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A veteran of four space flights and a retired Navy pilot, Kelly has spent 520 days in space, including a nearly year-long mission to the International Space Station that included a special longitudinal study on the health effects of long-term spaceflight that compared Scott to his twin brother and fellow astronaut Mark Kelly, who served as a control group on Earth.

On Nov. 15, Scott Kelly spoke to a special gathering of students in the Aerospace Building at CU Boulder.

What did you learn from the that was unexpected or unusual?

My telomeres on the space station got better compared to my brothers. Telomeres are the ends of our chromosomes, as we get older they get shorter and more frayed, kind of an indication of our physical age. The hypothesis was mine would get smaller compared to his because of the radiation, the stress, the microgravity, but the reality is mine got better compared to his.

At first we were confused about it, when your results are completely opposite of your hypothesis it’s a really stunning result. A few months after I got back NASA realized there was a telomeres experiment on the Japanese module of the space station, it was on these little worms, and their telomeres got better too. They learned later that radiation can excite your telomeres and cause them to get practically younger. But, after I was back they went back to normal.

The only lingering effects I have from my longer time in space is my vision. My brother needs reading glasses, but I can’t see without distance correction and that seems attributable to the time I spent in space.

What’s it like having a brother who was also an astronaut?

My brother applied the time before we got selected and he got rejected. So I think I pulled him across the finish line. If you consider he’s only flown in space for 50 days, versus my 500, that’s why he became a U.S. Senator, just to try to one up me.

What is your advice to someone who wants to be an astronaut?

It is a tough job to get, but that I’m standing here talking to you means it’s possible, because I wasn’t a great student when I was younger.

What I always tell people that want to have this kind of job, first you have to choose something that is technically qualifying. The second thing I say is choose the thing you want to study. Don’t become a fighter pilot in the Navy because I talked to you and that’s what I did. Do the thing you love because if you do stuff you like, you’ll do better at it, you’re going to enjoy your work and if you don’t get picked at least you’re doing something you value.

Generally the people who don’t have a military background or an operational background, let’s say you’re a scientist, the way they stand out from their peers is to do things, like hobbies, that are more operationally oriented, stuff that can put you under stress where there’s risk involved like mountaineering, scuba diving, learning to fly. Probably 100% of astronauts that didn’t have a kind of operational background had something else in their lives beyond their work to show they can perform well in these kind of stressful team oriented environments.

What inspired you to become an astronaut?

My first year of college I couldn’t pay attention. I didn’t know how to study. I never really did well, but I�� stumbled into the book store and saw The Right Stuff on the shelf and I read it and was like, I feel like I can relate to these guys, that I had very much in common with them with one exception: that I was a bad student. If I can fix this, maybe I can graduate from college someday with an engineering degree. If I can learn how to study and pay attention, maybe I can get a commission in the United States Navy and learn how to fly airplanes.

If you think an 18 year old kid reads a book and decides to become an astronaut is a giant leap, really in retrospect, it was a bunch of small, sometimes hard, but small manageable steps. One just built upon the other.

I used the book The Right Stuff almost like a recipe or cookbook, I kind of said I’m going to do what these guys did, it worked for them. It turned out it worked for me.

As technology progresses, do you believe it will become possible for the average person to go to space?

Spaceflight will have all different kinds of experiences. William Shatner going up in a suborbital Blue Origin at 90 years old, people are very capable of doing that.

Living on the space station for a week is a different thing. There’s a lot of things that are very uncomfortable about it. Between the fluid shifts, trying to sleep, using the restroom, eating, just functioning in that environment, it’s not for everyone.

What did you miss while in space and what do you miss now that you’re back?

I missed my wife. Mostly you miss people and the weather. You can’t step outside and get any fresh air, the air there is generally pretty stale.

Now what do I miss? The people that I worked with. I miss working at NASA. It was one of the greatest places to work in my career. I don’t mean riding the rocket or floating around in zero gravity or looking out at the Earth. What I mean is doing something that is really complicated, challenging, hard, and something that if you mess it up, can have really significant consequences, from losing your life to messing up someone’s life work of their science.

How does the spacewalk training in the differ from actual space walks?

There are a lot of differences. You’re not in zero gravity. In the pool if you turn upside down, you’re not floating, your shoulders are basically resting on the bearings of the suit. Gravity still affects you.

The pool makes it easier to slow down if you’re moving, but it makes it harder to get moving. Whereas in space it’s the complete opposite because you have all this mass.

I would say the pool is probably physically harder, but what makes a spacewalk in space more challenging is the day is so long. The emotional aspect also makes it very draining. In the pool if you mess up, they just float you up to the surface. In the space station if you can’t get yourself back in the hatch, it’s a serious problem.

How did being in space for so long change your perspective about our planet?

There’s so much you learn about managing resources, conservation. You’re on the space station, and we use energy from the sun for electricity, we have to recycle our water, our ability to get garbage off the space station is very limited. Just living there you’re kind of forced to live with this resource management, recycling mindset.

Then when you look out the window you see how fragile our planet looks. One of the first few days on my first mission I said to one of my crewmates, “What’s that film over the surface?” He said, “That’s the atmosphere.” It looked like a contact lens over somebody’s eye, so thin and fragile.

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Want more first-person accounts of space? Sarah Gillis, who flew on the Polaris Dawn mission, spoke at CU Boulder the week of Nov. 10, 2024.

Life in space from a CU Boulder alumna who has been there

You don’t see political borders, at least during the daytime. It gives you a sense that we’re all floating through space on our big spaceship: planet Earth, and we need to take care of those resources very similar to how we had to deal with it on the space station.

When are we going to Mars?

I hope it happens in my lifetime. I think it could. The rocket science is pretty much figured out. I’ll quote my brother from years ago, “Going to Mars is not about rocket science, it’s about political science,” which is good, because he’s a politician, maybe he’ll help with that.

What was it like servicing the Hubble Space Telescope?

Seeing Hubble is cool.

It’s like the size of a school bus and you always generally see the side of it in pictures that looks really shiny and nice looking. The sun pointing side is always away from you. When you see the other side, it’s burned to a crisp. One side is all nice and shiny and that’s the side that’s facing the Earth, and the other side is burnt up and has holes in it like the space station does.

Just to realize this thing is seeing practically to the beginning of time is pretty cool. The fact that it’s still doing incredible science is pretty amazing. Hopefully Jared Isaacman is going to go up there and re-boost it someday. We’ll see.