shrank him back down to normal height after he stretched by 1.5 inches in orbit – took nothing away from the awe he felt after his capsule landed back on Earth. When the Russian capsule opened on to the cool air of Kazakhstan, Kelly said, he smelled “a fragrance like a plant was blooming in that area”. It was the fresh air mingled with the charred, “kind of sweet” smell of a spacecraft that had survived re-entry through the atmosphere. Backing away from the vessel, he said, the scope of the mission began to sink in: 340 days on a 15-year-old space station which is “a million pounds, the size of a football field, the internal volume, some say, of a six-bedroom house ”. The ISS, he said, is a place that uses the power of the sun and was built with the help of an international team and millions of taxpayers. “There are things we’re going to discover about our experience in space in the space station that we don’t even know now,” Kelly said, comparing the research of more than 450 missions there to the work done by computer scientists at NASA in the 1960s and 1970s. He added: “The view is great, too.” Kelly made the most of that view, posting spectacular photos on social media of the Earth’s cities, landscapes, oceans and atmosphere. “The Earth is a beautiful planet,” he said, describing the striking colours of the waters around the Bahamas and