Kelly was the flight engineer of ISS expeditions 43 and 44 and took command of ISS expeditions 45 and 46 on September 11, 2015 . On October 15, 2015, Kelly was in space for a total of 381 days, replacing Michael Fincke as the most experienced NASA astronaut. The return to earth together with Korniyenko took place on March 2, 2016 with the Soyuz TMA-18M spacecraft and its commander Sergei Volkov .

Ten days after his last landing, Kelly announced that he was leaving Nasa with immediate effect. Kelly retired on April 1, 2016.

Quotes

“... I've learned that nothing is as wonderful as water.
When my plane landed in Houston at night and I was finally able to go home, I did exactly what I had announced all along: I stepped in through the front door, walked out the back door, and jumped into mine with my flight suit still on Swimming pool. The feeling of being submerged in water for the first time in a year is impossible to describe.
I will never take water for granted again. ... "

- : Series 5 , magazine of the Staatstheater Stuttgart No. 16 June / July 2019

Awards

Selection of decorations, sorted based on the Order of Precedence of Military Awards :

Publications

  • 2017, Alfred A. Knopf, New York: Endurance - A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery

See also

Web links

Commons : Scott J. Kelly  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. spacefacts.de: Astronauts and cosmonauts (sorted according to "total flight time"). March 2, 2016, accessed March 2, 2016 .
  2. Karen Northon: Astronaut Scott Kelly to Retire from NASA in April. NASA, March 11, 2016, accessed March 12, 2016 .
  3. Endurance. Retrieved June 24, 2019 .