Scott Kelly

I believe in exploration, and I will miss being on the front lines of that endeavor. On one hand, I look forward to going home, but it's something that's been a big part of my life, and I'm going to miss it.

I am humbled and excited by new opportunities for me to support and share the amazing work NASA is doing to help us travel farther into the solar system and work with the next generation of science and technology leaders.

There are few aspects of everyday life that aren't touched by the technologies developed for space travel.

I went to the University of Maryland for a year and was considering maybe, you know, being a medical doctor but decided my other interest was maybe flying airplanes in the Navy and just kind of changed my mind and changed schools and changed majors and decided to focus a hundred percent on that.

What we look for are people that are technically competent. You need a background in a scientific field, whether it's as a scientist, an engineer, medical doctor, or, you know, a person that's in the military with some kind of technical background.

It's a combination of science, maintenance, and general housekeeping. And then, occasionally, robotics activities or a spacewalk you might get to do.

The calluses on your feet in space will eventually fall off. So, the bottoms of your feet become very soft like newborn baby feet. But the top of my feet develop rough alligator skin because I use the top of my feet to get around here on space station when using foot rails.

The majority of astronauts have to change their eyeglasses while in space. They bring eyeglasses with them and typically change a few months into the mission.

Flying in space is a privilege, whether it's the first time or the fourth time.

We don't do laundry because that requires a lot of water, and water's at a premium up here. Plus, it'd be pretty complicated, I think, to make a space washer, although I guess you could do it.

People do really well on space missions, but it's the physiological, the medical stuff, the stuff like radiation, loss of bone mass and muscle mass and density. It's those things that we need to figure out.

If you go on a journey to Mars and get into deep space, there is several hundred times, maybe 300 times the radiation.

This is a really big space station. We do a lot of various kinds of work here, different kinds of science experiments; we have over 400 different experiments going on at any one time in different areas, from basic science research to medical technology, that hopefully will benefit more people on Earth.

It seems like in the beginning of my flight, the space dreams were rare. And now, almost 150 days into it, the Earth dreams are more of the rare ones.

I heard sad choirs in my mind. There was nothing left of Rachel in the world. He cherished what he'd shown me, and now it was gone. Eureka.