Scott Kelly does not like the writing process.

“Horrible,” he says, when asked about the experience of writing his new book, Ready for Launch: An Astronaut’s Lessons for Success on Earth (Crown, April 12). “With this particular book, it was just a lot easier. My other book [the 2017 memoir, Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery,] was probably 10 times the size. That was a horrible experience.”

But as hard as Kelly—the U.S. astronaut who holds the record for most time in orbit, more than 520 days in space on four space flights, according to NASA—finds writing, he does it when the reasons are important enough. He hopes to follow Ready for Launch, aimed at teenagers looking for inspiration for their lives, with a business leadership book.

Currently, Kelly is doing plenty of writing on Twitter (mostly in Russian) as he tries to keep friends and supporters in Russia informed about the war in Ukraine. He is also advising some about how to use apps like Signal so that their texts cannot be collected by the Russian government.

“My primary goal is to get real information to Russians and Russian speakers in Russia because they’re just fed so much misinformation,” says Kelly, who became a celebrity there after his year on the International Space Station with Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko, ending in 2016. “I do have a very large Twitter following, and a lot of them are Russians. My book was published in Russian, and I’m somewhat of a public figure there. I feel like we all need to be doing whatever we can to have some kind of an impact in a positive way, and that’s one way I think I can do it that maybe a lot of other people can’t because they just don’t have that kind of social media footprint in the country.”

After all, Kelly speaks Russian. He lived in Russia briefly while on assignment for NASA. He has plenty of Russian friends. However, he sees the Russian invasion of Ukraine as “horrific.”

“But it’s not a war of the Russian people,” Kelly says. “It’s a war of one person. [Russian President Vladimir Putin] is responsible. It seems like there are war crimes being committed. Some of my Russian friends support what’s going on there and some of them don’t. The ones that support it are completely brainwashed by Russian propaganda, so I don’t necessarily fault them for that.”

Even though the Russian government has banned Twitter in the country, Kelly says many Russians still access it using VPNs, and they thank him for providing uncensored news about the war. Kelly made some news himself in March when he returned the Russian medal he received “For Merit in Space Exploration” in protest over the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “Please give it to a Russian mother whose son died in this unjust war,” Kelly tweeted in Russian to former Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who currently serves as deputy chairman of Russia’s security council. “I will mail the medal to the Russian Embassy in Washington. Good luck.”

Kelly believes in the power of words because he knows how they changed his own life. From his home in Houston, Kelly talked with us about how he wants to share that power. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you want to write Ready for Launch?

I was not the typical astronaut as far as how good a student I was or how motivated I was. I found inspiration in the book The Right Stuff [by Tom Wolfe] when I was 18. And I thought a book like this might inspire kids like me to go out and do some things that they didn’t think they were capable of doing.

What was it about The Right Stuff that you found inspiring?

I felt like I had a lot of things in common with the guys in the book. The fighter pilots, test pilots, original astronauts—I felt like I had a lot of the same traits, with [the] one exception that I was just such a poor student who couldn’t pay attention. I didn’t do well in school. But when I read it, I thought, Well, if I could just fix that one thing, maybe I can go on and fly airplanes in the Navy and be a pilot or, maybe, be an astronaut someday.

Were there particular people in the book that you identified with?

The Original Seven, The New Nine—all of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts.

How did you even find that book? Were you reading a lot at that time?

I was walking into the college bookstore to buy gum or something, not a book. I was not a big reader. But I saw it at the end of the aisle, right near the checkout line. I picked it up, looked at the back, took my gum money and bought the book. And the rest is history. I was 18 when I read it, and almost 18 years to the day from when I read that book I was getting ready to fly in space for the very first time. I launched in December 1999 on a Hubble [Space Telescope] repair mission. It was surprising even to me. Looking back, there were 35 Americans in my class and 10 shuttle pilots, but I was the first one to fly in space.

One thing that makes Ready for Launch unusual is that you’re pretty open about your mistakes and disappointments. Why did you want to include those?

When you include the bad, it makes the good more believable. We’re not all perfect. And one thing I talked about in the book is that failure is one of the most powerful life lessons. It’s certainly been a big part of my life. You’re gonna have setbacks along the way. None of us are perfect. Some of us think we are, but we’re not. I just felt like it was part of the story.

It seems like there’s now a renewed fascination with space. Do you think that this generation of kids look at it with more interest than recent generations?

I’m a believer in human spaceflight, exploration in general. I think there’s always an interest there. It’s just a matter of how much exposure it gets to young people. Companies like SpaceX and Elon Musk make it just look more fashionable, I guess you could say. I never look at it as ordinary. It’s very challenging. It’s the hardest thing we do. I think everyone’s motivation is different.

Can you talk about what motivated you and your twin brother, U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, also a retired astronaut, to dedicate your lives to serving your country?

Our parents were police officers. My grandfather on my mother’s side was a New York City fireboat captain. I had another uncle that was a firefighter in New Jersey. Our grandfathers served during World War II. My dad was in the Army during the Vietnam War, although he never went to Vietnam. My uncle was an FBI agent. So public service was kind of a family thing. Had I not picked up Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff I probably would have ended up doing something similar to what they did.

Glenn Gamboa is a freelance writer in Brooklyn.