Kopra, Yuri Malenchenko of Roscosmos and Tim Peake of ESA (European Space Agency), will operate the station as a three-person crew until the arrival of three new crew members in two weeks.
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“I actually look forward to sitting at a table and just relaxing and having a meal with friends and family, when you don’t have to worry about your spoon or your fork or your food floating away”, Kelly said. From fantastic pictures of earth and space to the latest missions the ISS crew completed, Scott Kelly recorded it all through his tweets.
“Leaving this incredible facility is going to be tough because I’ll probably never see it again, and I don’t expect I will”, Kelly told CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta in his final round of interviews from space.
But the hardest part of all, he said, is being separated from his loved ones, a situation that will pose even more of a challenge for astronauts sent to Mars.
Next Tuesday, Kelly, Kornienko and Sergey Volkov – who will himself have clocked up 182 days in space – will board the Soyuz TMA-18M capsule for the return leg of their epic space journey.
Scott Kelly posted the video on his Facebook page. “I hope to do more when I get home in helping to protect Earth”. Now the Human Research Program is building on that foundation by proposing more global collaboration on future one-year space station missions.
“For him, living in space and being so far detached from life on Earth, one of the only real lifelines you have, one of the best ones, is certainly the ability to make a phone call”, Mark Kelly said from his home in Tucson, Arizona.
Once Kelly lands, he will be flown to Houston’s Ellington Field and go through a battery of physical and scientific tests. “The space station is a magical place”.
“I plan to be completely honest about it”, he said before launch, but – “who knows, maybe there are some insane thoughts I’ll have at the end that I wouldn’t want to share”. Between 1987 and 1995, four cosmonauts spent a year or more in space. Kelly’s brother Mark is, incidentally, planning to spend all his years on earth.
The focus of the pair’s extended stay on the orbiting outpost was to gain detailed information on how the human body reacts to an extended period in space, knowledge which may one day be vital on a manned mission to Mars.
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“I’m looking down at the Earth right now and it’s 250 miles below me, and only a small portion of that is the atmosphere”, Kelly said, when asking about preparing for re-entry.
