Feet on the Ground

THEY'RE BA-ACK!:  After 340 consecutive days off planet, astronaut Mark Kelly and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko have returned to Earth!

This morning, Kelly took this photograph of the last sunrise on his final day of a nearly-year-long mission.

   Photo: NASA/Scott Kelly

We watched this afternoon as the pair bid adieu to their crewmates and climbed into the Soyuz capsule that would ferry them back to the Earth's surface.

Imagine, feeling the Earth's gravity after 340 days on the International Space Station. 

                        Graphic: NASA
The New York Times recently published a story summing up Kelly's (almost) year in space by the numbers,

Kelly was on station for 10,944 sunrises and sunsets, he  made over 5,440 orbits of Earth, and traveled 143,846,525 miles (about the distance to Mars, by the way!). It's estimated Kelly drank 193 gallons of recycled urine and sweat, and he ran 648 miles (exercise is important to combat bone density loss in microgravity).

By the way, the NASA astronaut who previous held the record for longest consecutive space mission was Michael López-Alegría, who spent 215 consecutive days in space in 2006 and 2007. The man who holds the record for the all-time longest space misison is Valeri Polyakov, who was on Russian space station Mir for 438 days from 1994 to 1995. Kelly worked on more than 400 experiments, and took thousands of photos. (You can see some of his top shots here: http://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/blog/2016/03/01/20-amazing-pictures-from-astronaut-scott-kelly-s-year-in-space.asp.)


RACE:  We had a Groupon for a movie and popcorn we had to use up by yesterday, so we headed to Columbia City, the southeast part of Seattle, to Ark Lodge Cinemas, a nice vintage movie house that puts REAL BUTTER on their popcorn! Since we're sports fans and it was the last day of black history month, we chose to see movie "Race." It was a good choice. I'll let CJ tell you a bit about the movie.

"Race" is a docu-drama about Jesse Owens, an iconic Olympian who broke boundaries when he raced at the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany. According to his website at jesseowens.com, Jesse began his promising athletic career began in 1928 in Cleveland, Ohio, where he set Junior High School records by clearing 6 feet in the high jump, and leaping 22 feet 11 3/4 inches in the broad jump.

Jesse Owens went to Ohio State College, and continued to practice his athleticism there. In 1935, Jesse Owens went to the Big Ten championships in Ann Arbor, where he succeeded. Jesse Owens went to the Olympics in 1936, which was troublesome, as the Nazi regime believed that black people, one of which was Jesse, were supposedly inferior to the "aryan" race.

Jesse Owens performed very well at the Olympics, winning 4 gold medals for his efforts. According to his website, he was the first American track-and-field athlete to do so. In the long jump competition, Jesse Owens was given 3 tries to do a successful jump. He was disqualified from the first 2 attempts, but a German athlete named Max Luz scrunched up his towel and placed it next to the jumping line, to show Jesse where to jump. Jesse finished and won the long jump.

Jesse Owens joined the American relay team for the Olympics for an unusual reason. The Nazi regime demanded there be no Jews on the Americans' relay team, so two of the Jewish athletes on the American team had to be taken off the team. Jesse Owens replaced one of them, but didn't want to because he felt sorry for them. He asked the Jewish athletes in question if it was okay that he replaced him, and the Jewish athletes eventually said yes.

In one of the last scenes of the film, Jesse Owens was back in New York, being the guest of honor for a banquet at an expensive hotel. Jesse, expecting more respect because he was a winning Olympic athlete and the guest of honor, attempted to enter through the normal entrance, but was turned away because he was black. He had to enter through the "colored door," a door that was not as nice as the main door. Even though he won four gold medals, Jesse Owens was never invited to the White House. 

The end of the movie was heart wrenching. Owens was such a triumph at the Olympics, and then to come home and be treated so poorly. Fortunately, we have made progress since the mid-1930s.

Here's a trailer for "Race." Catch it if you can.

https://youtu.be/E31LnSw47xo