Astronaut Scott Kelly is back on Earth and reliving his space stories in W. Orange

A young Scott Kelly stared out the window daydreaming, occasionally switching his gaze to watch the clock. Anything, really, to avoid listening to the teacher. As a student at Hazel Avenue Elementary School in West Orange, he was constrained by boredom and reading below grade level.

None of his teachers could have guessed that he would grow up to join a select group of intrepid travelers floating in endless space.

Decades later, Kelly, now 53, is retired from a storied career as a test pilot, Navy captain and astronaut. But for 11 months, he was our guy in space, with his stay on the International Space Station. Kelly returned to Earth in 2016 to much fanfare. President Barack Obama lauded Kelly and his identical twin brother, Mark, a fellow retired astronaut, at the White House. Pleasantdale School was renamed Kelly Elementary for the Jersey boys made good.

Now Scott Kelly is embarking on a tour to promote his book, "Endurance: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery" (Knopf, 387 pp., $29.95), which comes out on Tuesday, the same date of his appearance at West Orange High School. The book follows the career of the astronaut, who first traveled to space in 1999 and commanded three missions on the space station, spending 340 consecutive days -- an American record -- on his last trip, performing experiments in service of a larger NASA quest to examine the effects of long-term space travel on the human body.

The Kelly brothers are known for NASA's ongoing Twins Study, a project of 12 universities that documents differences between an earthbound body (Mark) and one that has spent a long period of time in space (Scott). The brothers will be tested each year for the rest of their lives.

With such a resume, Kelly doesn't often express regret. He does not dwell, for instance, on the fact that in 2011, the brothers missed the boat on an anticipated historic first -- the meeting of siblings in space -- because of a delayed launch. But shirking his education? That's another story.

"I have one regret in my life and that is that I spent 13 years in school looking out the window," he tells NJ Advance Media in a phone interview from Las Vegas. "Such a waste of my time."

To be sure, Kelly spent a lot of time looking out of windows (at Earth) on his long stay in space, which stretched from March 27, 2015 to March 1, 2016 (he returned on March 2, Kazakhstan time). "Year in Space," a PBS and Time documentary about the mission, won an Emmy (the second part, "Beyond a Year in Space," airs in November) this month. Kelly also authored a children's book, "My Journey to the Stars" (Crown Books for Young Readers), also out on Tuesday.

"Endurance" starts with Kelly back on Earth, glad to be reunited with Mark and his daughters, Samantha and Charlotte, but feeling the harsh symptoms of his body's adjustment to gravity -- legs wobbly and swollen, skin plagued by rashes. The story then moves between the Kelly's space launch and the improbable tale of how he even became an astronaut.

Kelly, who now lives outside Houston, says he probably could've been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder as a child. But both he and Mark have long demonstrated another quality -- a penchant for risk-taking. Growing up on Mitchell Street in West Orange (before his family moved "up the hill" to Greenwood Avenue), they were always recovering from some sort of scrape.

"We both got stitches so often we sometimes would have the stitches from the previous injury removed during the same visit," Kelly writes, recalling how Mark, who would go on to become a Navy captain and spend more than 50 days in space, got hit by a car after he failed to heed their mother's instructions to cross at the corner. Their penchant for goofy mischief endures, too -- Mark sent a gorilla suit to space so Scott could scare his fellow ISS inhabitants.

As a teen, Scott Kelly got his adrenaline fix working as an EMT in Jersey City, but it wasn't until he was a drifting student at the University of Maryland that he found his sense of purpose in the pages of Tom Wolfe's 1979 book "The Right Stuff." He was utterly taken by the story of the hotshots who would go on to join Project Mercury, the first American manned space program, in 1959.

Wolfe's book gave him direction, even if his ascent to a world-class space laboratory wasn't a quick ride. There, floating in zero gravity, he would perform ultrasounds on himself, get a whiff of the metallic "smell" of space, repair a processor that turns urine to water, watch the movie "Gravity" (really), use a "space cup" to drink espresso from a special machine (that cost $1 million from build to launch), cut up mice (for science) and play a game of "is that chocolate or mouse droppings floating my way?"

This is where the "endurance" comes in, Kelly says.

"It's a giant leap to imagine -- but if you consider it, really, what it was was a bunch of small steps executed over a very long period of time, almost 15 years from the time I read that book to becoming an astronaut," he says.

Flashbacks to Kelly's late teens drive the "endurance" point home, like when he transferred to SUNY Maritime College in the Bronx, only to nearly ruin his chances of staying afloat by running off to party at Rutgers (the school had rejected his application), before Mark advised him to hunker down and stay the course.

Kelly's recalibrated focus eventually led him to the Navy, then NASA, where he became the first American in his astronaut class to fly, piloting space shuttles. And though the record has since been broken, after his last return to Earth, Kelly notched an American best for the most time spent in space.

The Kellys are the first astronaut siblings to travel to space, but they had a template for firsts -- in 1979, their mother, Patricia Kelly, a former secretary who died in 2012, became the first female police officer in West Orange.

Their father, Richard, was already a police officer in town. His alcoholism colored their childhood; Kelly recounts a trip down the Shore when his father took off with their money, then refused to hand it over when their mother tracked him down at a bar. He still remembers how hungry he felt that weekend.

When they were teenagers, Scott and Mark intervened when a fight between his parents ended with their father pointing a gun in his mouth, threatening to pull the trigger.

Kelly was in Las Vegas with Mark to give a speech less than two weeks after a mass shooting there left 58 dead. He believes rough moments in childhood helped the two future astronauts learn to manage conflict, to see "through all the bullsh*t," he says. After Mark's wife, former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., was shot in the head in a 2011 assassination attempt that left six people dead, he became an advocate for stricter gun laws.

During Scott Kelly's year in space, he completed his first three spacewalks and ate lettuce grown onboard. On difficult days, such as when carbon dioxide levels were too high, Kelly would page through "Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage," the 1959 Alfred Lansing book about a failed 1914 Antarctic expedition to the South Pole, which inspired the title of his space memoir. He'd always see that those men, who had to eat their dogs to survive, had it worse.

Kelly's tweets from @StationCDRKelly served as the public face of the mission, letting millions see his view of Earth from the cupola. Kelly, who is divorced from his first wife, says his fiancee, Amiko Kauderer (they got engaged in March), a former NASA public affairs officer, had much to do with his Twitter presence; his tweets came up during after-work phone calls from space to Texas.

In the last days of his mission, Kelly made another call to his hero, Tom Wolfe. He had sent the writer a thank-you note and photo of himself holding a tablet computer displaying the cover of "The Right Stuff."

"My name is Scott Kelly and I'm currently the Commander of the International Space Station," he wrote, calling Wolfe's book the "spark" that lit his career.

"It just made logical sense for me to call him," Kelly says. "People don't hang up on you in space."

Scott Kelly will be at West Orange High School (51 Conforti Ave.) at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 17 to promote "Endurance" with a conversation with New York Times science writer John Schwartz. Tickets available with purchase of the book ($29.95) from Words Bookstore.

Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @AmyKup or on Facebook.