The brothers were selected-the first time the space agency had ever chosen relatives to be astronauts. His twin brother, Mark, also a Navy flier, applied at the same time, and both men interviewed at NASA in Scott’s suit, the only one they owned between them. In 1995, he applied for the astronaut program. After years of intensive effort and training he qualified for carrier landings in an F-14, becoming first a fighter pilot and then a military test pilot, just like the men he’d read about in the book he credits with changing his life. His direction set, Kelly applied himself academically, transferred to SUNY Maritime College, and joined the ROTC. “I wanted to be like the guys in this book, guys who could land a jet on an aircraft carrier at night and then walk away with a swagger.

“I felt like I had found my calling,” he writes. It is the story of a kid from New Jersey who had trouble concentrating in school and had no direction in life until he discovered a copy of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff at the college bookstore. Photo: NASA Bill IngallsĮndurance is the story not just of the year Kelly spent in space but of how he became an astronaut.

The sensation of being immersed in water for the first time in a year is impossible to describe.” Scott Kello. “The night my plane landed in Houston and I finally got to go home, I did exactly what I’d been saying all along that I would do: I walked in the front door, walked out the back door, and jumped into my swimming pool, still in my flight suit.

But the feel of water was a particular yearning. In Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery, written with Knoxville author Margaret Lazarus Dean, Kelly describes longing for such commonplace experiences as cooking, shopping in grocery stores, sitting down, even being in rooms. During those 340 days, Kelly missed many things about life on his home planet. “I’ll never take water for granted again,” writes astronaut Scott Kelly about his nearly yearlong mission aboard the International Space Station.

The right stuff novel