Endurance review

I've been getting a lot of time to read lately, which has been nice. At the library, I stumbled up on Endurance: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery by astronaut Scott Kelly. I'd loosely followed his yearlong mission in the International Space Station (specifically his growing of plants in space) and was curious about what it was actually like to be up there. Plus, as a writer of science fiction, this book was great research.

This was the second book-by-an-astronaut I'd read. The first being Chis Hadfield's An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth which is a fantastic combo of biography and self-help book (I also stood in line for three hours with a baby to get Chris to sigh it).

Endurance is highly personal in a very matter-of-fact way. The writing felt very honest and he didn't gloss over his flaws. Basically, the book is aa autobiography of his life leading up to the yearlong mission in space combined with journal-like entries of his time on the ISS. This combination worked for me.

Everything is presented in vivid detail. I particularly liked the metal image I got when he described being strapped into the Soyuz rocket as the co-pilot of the co-pilot. They were ready to go and forced to listen to crackly music being played over the comms systems – songs that included 'Killing Me Softly' and 'Time to Say Goodbye.'

Living on the ISS, sounded like a lot of hard work and I loved the details about the mundane daily tasks. I had no idea that fresh fruit and vegetables rot faster on the space station that on Earth (I wonder why), or that tortillas are the bread of space (the keep well and don't make a lot of crumbs). And it was interesting to know that space has a distinct smell like the slightly burned, metallic scent of sparklers and welding.

He predicts that in the future, space farers will coin a word for the nostalgia humans feel when not surrounded by living things. I wonder what that word might be--or perhaps we'll discover we're better humans when we pack a our space habitats with more living things.

Overall, I would highly recommend this book for anyone interested in how humans are living in space right now.

As a tangent, when I worked in the Arctic, jet contrails were sometimes the only other evidence of human activity beyond our tiny ship. It never dawned on me that jet contrails could be visible to those looking down on Earth—turns out you can see them from the ISS.