Book review: Endurance by Scott Kelly
You go to school, finish a mildly interesting university, find an average job that pays your bills and enjoy the rest of your life…until you die. At the same time you’re doing this there are incredibly driven, determined and hard-working people conducting spacewalks around 300km above the Earth’s surface. Even thinking about something like that feels like sci-fi but it’s not! I have always been curious about the subject of space travel, living in such a distant place and the daily life and routines out there.
I couldn’t have picked a better book to satisfy my curiosity than “Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery”, it’s a stellar memoir written by a military pilot, an engineer, a retired astronaut and U.S. Navy Captain — Scott Kelly. It’s a fascinating behind the scenes look into a life of an immensely hard-working human in space and his record-breaking year on the International Space Station (ISS). A large part of a book covers the past decades of Scott’s life and the exhaustive process of physical and mental preparation. What I found interesting was the detailed descriptions of his everyday life that he shared with a few colleagues whilst orbiting the Earth, from spacewalks to fixing the ISS toilet! I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Scott Kelly himself, and was hooked from start to finish!