Frank Rubio didn’t got down to break a record, but today aboard the International Space Station (ISS), he’ll just do that.
Rubio, a NASA astronaut and member of the space station’s 69th expedition crew, will develop into the American who has flown the longest space mission in U.S. history. At 1:39 p.m. EDT (1739 GMT) on Monday (Sept. 11), he’ll surpass the 355 days, 3 hours and 45 minutes logged by NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei in 2022.
Further, since he is just not scheduled to land until Sept. 27, Rubio will soon develop into the primary American, and one in every of only six people, to spend a yr in space, ultimately returning to Earth after 371 days in Earth orbit.
“It’s an honor to have the ability to be considered one in every of the folks that’s going to have spent a yr in space,” said Rubio in a recent interview with ABC’s Good Morning America. “And needless to say this record will soon be broken again.”
“I believe this [duration] is basically significant, within the sense that it teaches us that the human body can endure, it may adapt and — as we prepare to keep off to the moon after which from there, onward onto hopefully Mars and further on into the solar system — I believe it’s really essential that we learn just how the human body learns to adapt, and the way we are able to optimize that process in order that we are able to improve our performance as we explore further and further out from Earth,” he said.
Rubio launched on this flight, his first, on Sept. 21, 2022. Riding aboard Russia’s Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft, Rubio and his crewmates — Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin — were then slated to return to Earth after about six months on the space station.
Then on Dec. 14, as Prokopyev and Petelin were preparing for a spacewalk, Russian flight controllers received telemetry showing that the outside coolant system for the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft was losing pressure. Cameras on the station confirmed that the Soyuz was leaking its ammonia coolant into space.
Deemed not protected to return a crew to Earth, a “rescue” Soyuz, MS-23, was launched on Feb. 23 and Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio’s stay on the station was prolonged one other six months. Moderately than serve on just the Expedition 67 and 68 crews, the three also became a part of Expedition 69. (Their departure on Soyuz MS-23 will mark the start of Expedition 70).
“Frank thought when he flew to space, he could be here for six months. And partway through his mission, he came upon that it was prolonged to a yr,” said NASA astronaut Warren “Woody” Hoburg, during an on-orbit press conference preceding his return to Earth after six months on Sept. 3. “His leadership up here has been incredible. He’s been amazing to work with and Frank is just making an enormous sacrifice being away from his family for thus long.”
Like Rubio, Vande Hei also didn’t know he could be spending nearly a yr in space when he launched to the space station. Moderately than an incapacitated spacecraft, though, Vande Hei’s prolonged stay was to accommodate a Russian movie crew’s visit to the station and to guard against a crew rotation schedule that might leave the complex without an American on board.
Vande Hei’s 355 days surpassed Scott Kelly’s mission that spanned 2015 to 2016. Kelly’s 340 days was planned from the beginning as a method of gathering physiological data in regards to the effects of an extended duration spaceflight on the human body.
Rubio’s Soyuz MS-23 crewmates, Prokopyev and Petelin, are the fifth and sixth Russians to spend a yr in space and the primary two to achieve this on the International Space Station. Soviet-era cosmonauts Musa Manarov, Vladimir Titov and Valery Polyakov each logged greater than one year on the previous space station Mir. (Polyakov, who died in 2022, still holds the record for the longest single space mission at 437 days.)
A former flight surgeon, Rubio said he expects his return home to be a challenge.
“After about six months in space, most individuals have somewhat little bit of a tough time with their vestibular system and their equilibrium. So after 12 months that is usually a challenge,” he said. “It would take a few days before I’m somewhat normal, but the truth is it may take anywhere from two to 6 months of really intense rehab to get back to my normal, and that is just a part of the method.”