Out of this world
Naval aviator and final commander of the space shuttle Endeavour Mark Kelly flew 39 combat missions during Operation Desert Storm, made four space flights, and spent 54 days in outer space. But although aviation has been in his blood for as long as he can remember, Kelly began his career closer to the ocean than to the sky.
“I decided I wanted to be one of those guys flying one of those airplanes off an aircraft carrier,” Kelly said. “I also wanted to be an astronaut, but it wasn’t a means to an end. I just thought, you know, of all the jobs that are out there, I couldn’t think of anything more exciting when I graduated from college than flying a fighter airplane off a ship. I had a lot of buddies going to work for engineering companies and going into the shipping industry. I went to the Merchant Marine Academy, which is all about ships and hauling cargo. But the cargo I wanted to haul was a bomb in an airplane, so I started [Navy flight school] in Pensacola in June of 1986.”
Kelly made his first trip to space in 2001 on the space shuttle Endeavour.
“If aircraft are about speed, payload, and performance over a wide range of conditions,” Kelly said, “there’s nothing that can beat the space shuttle. You can go zero to 17,500 miles an hour in eight and a half minutes. You go up in altitude to between 250 and 350 miles—not 35,000 feet, but 350 miles.”
He smiled as he remembered his four rocket rides aboard the space shuttles. “There’s nothing that beats it. It’s the best space ship built. It’s not a particularly good airplane—in fact, it’s probably one of the worst airplanes I’ve flown—but it is a pretty decent rocket ship and the most unbelievable spacecraft. It’s going to be a long time before we build something with the capability of the space shuttle.”
Now Kelly is hard at work trying to figure how to share outer space adventures with fellow pilots as co-founder of Worldview Experience. The company hopes to take space voyagers above 100,000 feet in a craft lifted by a high-altitude helium balloon, then gently flown back to earth.
“I’ll be flying the first test flight of the vehicle probably in a little over a year from now,” he said.
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