Astronaut Frank Rubio sets new U.S. record for longest trip in space
CTV
Astronaut Frank Rubio has now been in low-Earth orbit for more than 355 days, breaking the record for the longest space mission by a U.S. astronaut.
Astronaut Frank Rubio has now been in low-Earth orbit for more than 355 days, breaking the record for the longest space mission by a U.S. astronaut.
Rubio — who has been on the International Space Station since September 2022 — bested the previous record, held by retired NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei, at 1:40 p.m. ET on Monday, according to a spokesperson for the space agency.
What’s more, Rubio is on track to reach another significant milestone in a few weeks’ time. A Russian Soyuz capsule is not expected to return him and his two fellow crewmates — cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin — to Earth before September 27.
That means Rubio will have spent at least 371 days in orbit once he completes his mission. He is on the cusp of becoming the first American to spend more than one calendar year in microgravity.
Yet Rubio’s mission was not originally designed to break records.
When Rubio left for the space station aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule on September 21, 2022, he and his crewmates believed they were carrying out a six-month mission. But the spacecraft that carried Rubio and his two Russian colleagues sprang a coolant leak in December. Officials at Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, later deemed the spacecraft unsafe to carry the crew back home.
Instead, the Soyuz MS-22 capsule returned to Earth without a crew on March 28. And Roscosmos launched a replacement spacecraft, MS-23, that docked with the space station on February 25. Rubio’s return date was pushed back to September as Russia prepared the next Soyuz vehicle, which will launch with a new crew of two cosmonauts and one NASA astronaut as early as Friday.
