A year in space

Time has an article about a lucky astronaut, finally home:

It would take a brave astronaut to eat the dates, raisins, and sweetened dough they serve during the welcome home ceremony at Zheskagzan airport in Kazakhstan. Dates, raisins, and sweetened dough would surely look good to any space-station crew member who has just put in the average six-month hitch in orbit, to say nothing of Scott Kelly and Misha Kornienko, up for nearly a year.
But what an astronaut’s stomach says and what an astronaut’s otoliths say are two different things, and when you’re back on Earth and feeling the tug of gravity after a long period in weightlessness, it’s the otoliths, the little stones of floating calcium in the inner ear that govern balance and motion sickness, that rule.
For that reason, nobody ate a bite as Kelly (photo), and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Volkov and Kornienko, who, only two hours before, had landed in the steppe in their Soyuz spacecraft, were helped to their chairs in the airport receiving area, while Kazakh, Russian, and American dignitaries applauded, a fusillade of cameras flashed, and four young women in traditional Kazakh costume, long, bright, yellow and green dresses with bright green head pieces, brought in the traditional foods.
There were other gifts, too, for the men who had begun their day 250 miles overhead, circling the planet once every 88 minutes. There was a medal for Volkov, who had commanded the spacecraft on its return. There were matryoshka, Russian nesting dolls, with the likeness of each astronaut painted on the faces.
For Kelly, who has now flown four missions and holds the American record for the longest unbroken stay in space, there was the inevitable question: “Would you consider going back?” His answer was succinct: “I would always consider flying in space,” he said, “no question.”

The Soyuz TMA-18M spacecraft lands (above) with Expedition 46 Commander Scott Kelly of NASA and Russian cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Sergey Volkov.

That may just be astronaut bravado, though you wouldn’t have known it to look at Kelly. Volkov entered the room with the telltale gait of a person just back from space— back straight, head upright, eyes locked ahead. He dared not turn to look at someone without rotating his entire body since pivoting his head— or, much worse, flicking his eyes— would bring on a dizzy, sickly swoon. Kornienko looked better, though he was drawn and clearly fatigued.
Kelly, however, nodded and turned and smiled and joked and looked every bit like a man who had spent the last 340 days on Earth, not circling and circling and circling above it. “What’s with all the overcoats?” he asked the rescuers who extracted him from the capsule in the frigid wind of the frozen steppe. “This feels great.”
It should have felt great, and in a way that went beyond just the welcome sting of the cold air after a year in the never-changing atmosphere of the space station. The entire process of rescuing a Soyuz crew is an act of human caretaking on a massive scale. It takes a month of planning, the coordination of three countries, and the chess-board-like deployment of three separate teams of helicopters, all-terrain vehicles, snow mobiles, and rescuers in a great triangle in northern Kazakhstan, bounded by the cities of Katraganda, Zhezkasgan, and Arkilik. Poor weather in one corner of the vast field would mean shifting part of the deployment to another. A shallow or ballistic reentry would have meant sprinting far south of all three cities for an emergency rescue at a less certain site.
Now that job is done, and the biomedical work that was the entire purpose of the mission begins. The more times astronauts go into space, the better they adapt to the otherworldly state of zero-g and re-adapt to the leaden feel of a gravity field when they return, which helps explain Kelly’s apparent ease in the airport.
But the physical insults of space travel, the toll weightlessness takes on all of the body’s systems, not to mention the damage the constant bath of high radiation can do to their DNA, may be cumulative. A lone week in space might do much less damage than an additional week heaped on top of the 49 that Kelly has just spent there.
The great twins experiment, with Kelly’s brother Mark serving as a genetically identical control subject, will help scientists determine which of the changes his body has undergone in the past year are indeed attributable to his time in orbit and which are the result of nothing more than a fifty-one year old man living the year that turns him fifty-two. Finding those answers will be critical to discovering whether human beings, who have talked about making a two or three year trip to Mars one day, actually have the bodies to back up that boast. That will mean more one-year astronauts, possibly quite a few more.
“We’re looking at as many as ten,” says Doug Wheelock, a NASA astronaut and the incoming director of NASA’s office at Zvyozdny gorodok, Russian for Star City, the Russian space agency’s headquarters outside of Moscow. “To get a good data set, we need a good mix of subjects, which means women and men, older crew members and younger ones, veterans and first timers. There’s a lot we have to learn.” That is not cheering news for space partisans missing the golden era of the moon landings, weary of more than forty years of rowing in circles in low Earth orbit and anxious to fly off and kick up some Mars dust. But ambition can’t sprint ahead of safety, and there’s something to be said for the pokier pace of today compared to the headlong rush of the Moon era.
The space race of then may have been a thing fueled by ambition and vision and a commitment to dream up the most difficult, outrageous, improbable thing we could, give ourselves a deadline, before the end of the 1960s, and not a day later, and then go off and do it. But it was fueled by other, less lovely things too. It was a very big piece of a very cold war, a battle of armies and ideologies and nuclear arms between the US and the now-vanished USSR, and a flag on the Moon for one side was meant as a finger in the eye to the other.
Now, half a century on, a little ceremony can be held in an airport lounge with room for three flags and three interpreters speaking three different languages. And around them can be men and women in the light blue jumpsuits of NASA and the dark blue jumpsuits of Roscosmos, with the American stars and stripes or the Russian tricolor stitched to their shoulders, and no one really caring much who was wearing what. Kelly and Kornienko, representatives of those countries, flew together in the same way and, if there will be a medical price to pay for their long year in space, they will pay it together too. But the benefits, as the two of them surely knew before they went or they wouldn’t have gone at all, will belong to our questing, spacefaring species as a whole. 

