339 sunrises over a distant blue planet to which you belong. Opening your eyes and discovering your world moving without you, there in its orbit can be wonderful, or frankly alienating, depending on the first foot you float with when you wake up.
For the rest, nothing ... a black environment around which seems to reign an icy Wagner symphony. Scott Kelly he has lived through all those dawns, with the inevitably variable emotional stages.
At times he could feel like a privileged being of all human civilization, like a guardian of planet Earth, gazillions of kilometers from it. But at other times loneliness is irrevocably distressing. The knowledge of fear, up there, requires experiments and tests where guinea pigs can only be the same astronauts.
And space is still not our natural environment. Nor have we been able to generate a space that keeps our organism in proper working order (the one that marks the law of gravity to make all kinds of internal "humors" work)
But we need to know ..., and Scott was willing to spend those 340 days for scientists to study their day to day, their experiences and the final consequences (which continue to be a physical and emotional burden)
Surviving out there has a lot to do with surviving yourself. Outside of essential magnetism, to the evolutionary magic that unites us to the planet we are nothing. The reason is annulled by the magnanimity of the work of an energy or a God X. Devoting yourself to your routines as an astronaut while the Universe seems to contemplate you with its dark eyes like a stranger, it should not be easy at all.
Scott survived. All of him were shortcomings and setbacks to himself. Outer space does not know how to care for lives beyond the laps of their respective planets. But Scott had a mission and he was determined to carry it out.
The only hope was that blue glow of a planet full of peers, among all of them the most beloved, who would search in the cloudless nights for the last trail of human life in search of more and more solutions and answers.
Our future is more than likely out there. Give it a few more years to check that all this is getting too small for us. That's why Scott had his mission. Then the scientists will take care of looking for improvements and alternatives. Astronauts like Scott transformed into the Columbus of interstellar spaces, in search of other new worlds ...
You can buy the book Endurance. A year in space, by astronaut Scott Kelly, here: