HOUSTON – On March 27th, three astronauts will blast off to the International Space Station.
NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Mikhail Kornienko will launch from Kazakhstan in a Soyuz rocket. Kelly and Kornienko will remain on the space station for one year, spending twice as much time on the ISS as previous missions.
Astronaut Scott Kelly spoke with the Channel 2 News Today team Monday morning about the upcoming historic mission.
Q: How have you been training for this mission, Mr. Kelly?
A: Well, I started training for this well over two years ago. Mostly in the United States but also in Japan, in Germany and a lot of time in Russia. One reason we spend a lot of time [in Russia] is not only is it part of the space station - the Russian segment of the space station was built and is operated out of [Moscow] - but also we launch on a Russian Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan. So all that training is [in Russia]. And the training has been in a bunch of different disciplines, whether it's how to fix the space station, [...] maintain it on a daily basis or do all the different types of scientific experiments, of which there will be 400 or so going on in the year that I'm there. So that's what I've been spending most of my time on.
Q: We saw your tweet "This is about to get real #YearInSpace". In what ways do you think this could affect your health?
A: The space environment does have some negative health effects, whether it's bone loss or muscle loss. There are effects on our immune system, and it's not a positive effect. Recently, we've discovered an effect on our vision. And we're trying to understand those things, some of which - like bone loss and muscle loss - we've got a pretty good handle on, but the effect on our vision we don't. There's also the negative effect of large amounts of radiation. [...] And that's one of the reasons that we fly on the space station. There's science that is devoted to understanding human physiology and how to improve our performance over long periods of time. And there's also the science that we do that's more on how to improve life for the people on Earth.
Q: You're twin brother, Mark, won't be going along with you, but he's still playing a role in the mission?
A: Yeah, it was somewhat of a unique opportunity for NASA to venture into the area of research and the effects of the space environment at a genetic level. Because my brother and I have very similar DNA, there was interest in doing scientific experiments on how the space environment affects not only our DNA, but then how that DNA is expressed in the RNA and the proteins that control our whole physiology. Granted, we're just a sample of one. There's two of us and it's only one scientific data point, but hopefully we'll learn things, you know, anecdotal information that we can use to develop other scientific investigations and look more closely into these genetic effects of the space environment.