The space capsule descended gently through the stratosphere, like a falling feather. As it slipped through the clouds, a strange land loomed below. Just as the craft was about to hit the ground, six engines suddenly fired simultaneously, bringing the Soyuz descent module to a cushioned stop. Scott Kelly looked out the spherical window at the flat, barren terrain around him.
It wasn’t Mars. It wasn’t even the moon. It was Kazakhstan.
But after 340 days in space, anywhere on planet Earth felt like home.
“The air feels great out here,” Kelly quipped, according to a NASA spokesman, as burly Kazakhs in heavy coats and furry hats hoisted him from the scorched capsule. “I have no idea why you guys are all bundled up.”
Then he pumped his fist in celebration, zero-gravity-weakened muscles be damned.
Over the past 11 months, Kelly and Russian colleague Mikhail Kornienko have traveled 144 million miles through space, orbited the globe 5,440 times and experienced a combined 10,880 sunrises and sunsets. Kelly’s 340-day stint in space is a record for an American astronaut, as is his total of 520 days spread over four missions.
Even more than his records, however, it’s Kelly’s attitude that has made him a crowd favorite back on the Big Blue Marble. He has performed death-defying spacewalks, successfully grown (and eaten) lettuce in outer space and chased a colleague around the International Space Station in a gorilla suit. He has chatted with everyone from President Barack Obama to Stephen Colbert to school kids.
Perhaps most memorable of all, he has snapped more than 1,000 stunning photos of the planet, sharing them with his nearly 1 million Twitter followers with the hashtag “#yearinspace.”
And that’s what it felt like — for all of us.
“Talking to someone who’s in orbit — it’s like I’m an astronaut right now,” gushed Colbert.
Kelly’s safe return Tuesday is, therefore, a bit of a mixed blessing. We have regained an Earthling but lost a colorful and quirky view of our planet from 250 miles up. He tweeted, “Huge thanks to all that made this beautiful launch possible.”
His adventure began with a March 28 blastoff. But even before the rocket engines roared to life, Kelly was already broadcasting his extraterrestrial experience as no American astronaut had ever done before.
On Feb. 15, 2015, he posted a photo of himself sitting in a nearly empty NASA office with a sign reading: “BE BACK IN 365 DAYS.” The day before liftoff, he added: “Just awoke from pre-launch nap. Last time in bed for a year.”
Kelly made it feel like we were in the cockpit with him. He was our ambassador to outer space.
The experience continued aboard the space station. In his first tweet from outer space, he thanked first lady Michelle Obama for wishing him good luck.
“Thank you. Made it!” he wrote. “Moving into crew quarters on @space_station to begin my #yearinspace.”
More than 1,000 tweets followed, almost everyone of them featuring a jarringly vivid photograph of the planet. From the space station, sheets of icebergs appeared to be shattered glass, deserts resembled beautiful tapestries and the Himalayas — the tallest mountains on Earth — looked like a weary world’s wrinkles.
He tweeted, “Will be missing these sands too, but looking forward to sandy beaches up close.”
Many of Kelly’s photos were unbelievable. Swirling red and green auroras seemed like scenes from “Star Trek.” The Milky Way was a sparkling sea of stars surrounding Scott. And every 90 minutes, he was treated to the most spectacular sunrise or sunset a human had ever seen.
From up high, he watched as immutable and eternal forces dictated events below. He witnessed a historic snowstorm bury the East Coast, and saw smoke rise from wildfires moving across a drought-stricken California.
He tweeted, “Massive #snowstorm blanketing #EastCoast clearly visible from @Space_Station! Stay safe!”
But he could also see the effects of humankind.
“Today we had this incredible pass over the Himalayas and to see all that pollution that is just riding up against the mountains from the south is just really, really … heartbreaking,” he told CNN’s Sanjay Gupta.
“Shocked & saddened by terrorist attacks on #Paris,” he tweeted as he soared above the stricken City of Light hours after the Nov. 13 attacks. “Standing with #France from @space_station. Our thoughts are (with) you.”
Even as his photos captured hearts and minds on Earth, Kelly still had a day job to do in outer space. Much of it involved helping NASA prepare to send astronauts to Mars in about 15 years.
In perhaps the most important experiment, Kelly served as a test subject for the long-term effects of living in outer space, where zero gravity slowly saps muscle strength and bone density. Kelly took his own blood, performed ultrasounds on himself and got fellow crew members to examine his eyes to see how he was coping with his year-long space sojourn. The results will be compared with those from his twin, Mark, a retired astronaut back on Earth.
“Scott’s the guinea pig in space, and I’m the guinea pig on Earth,” Mark Kelly said on the “Today” show. “We have a good sense of what it takes to fly in space for six months, but if one day we decide we want to go to Mars or some other destination in the solar system, we know what the engineering is to do that, we don’t know a lot about the human body. So Scott spending a year in space and NASA studying both of us, because we are genetically the same, that’s going to give NASA a lot of information to reach out into the solar system.”
Working a dozen hours a day, Kelly juggled other experiments.
“It’s a remote place and it’s a tough environment because you can never leave, there is no running water, there is a lot of work to do, you’re always at work,” he said on “Today.”
He grew lettuce in zero gravity and ultraviolet light, then recorded himself eating his bizarre crop, tweeting: “It was one small bite for man, one giant leap for #NASAVEGGIE and our #JourneytoMars.”
In his last couple of days, Kelly reposted his favorite photos and took some final ones, too.
“Thanks for following our #YearInSpace,” he wrote in his last tweet from the space station. “The journey isn’t over. Follow me as I rediscover #Earth! See you down below!”
A small crowd had gathered in the bleak emptiness of Kazakhstan’s southern steppe to greet the returning astronauts.
Kelly squinted in the morning light as he climbed out of the cramped capsule. A ground crew swaddled him like a child in a giant blanket and set him on the snow-dusted ground.
