NASA astronaut Frank Rubio says spending an additional six months in space made him higher on the job than before.
Rubio, who unexpectedly spent greater than a yr on the International Space Station (ISS), did periodic self-assessments to be more efficient as his time in space accrued, he told Space.com during a livestreamed press conference Friday (Oct. 13) from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
“I used to be capable of … see what things things I had done well, what things I had done poorly and take a look at to enhance on those for the following half of the expedition,” Rubio said. He emphasized that he still wasn’t perfect but was “incredibly lucky within the incontrovertible fact that you are capable of take those lessons learned and immediately implement them. Quite a lot of people need to wait five, six or 10 years [for a second mission] until they can implement those things that they simply learned.”
Rubio unintentionally broke a U.S. record for spaceflight, spending 371 continuous days in space after his Russian Soyuz spacecraft sprung a leak in December 2022 while docked to the ISS. After a sophisticated series of spaceship schedulings, Rubio and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin safely arrived home on Sept. 27 in a substitute craft, six months past their originally planned arrival date.
Related: After 1 yr in space, what’s next for an astronaut? ‘Peace and quiet’ on Earth, Frank Rubio says (video)
The leak that stalled Rubio’s Soyuz was the primary of three coolant problems for Russian ISS hardware within the last yr. Following that incident, a Progress cargo spacecraft sprang a leak in February 2023, also during Rubio’s mission; the Russian federal space agency Roscosmos has said each Rubio’s Soyuz and the Progress were likely damaged by micrometeoroid strikes.
A brand new coolant leak arose this week with Russia’s Nauka module as well. A 13-year-old backup radiator on the two-year-old science hub ejected coolant into space on Monday (Oct. 9) for reasons which might be still unclear. Nauka stays working well and the leak has stopped, however the event delayed two U.S. spacewalks as NASA took precautions, preferring to attend until Russia continues its investigation.
Rubio said his military background helped in adjusting to the prolonged stay, and he had perspective from other “family and friends which have been under rather more duress and rather more difficult conditions” while serving the country.
“It was somewhat difficult to feel sorry for myself in that situation, but that is to not say we did not have a few hard days,” he said. But as Rubio and his family absorbed the news, help got here through. “The community around us was just, gosh — that they had a lot, prayers and support. It was really almost overwhelming, how much love and support we have received. So from that perspective, it made it incredibly easy.”
“Unfortunately, I haven’t got a complete lot of detail on probably the most recent, third incident,” Rubio said of the Nauka leak. “In the event that they do occur to be related,” he added, “possibly there is a change within the environment for them (the leaks) to occur this relatively close together.”
Mission controllers in each Houston and Moscow, he emphasized, “are doing an incredible amount of study to going get to the basis cause. And like they did for us, they are going to provide you with a terrific plan to ensure that crew safety is paramount to everybody on the team. That just overrides all the things.”
While much of Rubio’s time in space was spent coping with the unexpected, there was still time for somewhat fun. Rubio provided an update on a missing (and ziplocked) dwarf tomato he unintentionally lost on-station shortly after the harvest, when it unexpectedly floated away.
Despite “18 to twenty hours of my very own time in search of that tomato” — a figure he could have been exaggerating for humor’s sake — it never showed up.
“The fact of the issue, you realize — the humidity up there’s like 17%. It’s probably desiccated to the purpose where you could not tell what it was, and any individual just threw away the bag,” Rubio lamented, laughing. “Hopefully any individual will find it someday: somewhat, shriveled thing.”