Review — Endurance

Captain Scott Kelly is a baller. You go to space multiple times and one those for nearly a year, you should get a Presidential Medal of Honor as far as I am concerned. Kelly’s book can be a bit mundane at times and that is a good thing. As an astronaut, the amount of focus you have to have on every single task no matter how mundane can be mentally exhausting. So when you read Kelly’s biography ‘Endurance: A Year In Space, A Lifetime Of Discovery”, try to remember the amount of time and effort that goes into every little task while training for space flight, doing a space flight and living on the ISS which is hurling around the globe at 17k+ miles an hour.

Being an astronaut is never easy and becoming one can be even harder. Kelly did a great job of detailing his road to spending nearly a year in space. The focus, the paperwork and the NASA process can seem like a never ending journey. Another thing that struck me was his absolute focus on being an astronaut. Kelly read ‘The Right Stuff’ and from then on he applied himself to a singular goal of becoming and astronaut and going to space. Before the book he was a lot like the rest of us (which was reassuring in some ways). To see that singular focus change how he applied himself was truly inspiring.

There are moments in the book where you are kind of like “what!?” I am referring to a moment when NASA alerts the ISS about an object possibly jumping into their orbit and colliding with them at a very, very high rate of speed. Kelly and the Russian cosmonauts pile into the Soyuz in case they have to evacuate back to Earth. Kelly was following procedure by closing off the hatches between modules while the Russians were like, “is that really gonna matter?” I found myself kind of agreeing with the Russian’s point of view. At those speeds, if an object was to collide with the ISS in a head on collision, it would be a horrific explosion and closing the hatches would probably be like trying to prioritize a backlog on JIRA.

This book is very timely to our current situation with COVID-19. Most people are fatigued with the virus and are not abiding by social distancing or wearing a mask. Kelly was in space for nearly a year. There were no “mental health” days for him, no runs outside during a nice day, no quick trips to the local restaurant to pick up dinner, or lounging on the couch with a good book. He was an astronaut on a giant object spinning around the Earth all day, everyday and if something broke, well guess who had to fix it? Kelly’s journey should give all of us a better perspective on the current state of the world.

‘Endurance’ is worth the read. It is an impressive feat to do what he did and one that a whole lot of us couldn’t do. It is even more impressive to be so inspired by a book that you change your life to focus on a goal of becoming something and doing something that most of us only dream about.