Astronaut Mark Kelly-The Power of Having a Goal and a Plan

摘要

Dressed in his blue NASA flight jacket adorned with patches from all four space shuttle missions that he flew as pilot or commander, astronaut Mark Kelly kept the AIA audience enthralled with stories of his first carrier deck landing as a U.S. Navy pilot ("the first thing my instructor pilot said to me when I got back to the naval air station that night was, 'Are you sure this career is for you?'"), his first combat mission during Gulf War in 1991 avoiding surface to air missiles over southern Iraq ("You know what's worse than seeing the first missile? Seeing the second one!"), nearly being downed by friendly fire ("Do not shoot down the moron in Iranian airspace!"), and landing the shuttle on the 15,000-foot runway at the Kennedy Space Center ("You may have noticed that on both sides of this runway is water, and what's in water in Florida? Alligators! I think NASA put that there as added motivation to land the $2 billion ship on the runway.").