NEW YORK: It was shortly after dawn when Scott Kelly emerged from a van in a remote part of Kazakhstan last year, wearing a trim flight suit. As the purple morning sky faded to a light blue the NASA astronaut climbed to the crest of a ridge crossed by railroad tracks.
In the distance a Russian rocket rolled along, pulled by a train toward its launch pad.
Although it was just September, an early morning chill had already come to Baikonur, the Russian spaceport where Americans now launch to the International Space Station.
Kelly was in central Asian serving as a backup crew member to another NASA astronaut, Butch Wilmore, who would soon strap into the Soyuz. He was also training for his own mission to the space station, set to begin Friday, where he will spend nearly a year in space, longer than any other U.S. astronaut.
When the rocket passed by a few feet away Kelly posed for photos, and then he took a moment to muse upon the purpose of all this – NASA’s cooperation to keep the space station flying, and his own mission, which is designed to study the effects on the human body of long-duration space flights.
“We’re trying to get to Mars,” said Kelly. “I won’t go, but the next generation has a chance.”
To reach Mars, the fourth planet from the Sun and the only other body in the solar system even remotely similar to Earth with land, ice caps and a thin atmosphere, NASA faces a host of challenges. It must design complex vehicles to fly people there, and safely land them. It must also build a political consensus for such a mission and obtain hundreds of billions of dollars in funding.
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