Time’s A Year in Space, a documentary film by Time and PBS, premieres on Wednesday, 2 March 2016 at 2000 on PBS.

The New York Times has an article by Daniel Victor about Kelly:

After 340 days in space, Scott Kelly is back on Earth. Kelly, who spent the time about two hundred and fifty miles above the planet aboard the International Space Station, and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko landed on Tuesday at 23:26 in Kazakhstan.
Kelly, in a bulky, white spacesuit, pumped his fist and smiled as he was helped out of his space capsule:

 

From Kazakhstan, Kelly will travel to Houston, Texas, where he will be greeted by NASA officials; Jill Biden, the wife of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and his identical twin brother, Mark Kelly, also an astronaut.
Scientists will study Kelly for the health effects of extended space travel, expecting it to be a steppingstone for a potential trip to Mars. They will have an unusual partner in the research: his twin will also be analyzed.
If you’re waiting to hear Kelly’s perspective on the experience, you’ll have to be patient a little longer; he won’t address the media until Friday. NASA scientists will answer questions on Reddit that day, and the agency will also hold a news conference to discuss research accomplishments.
Kelly documented much of his trip on his Instagram and Twitter accounts, which became popular largely because of his distant views of Earth and its otherworldly sunrises and sunsets (he witnessed eleven thousand of them). On Day 141, he posted a spectacular video of the aurora borealis.
Combined with his other three trips to space, Kelly has now spent 540 days of his life in orbit. The 340-day stay far surpassed the previous American record of 215 days set by Michael López-Alegría in 2006 and 2007. The international record is nearly 438 days, set by Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov on the Mir space station in 1994 and 1995.
“I could go another year if I had to,” Kelly said last week in a wide-ranging news conference. He was looking forward to jumping in his pool, he said, adding that the hardest part was being away from friends and family.
But Kelly managed to maintained a sense of levity, including dressing up in a gorilla suit. Highlights of the trip included a spacewalk and enjoying the first lettuce grown and harvested in space. “Tasted kind of like arugula,” Kelly said. 

Rico says its another job, however glamorous, that he'll pass on, but it is reminiscent of the recent Big Bang Theory, with Wolowitz and the two Russians coming home...