Astronaut Frank Rubio has been in space for more than 355 days, which is longer than any other US astronaut.
Rubio, who has been in space since September 2022, broke the previous record set by astronaut Mark Vande Hei at 1:40 p. mAccording to a spokesperson from the space agency, it will happen on Monday at ET.
Additionally, Rubio is close to achieving another important goal in a few weeks. A Russian spaceship called Soyuz will not bring back him and his two friends, Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, to Earth until September 27th.
This means that Rubio will have been in space for at least 371 days when he finishes his mission. He is about to become the first American to spend over a whole year in microgravity.
But Rubio didn’t plan to set records.
When Rubio went to the space station on a Russian spaceship on September 21, 2022, he and his friends thought they were doing a mission for six months. But the spacecraft that took Rubio and his two Russian colleagues had a problem with a coolant leak in December. Officials at Roscosmos, which is Russia’s space agency, later concluded that the spacecraft was not safe for the crew to return home in.
Instead, the Soyuz MS-22 capsule came back to Earth on March 28 with no people inside. Roscosmos sent a new spacecraft called MS-23 to the space station on February 25. Rubio will come back in September because Russia is getting ready for the next Soyuz spaceship that will have two cosmonauts and one NASA astronaut. The launch might happen on Friday.
In simpler words: To celebrate Rubio’s accomplishment, he recorded a talk with Vande Hei on September 5th. NASA will be showing the video on Tuesday at 11 a. m”ET broadcasts on its own media channel. ”
“Rubio’s trip to space represents the true nature of exploring,” said NASA administrator Bill Nelson in a statement shared on social media on Monday.
The statement says that as he sets new records for being the astronaut who has stayed in space the longest, he is also making it easier for future astronauts. “Frank, your dedication is amazing. ”
If everything happens as expected and Rubio leaves on September 27, his time spent in space for 371 days will not be the longest ever recorded. Valeri Polyakov, a Russian astronaut, holds the record for spending the most consecutive days in space. He stayed on the Mir space station for 437 days from January 1994 to March 1995.
Vande Hei broke a new record in 2022 for spending the most consecutive days in space. NASA and Roscosmos agreed to let him stay longer because Russia sent a film crew of two to the space station. Vande Hei’s return got delayed because there were more people going to the space lab. However, he already knew that his mission might be longer before he got there.
Before Vande Hei, American astronaut Scott Kelly had the record for the longest time spent in space with his mission lasting 340 days. That time in space was a planned long-term mission organized by NASA to learn about how being in space for a while affects people’s bodies.
A cosmonaut from Russia has the record for spending the most total days in space. Gennadi Padalka became the best cosmonaut in 2015 by spending a total of 879 days in space during five different missions.
Peggy Whitson holds the record for spending the most days in space among all US astronauts. She has spent a total of 675 days orbiting the Earth. Whitson, who stopped working for NASA as an astronaut in 2018, has contributed again to the record as recently as 2023. Now, she works as a private astronaut for Axiom Space. Axiom Space has organized two trips to the space station for regular people to go on. During these trips, customers get to experience what it’s like to be in space and they get to go with an experienced professional astronaut.
Rubio went to the space station on a Russian spaceship because NASA and Roscosmos made an agreement to exchange crews in the summer of 2022.
NASA picked Rubio to go on a Soyuz spaceship, and Roscosmos chose Anna Kikina to go on a SpaceX spaceship that flew in October 2022 and came back on March 11.
Even though the United States and Russia have problems with each other, NASA still thinks it is important to work with Roscosmos to keep the space station running and to continue doing valuable scientific research.
When the agreement to share rides was announced, NASA said that it was important to make this deal with Russia to keep the space station safe. If either the Russian Soyuz spacecraft or the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule have problems and cannot be used, a deal has been made to exchange seats so that both American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts can still go to the space station.
Roscosmos didn’t have to use a SpaceX capsule instead of the damaged Soyuz MS-22 crew ship because they had the MS-23 spacecraft ready to launch. The coolant leak on the MS-22 vehicle didn’t necessarily mean that there would be problems with other Soyuz vehicles, according to officials.
Joel Montalbano, who manages NASA’s International Space Station program, said in July that Roscosmos (Russian space agency) looked into the problem and discovered that an “outside force” probably caused the leak. This suggests that a piece of space junk likely collided with the spacecraft.
“A group of researchers from NASA has examined it separately from the Russian team, and we have also found no evidence, based on the information provided by our Russian colleagues, that it is anything other than some kind of outside force or debris or something similar,” Montalbano explained.
While being in space, Rubio has witnessed many groups of astronauts coming and going using SpaceX vehicles. Besides the Axiom-2 crew who visited in May, the SpaceX Crew-6 astronauts have already arrived and left after Rubio came. And the Crew-7 team, consisting of astronauts from different space agencies including NASA, Roscosmos, JAXA, and ESA, reached the space station in August.