Record-setting astronaut Scott Kelly back in U.S.
Astronaut Scott Kelly completed his return to Houston early Thursday, a little more than 24 hours after landing in Kazakhstan with two crewmates from the International Space Station.
"It's great to be back in Texas," Kelly said in brief remarks in a hangar in Houston's Ellington Field. He set a U.S. record of 340 days in space, and said Wednesday that he could have stayed up longer if necessary, giving him confidence future astronauts will be up to the challenge of even longer flights to Mars and beyond.
Kelly and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko were launched to the space station last March 27. They returned to Earth late Tuesday U.S. time, along with Soyuz TMA-18M commander Sergey Volkov, landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan.
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, Jill Biden, representing her husband, Vice President Joe Biden, and John Holdren, President Obama's science adviser, were on hand to welcome Kelly back to the U.S.
"It would have been great to get here quicker," Kelly said. "I'm used to going 17,500 mph (on the space station)," but the plane that brought him back to Houston doesn't go nearly that fast.
Also on hand were Kelly's twin brother, Mark, a retired astronaut, and Mark' wife, former Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, whose political career was cut short in 2011 when she was shot in the head by a gunman who killed six others.
On Wednesday, Scott Kelly was in good spirits and looked surprisingly fit upon emerging from the Soyuz capsule that brought him back to Earth.
The White House says President Obama spoke with Kelly on Wednesday, thanking him for his service.
In a NASA interview before starting back to Houston, Kelly said it was "amazing" to feel the cold air when the hatch of the capsule popped open after touchdown. "I don't mean to say it's not fresh on the space station," he said, "but there's nothing like new cold air coming into the capsule."
The world record for time in space is 438 days, set back in the mid-1990s at the former Mir space station. Even before that, a pair of Soviet cosmonauts had racked up a full one-year spaceflight.