Scott Kelly

Scott Kelly was born in 1964 in Orange, New Jersey, the identical twin of future astronaut Mark Kelly. By his own account an unmotivated student, he was galvanized after reading Tom Wolfe's 'The Right Stuff', which set him on a course toward naval aviation. He earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the State University of New York Maritime College and later a master's in aviation systems from the University of Tennessee, then became a U.S. Navy test pilot and F-14 Tomcat aviator, flying combat missions before NASA selected him as an astronaut in 1996 — the same year it selected his brother.

Kelly flew four times over sixteen years, and his missions trace the arc from the Space Shuttle to the modern station. In December 1999 he piloted Space Shuttle Discovery on STS-103, an eight-day flight to service the Hubble Space Telescope. In 2007 he commanded Space Shuttle Endeavour on STS-118, an ISS assembly flight that delivered the S5 truss segment. His first long-duration expedition came in 2010-2011, when he launched aboard Soyuz TMA-01M and commanded Expedition 26 for 160 days. His defining flight was the 'Year in Space': launching aboard Soyuz TMA-16M on March 27, 2015 with cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko, he spent 340 continuous days aboard the ISS across Expeditions 43 through 46, at the time the longest single spaceflight by an American, returning to Earth on March 2, 2016.

That year-long mission made Kelly the subject of NASA's landmark Twins Study, in which researchers compared him against his Earth-bound identical twin Mark to isolate the biological effects of long-duration spaceflight — data that continues to inform planning for eventual crewed missions to Mars. He retired from NASA in 2016 and became a bestselling author, writing 'Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery' (2017) and the photography collection 'Infinite Wonder' (2018). In retirement he has been an outspoken advocate for Mars exploration and for climate awareness, and a public voice on the physical and psychological demands of living in orbit. His enduring lesson, drawn from a life that began without obvious direction, is that grit and persistence matter more than raw ability.