Scott Kelly: 'It seemed like I'd lived there forever'

During his 340-day stay in space, astronaut Scott Kelly kept up a frenetic schedule of experiments, spacewalks, and spaceship maintenance – but that doesn’t mean that the time went by in a flash.

“The only big surprise was how long a year is,” Kelly said Friday, three days after returning to Earth from the longest stint anyone has ever spent on the International Space Station. “It seemed like I’d lived there forever.”

Scott’s identical twin Mark, a retired astronaut who spoke often to his brother during their nearly yearlong separation, gave a blunter account.

“Every time I would say to my brother, ‘A year is going by quickly,’ he would say, ‘No, it’s not,’ ” Mark Kelly said Friday.

Thanks to the mission he just finished, Scott Kelly has racked up 520 days off the planet, making him the U.S. record-holder for the longest cumulative time in space. He also holds the record for the longest single stay in orbit of any American astronaut, a feat of endurance exceeded only by a handful of Russian and Soviet cosmonauts.

The return to Earth, while very welcome, was also more onerous than Kelly had expected. He felt better just after landing than he did after his six-month stint on the space station in 2010 to 2011, but the triumph was momentary. His muscles and joints ache much more this time around, he said, and there is a “burning sensation” in his skin from having close contact once again with surfaces and materials. Sitting, standing and sleeping are all uncomfortable.

“Adjusting to space is easier than adjusting to Earth,” Kelly said at a news conference at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Unlike other recently returned astronauts who expected objects to float, Kelly hasn’t dropped anything. But he missed when he tried to throw something onto a table, and his basketball skills, never great, are even worse than before his mission. He expects the culture shock of being back on Earth, where the choices are endless compared to the severe restraints of the space station, to hit home soon, but it hasn’t yet, he said.

In the meantime he savored running water again, one of the amenities lacking in space.

“You definitely feel like you want to jump in a pool, so I did,” said Kelly, whose Twitter account includes a fuzzy video of him falling into his home pool, seemingly fully clothed. Just after landing in Russia’s Soyuz spaceship in Kazakhstan Tuesday, he enjoyed a banana – “so good,” he said -- in keeping with the gorilla costume he donned aboard the space station to chase one of his crew mates through the laboratory.

Scott Kelly saw his brother long enough to notice that Mark has “got a better tan.” The brothers are the subject of intensive study by scientists, who are comparing how Scott fared in space while Mark stayed on the ground. Scott noted that he grew an inch and a half in orbit, thanks to the stretching of the spinal column in weightlessness, but “gravity pushes you back down to size,” he said, and now they are the same height again.

Scott Kelly expects NASA won’t send him to orbit again, not when there are so many other astronauts waiting to fly. But even after a cumulative 520 days in space, he’d like to return some day, perhaps with one of the companies developing tourist flights.

“There might be a need for a guy like me” at one of those companies, he said. Or “maybe in the next 20 years you might be able to buy a cheap ticket and go for a little visit.”