A year isolated in space preps astronaut for modern dinner manners
His #YearInSpace is over, and it's time for astronaut Scott Kelly to readjust to phone-obsessed life on #Earth.
- Webby Award Winner (Best Video Host, 2021), Webby Nominee (Podcasts, 2021), Gold Telly (Documentary Series, 2021), Silver Telly (Video Writing, 2021), W3 Award (Best Host, 2020), Australian IT Journalism Awards (Best Journalist, Best News Journalist 2017)
Astronaut Scott Kelly spent a year in space, so you know he won't put up with your bad table manners.
It's been a big year for Scott Kelly.
The NASA astronaut has spent the past year on the International Space Station with just a handful of human beings for company. In his time floating through the vast ocean of space, he cleaned up acid pee, took hundreds of photos that he shared over Twitter and conducted more than 400 investigations, like growing lettuce and flowers in zero gravity.
He also offered himself up as a lab rat, so that NASA could measure the effects of zero gravity on his body, and compare the results with parallel experiments conducted on his identical twin brother back on earth.
After more than 300 days in space, Kelly finally landed back on terra firma -- Kazakhstan to be precise -- on March 1. But even an astronaut faces the same problems as countless earth families, especially around the dinner table.
Just days after returning from space, Kelly tweeted about his first dinner at a proper dinner table on Earth. We like to imagine the conversation went like this:
"Scott spent a year in space? He hasn't seen us in months and months? He went full "Martian"? That's really great, Scott, but I've just got to send this Snapchat..."
Your first time at a dinner table in a year and three people are on their smartphones.
Hopefully the other firsts back on Earth are a bit more satisfying. Like, getting a call from the president, or taking a dip, or looking around you and seeing your space journey in all the little things.
While the #YearInSpace might be over, it's just the start of a much broader mission for NASA as part of its Journey to Mars, and the experiments conducted by Kelly and his fellow astronauts on the effects of weightlessness, isolation, radiation and long-duration spaceflight on the human body, have been vital in that journey. In the words of NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, Kelly helped the Space Agency "take one giant leap toward putting boots on Mars."
Let's just hope his friends on Earth aren't too distracted to hear all about it.