On May 30, there were more people in orbit around our planet than ever before. 17 astronauts, cosmonauts and taikonauts from five different countries were conducting space studies on the International Space Station and the Chinese space station Tiangong. The previous record was broken a few years ago when the privately funded Inspiration4 team launched into orbit.
Aboard the International Space Station (ISS) with Expedition 69 members, cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitry Petelin and Andrey Fedyaev from Russia, NASA astronauts Frank Rubio, Stephen Bowen and Warren Hoburg from the USA, the United Arab Emirates is the first to do a long-term mission in space astronaut (he even spent the month of Ramadan in space) Sultan Al Neyadi.
Also on board were members of the special Axiom-2 mission, Commander Peggy Whitson, private astronaut John Shoffner, and Saudi Arabian astronauts Ali AlQarni and Rayyanah Barnawi. Barnawi made history as the first Arab woman in space and the 600th person to orbit the Earth. The Axiom-2 crew recently returned to Earth.
China’s space station Tiangong was aboard the three taikonauts of Shenzhou 15, Fei Junlong, Deng Qingming, and Zhang Lu, accompanied by Shenzhou 16’s taikonauts Jing Haipeng, Zhu Yangzhu, and the first civilian taikonaut Gui Haichao. Shenzhou 15 will return to Earth in a few days.
The record may change according to the understanding of space.
However, depending on the definition you use for space, this may not be considered the largest number of people in space. If you use the internationally accepted Kármán line, that is, 100 kilometers above the surface; There were 19 people in space on December 11, 2021, when Blue Origin’s NS-19 mission reached 107 kilometers in 10 minutes of space travel.
Using the US definition of 80 kilometers in space, this record was broken last week with Virgin Galactic Unity 25’s suborbital flight on May 25. SpaceShipTwo spaceplane VSS Unity took six people to 87.2 kilometers. This allowed a total of 20 people (Virgin + Expedition 69 + Shenzhou 15 + Axiom-2) in space…
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