TIME ’s Award-Winning Year in Space Documentary Is Now Available On Netflix

The women working in the commissary at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on March 27, 2015 barely paid attention as the moment approached when the Soyuz rocket, just visible less than a kilometer away, would lift off. But when the 20 engines at the base of the rocket lit at 12:42 AM local time, turning the deep night to a brilliant white day, they hurried over to the window to watch. Less than 20 seconds later, the rocket disappeared into a low-lying cloud bank. TIME was there for the launch — and with good reason. One of the three men aboard the rocket that night was veteran astronaut Scott Kelly, who was on his way to spending a near-complete year in space. Like all crew members on the International Space Station (ISS), Kelly would be conducting observations and scientific experiments. Unlike other space station crew members, Kelly also was the experiment — a test of how the human body adapts, or doesn’t, to extended periods in zero-g. The results would be compared to identical tests conducted on his twin brother Mark, who was also an astronaut, but who was staying on Earth for the duration of the mission. Start with two identical genomes, put the subjects in decidedly non-identical environments, and any meaningful differences in their physical and mental states at the end of the year would provide a pretty good sense of the wages of space. Over the course of that year, TIME’s video team continued to chronicle the mission, with footage shot arou...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized onetime Space Source Type: news