Retired astronaut Scott Kelly spoke in his autobiography about the peculiarities of his space flights and the difficult life situations he had to face.
The book, Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery, is by no means the standard rapturous memories that all astronauts share. Kelly explained to reporters that he did not want to publish another sweet stories about the delights of the life of astronauts and revealed the whole truth in his book.
So, Kelly, for example, talks about the hunt for an escaped garbage container and scattered underwear of another astronaut who was flying around the International Space Station. Scott writes about the congestion, headaches and sore eyes he suffered from high levels of carbon dioxide, and that no one cared about controlling the mission in Houston.
The astronaut recounts how he visited a tattoo parlor before the flight and applied black dots all over his body to make it easier to pass ultrasound tests in orbit.
In his book, Kelly also describes how surgery to remove prostate cancer nearly made it impossible for him to work on the ISS, and vision problems forced him to miss a mission from March 2015 to March 2016.
In the book, he writes about a little-known incident that he says happened during his first space mission in 2010, when a Russian cosmonaut went into outer space and began to fly away. Fortunately, they managed to intercept and hold him in time.
Selfie of Scott Kelly from July 12, 2015 in the dome, a special module of the International Space Station for observing the Earth
In the photo: December 21, 2015 Scott Kelly went into outer space outside the ISS
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Although he was aboard the space station at the time, Kelly learned about the incident five years later in conversation with other astronauts. Note that the Russian side refused to comment on this statement of the American astronaut.
Kelly, 53, said he had a passion for aviation and space until he read Tom Wolfe's 1979 book The Right Stuff in college. Kelly writes that he was a terrible student and probably suffered from attention deficit disorder.
The former astronaut also frankly says that right before the wedding he realized that he did not want to marry. As a result, his first marriage was unhappy and he got divorced. Kelly adds that some time after retiring, he felt that he missed space, so he decided to share his memoirs.