Campus News

Astronaut twins share benefits of doing ‘the hard things’

Mark and Scott Kelly at distinguished speakers series lecture.

Scott (left) and Mark Kelly took the stage in Alumni Arena Thursday night to open the 2016-17 Distinguished Speakers Series now in its 30th year. Photo: Joe Cascio

By MARCENE ROBINSON

Published September 23, 2016 This content is archived.

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“For us as a nation, it was our choice to do the hard things. ”
Mark Kelly, NASA astronaut

Seven months after returning to Earth, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly again found himself on a new frontier, this time on a stage inside Alumni Arena as the first lecturer of the 30th annual Distinguished Speaker Series.

With his twin brother, Mark Kelly, also an astronaut, the pair drove home to a packed arena messages about determination, setting goals and attempting the impossible.

“For us as a nation, it was our choice to do the hard things,” says Mark, now retired from NASA and the U.S. Navy. “The greatest gift that we can continue to give our children, our grandchildren and the students here at this great university is to continue to do those hard things.”

The only siblings to have both travelled to space, the Kelly brothers have spent their lives avoiding the easy route.

Each has travelled to space four times. Mark has twice served as commander of NASA shuttle missions, with a total time in space of 55 days.

Scott, who retired in April, recently returned to Earth after spending a year in space on the International Space Station, the longest voyage of any U.S. astronaut. The journey brings Scott’s total travel time to 520 days.

The Kelly’s are also the subjects of NASA’s groundbreaking Twins Study, which monitored Scott from space during his year-long journey and Mark on the ground as a control model to better understand how space affects the human body.

Breathtaking accomplishments for two men who admitted to underachieving throughout their years in school.

The brothers believe their desire to accomplish more began with their mother, one of the first female police officers in their area of New Jersey.

At that time, the police academy test required candidates to climb a 7-foot wall. Barely over 5 feet tall, their mother struggled to make the climb, and spent months practicing with a makeshift wall in their backyard.

But her determination paid off. On the day of her test, she climbed the wall in four seconds, much faster than her male classmates.

“This is the first time in our lives that we saw the power of having a goal and a plan, and what it meant to work really hard. So we started working harder ourselves,” says Mark, who later decided that he wanted to become the first person to walk on Mars.

For both brothers, the route to becoming an astronaut involved training as a pilot in the U.S. Navy. Unfortunately for the Kellys, learning to fly a plane — let alone a space shuttle — didn’t come easily.

One of the tests for Navy pilots involves landing a plane onto an aircraft carrier. Mark missed the landing several times, while Scott nearly crashed his plane into the back of the ship.

Those failures forced the brothers to reconsider whether they could achieve their dreams of becoming astronauts. But rather than quitting their training, they retook the tests, both eventually passing.

“How good you are at the beginning of anything you try is not a good indicator of how good you can become,” says Mark. “I’m a prime example of somebody who was able to overcome a lack of aptitude with practice, persistence and just not giving up.”

Mark went on to fight during the Gulf War, piloting 39 combat missions. During the lecture, he shared a harrowing tale of narrowly dodging two anti-aircraft missiles while on a mission to bomb an enemy airbase.

Scott also recounted a near-death experience aboard the International Space Station, when the structure almost collided with a satellite travelling toward it at 30,000 miles per hour.

The satellite missed the space station, but the experiences revealed the dangers of piloting both planes and space shuttles.

Although dangerous, Scott admits that everyday life aboard a space station is typically a mix of awe-inspiring moments and mundane activities. On some days, he watched the sun set over Earth while floating in mid-air, and on others, he fixed the oft-broken toilet and completed research.

Much of his latest research involved the Twins Study, which aims to answer how zero gravity and extended exposure to radiation affects the human body. Engineering has advanced enough to put a space shuttle on Mars, they say, but scientists are unsure how the body will hold up during the grueling six-month journey.

One effect that is known is the impact of space travel on age. Scott, who left Earth six minutes older than his brother, returned six minutes younger. Because speed and time are related, by hurling through space for a year at more than 17,000 miles per hour, Scott managed to slow down his internal clock.

The results of the Twin Study will move humanity one step closer to placing a person on Mars, a possibility that Mark believes will happen within the next 30 years.

“The best part about this experience is I had just finished the hardest thing I will have ever done in my life,” Scott said, referring to his year in space. “If we can do this — the hardest thing we have ever done — we can do anything.”

Mark closed the lecture by adding: “If you set goals and have a plan, and you’re willing to take risks and test the status quo, you — especially you students out there — can accomplish anything… the sky is definitely not the limit.”