CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- The man who spent a year in space is still dealing with sore feet, stiff legs and fatigue, even after nearly three months back on Earth.
Retired astronaut Scott Kelly gave an address to NASA employees Wednesday, confiding that while he may have looked good upon landing in Kazakhstan in early March, he didn't feel well after returning from the International Space Station. His 340-day mission was the U.S.' longest spaceflight.
"When I got out of the Soyuz [space capsule] ... I didn't really look too bad," Kelly said in a packed auditorium at NASA headquarters in Washington. "But that was only because I'm a very good actor. I think I should be nominated for an Academy Award.
"My goal here was not to look great. I just had to make sure I didn't look worse than the two guys I was with. My colleagues would never let me hear the end of it," he added with a smile.
Kelly was accompanied back to Earth by two Russians, one of whom, Mikhail Kornienko, was there for most of Kelly's yearlong stay.
Kelly said that after he returned home to Houston, he had burning skin, rashes and flu-like symptoms. He said he felt so bad that if he hadn't just returned from space, he would have gone straight to the emergency room.
"But that's why we do this," he said. "We need to learn these things if we're going to go to Mars."
NASA wants to understand how the body copes with a year of weightlessness as the agency gears up to send humans on much longer journeys to Mars beginning in the 2030s.
Kelly, 52, who retired from NASA shortly after his mission, is now on the speaker circuit and working on a book. He and his identical twin, Mark, a retired astronaut who took part in his brother's medical experiments as a ground subject, sometimes share center stage these days. Last week, they were honored at their elementary school in New Jersey, now named for them.
During Wednesday's presentation, which was broadcast to NASA centers nationwide, Scott Kelly joked that on the space station, "I changed positions so many times, you would have thought I was running for president." No longer a civil servant, "I can say that now," he said.
A Section on 05/26/2016