Mark Kelly

My brother has 520 days in space.

Oh my God.

A year and a half, that's insane.

Yeah, it's a lot.

Yeah.

I mean, you realize the risk, right?

I mean, when you consider the number of people that flew on the space shuttle, 14 of them, and I don't know what the total number is, but

You know, it's, you know, probably a few couple, a few hundred.

You know, 14 of them are dead.

You know, out of 135 missions, we lost, you know, two orbiters.

So it is a, you know, risky thing to do.

You get it.

You understand that there is a lot of personal risk for you.

The way I think about this is like, you know, what's the reward?

Not to me personally, but to our country.

In our ability to do this and do exploration and push the boundaries of technology forward, there's a tremendous amount of progress that we can make.

So it's worth it, even though there's risks for me personally.

But especially like on my second flight on the heels of the Columbia accident,

Yeah, I remember, especially during reentry when Columbia started to break up, you know, we knew, you know, after entry interface and at what Mach number the vehicle started coming apart, I remember, you know, saying to one of my commanders, Steve Lindsey, I remember, you know, us recognizing that this is the time that they lost communication with the ground.

because Columbia started to disintegrate at that point.