NASA astronaut Scott Kelly returned from space nearly 7 years ago and landed in a small Soyuz spacecraft on a barren, frozen steppe in Kazakhstan. NASA praised this flight, describing it as the agency’s first 1-year space mission. PBS was among the television channels broadcasting full-length coverage of Kelly’s assignment, and the multi-episode series was titled “1 Year in Space.” But the dirty little secret is that due to the inevitability of schedules in spaceflight, Kelly and his Russian colleague Mikhail Kornienko spent 340 days in space instead of a full year of 365.25 days.
After Kelly’s mission, NASA health officials said they hoped to bring more 1-year missions on the agenda as they sought to better understand the biological effects of long-duration spaceflights on humans and how the agency could reduce bone loss and other harmful effects. These missions have not yet materialized. However, since Kelly’s pioneering flight, NASA astronauts have spent very close to that time aboard the International Space Station.
After Peggy Whitson spent 289 days in space from late 2016 to 2017, her planned 6-month mission has been extended due to Russia’s realignment of launch programs. Then, from 2019 to 2020, Christina Koch spent nearly 329 days in space, performing 4 spacewalks, breaking Whitson’s record for the longest single spaceflight ever performed by a woman. Koch knew a long mission was possible before launching with a Soyuz vehicle in 2019, but the timing decision to reserve a Soyuz seat for the UAE’s first astronaut, Hazza al-Mansoori, wasn’t made until she lived on the space station.
Mark Vande Hei was planning a 6-month mission when it launched to the space station in April 2021. But again, the Russians changed the schedule to use a Soyuz spacecraft to shoot a movie on the station. So instead of launching a backup crew with the Soyuz MS-19, film director Klim Shipenko and actress Yulia Peresild flew to the station in this spacecraft, along with cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov. With this extended mission, Vande Hei spent 355 days in space and currently holds the record for the longest sustained spaceflight ever performed by an American astronaut. However, he still has not spent a full year in space.
It looks like NASA will finally make it happen. Dina Contella, a senior official from NASA’s International Space Station Program on Tuesday, said during a press briefing that the crew of the damaged Soyuz spacecraft will now likely return to Earth in late September.
Cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin and NASA’s Frank Rubio were launched on September 21, 2022 aboard the Soyuz MS-22. The mission was supposed to be completed this spring, but in December, the vehicle’s external cooling loop was damaged after a micrometeorite struck.
As a result, this 3-man crew will return to Earth in a new Soyuz vehicle MS-23, which will launch next month and fly to the station autonomously. This will delay the launch of the backup crew, as the next Soyuz crewed spacecraft will not be ready for flight until autumn. A source says that currently NASA’s internal program expects this Soyuz MS-23 vehicle to return to Earth after September 21, 2023.
All of this indicates that Rubio will spend more than a year in space and will be the first NASA astronaut to do so. For Rubio, who joined NASA in 2017 and became the space agency’s first Salvadoran astronaut, it’s a beautiful and unexpected feat.
But even that won’t reach the record for the longest spaceflight of a human. Valery Polyakov spent 438 days aboard the Mir space station in the 1990s. It seems unlikely that this record will be broken for a long time. However, if the return of the Soyuz MS-23 is delayed a bit, Rubio and his 2 crewmates could be second on this list. Second place belongs to cosmonaut Sergey Avdeev, who spent 379 days on Mir in the late 1990s.
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