What’s it like to be 70 years old in space? “All those little aches and pains heal up.”
"When the flight docs say I'm ready to go back, I'm ready to do it."
Not many people celebrate their birthday by burning a fiery arc through the atmosphere, pulling 4.4gs in freefall back to planet Earth, thudding into the ground, and emptying their stomach on the steppes of Kazakhstan.
No one has ever done it on their 70th birthday.
Perhaps this is appropriate because NASA astronaut Don Pettit is a singular individual. His birthday is April 20, and when the Soyuz spacecraft carrying him landed at dawn in Kazakhstan, the calendar had turned over to that date. John Glenn, then 77, was older when he went to space. But no one as old as Pettit had spent as long as he had in orbit, 220 days, on a mission.
