![]() ![]() He begins the book with a family dinner at his Houston home 24 hours after returning from 340 days in space. Part of his mission was to reveal those mental and physical risks. From there, he alternates chapters, shuffling his personal history with the year-in-space story.Īs Kelly found out, spending that long in a metal container orbiting the Earth at 17,500 miles per hour is dizzying. Kelly’s space account begins in Star City, at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center outside of Moscow, where all the logistics, routines and rituals take place for him and his cosmonaut colleagues. From space, Kelly even placed a long-distance call to Wolfe to thank him. The turning point in Kelly’s life came when, as a directionless college student, he read Tom Wolfe’s NASA classic, The Right Stuff. It was a game changer for a blue-collar Jersey kid, the twin son of an alcoholic cop and resilient mother, and set him on the improbable path to outer space. His rocket-fueled bucket list includes Mars, and the 520 total days he has spent in space so far is about what it would take to land him on the Red Planet. Hard to imagine, except this plain-spoken travelogue lets you. I don’t know whether this comforts me or disturbs me.A modern-day pioneer, Kelly’s sense of adventure thrives on achieving what no others have done. I think of that time I almost flew an F-14 into the water and would have disappeared without a trace. The energy involved in a collision between two large objects at 35,000 miles per hour would be similar to that of a nuclear bomb. Our neurological systems would not even have had time to process the incoming data into conscious thought. ![]() Misha, Gennady, and I would have gone from grumbling to one another in our cold Soyuz to being blasted in a million directions as diffused atoms, all in the space of a millisecond. When I used to work on investigations of aircraft mishaps as a Navy test pilot, I would sometimes reflect that a crew might never have known that anything had gone wrong. When an aircraft flies into a mountain in bad weather, at five hundred miles per hour, there is little left to tell the story of what went wrong: this crash would have taken place at a speed seventy times that. “Later, as I reflect on the situation, I realize that if the satellite had in fact hit us, we probably wouldn’t even have known it. The presidential commission that investigated the disaster recommended fixes to the solid rocket boosters, but more important, they recommended broad changes to the decision-making process at NASA, recommendations that changed the culture at NASA-at least for a while.”Įndurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery They knew nothing about the O-ring problems or the engineers’ warnings, and neither did the astronauts who were risking their lives. Those engineers’ recommendations were not only ignored, they were left out of reports sent to the higher-level managers who made the final decision about whether or not to launch. In a teleconference the night before Challenger’s launch, they had desperately tried to talk NASA managers into delaying the mission until the weather got warmer. Engineers working on the solid rocket boosters had raised concerns multiple times about the performance of the O-rings in cold weather. “It wasn’t until years later that I understood that a management failure doomed Challenger as much as the O-ring failure. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |