Eyeworld

85 June 2017 EW MEETING REPORTER first time, Captain Kelly was paired with a pilot who told him he was getting too comfortable in the cock- pit, and that was his problem. "This guy taught me, if I wasn't making positive corrections all the time, things were naturally going to get worse," he said. "This philos- ophy of testing the status quo, of never being comfortable with how things are … was able to help me land on the ship at night and qual- ify the very first time and become a fighter pilot." After being accepted as a Navy test pilot, in 1996 Captain Kelly applied for and was accepted to the NASA space program, along with his brother. He spent several years learning to fly the space shuttle and took his first trip to space in Decem- ber 1999 on a mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. After sever- al more trips to space, Captain Kelly was selected for a long-duration flight NASA was planning, where two astronauts would be stationed at the ISS for a year to study the long- term effects of spaceflight on the human body. People often ask him what the best part of flying in space is: Is it the launch, the landing, floating at zero gravity, looking at Earth from above? But none of those are Cap- tain Kelly's favorite part. "All those things are great, but for me, the best part about this expe- rience is that it's really hard," he said. "For me, doing the hard things … required me to have a goal and a plan. It was about taking risks, being willing to fail, being willing to make mistakes. It was about focusing on things that I could control and ig- noring what I couldn't. It was about testing the status quo, and about working as a team. Because for me as an astronaut and a pilot, when I was able to put all these things togeth- er, I realized that the sky is not the limit." Editors' note: Captain Kelly has no financial interests related to his com- ments. At that time, there were no fe- male police officers in their town of West Orange, New Jersey. To qualify, Mrs. Kelly had to take and pass the same physical fitness exams as male recruits. Mr. Kelly, who was already a police officer, helped his wife train by building an obstacle course for her in their backyard. One task involved scaling a wall that was 7 feet, 4 inches tall. At first, she could barely make it a foot up the wall, but she quickly devised a plan she could follow with small, manageable steps. After several months of work, Mrs. Kelly was able to climb the wall, and when she took her physical exam, she scaled the wall in half the time that the male recruits did. "This was the first time in my life and my brother's life that we saw the power of having a very lofty goal and a plan with small, manageable steps to get there," he said. Mrs. Kelly became one of the first female police officers in New Jersey, and her success strategy always stuck with her son as he grew up. Although he was a poor student academically, Captain Kelly attend- ed college and one day spotted The Right Stuff, a book by Tom Wolfe that documented the stories of the first Project Mercury astronauts se- lected for the NASA space program. "I recognized traits in these guys that I had in myself," he said. "This book became my spark that got me moving in a positive direction." Captain Kelly decided to be- come an astronaut and to break the task down into many small, man- ageable steps like his mother had done. He taught himself how to pay attention, how to study, and how to do well in school. He joined the Navy, was accepted to flight school, and became a fighter pilot. As a stu- dent aviator, however, he realized he was not a particularly good pilot. "But I did, however, know how to work really hard," he said. "I studied … to compensate for the fact that I didn't know how to fly." After failing to properly land his plane on an aircraft carrier for the continued on page 86

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