American astronaut sets record for longest stay in space

Frank Rubio has been in low Earth orbit for more than 355 days, breaking the record for the longest space mission for a US astronaut.

Astronaut Frank Rubio poses for a photo in front of the dome window of the ISS. Photo: NASA — Astronaut Frank Rubio poses for a photo in front of the dome window of the ISS. Photo: *NASA*

Rubio will be living and working on the International Space Station (ISS) from September 2022, surpassing the previous record set by astronaut Mark Vande Hei at 12:40 a.m. on September 12 ( Hanoi time), according to a NASA spokesperson. In addition, Rubio is on track to reach another important milestone in the next few weeks. As expected, a Russian Soyuz spacecraft will bring him and two colleagues Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin back to Earth on September 27. That means Rubio will have spent at least 371 days in orbit when he completes the mission. He will become the first American to spend more than a year in a microgravity environment.

Rubio’s mission wasn’t originally designed to break records. When Rubio set off for the ISS on a Russian Soyuz capsule on September 21, 2022, he and his colleagues assumed they would be on a six-month mission. But the spacecraft carrying Rubio and two Russian colleagues suffered a coolant leak in December of that year. Officials at the Russian space agency Roscosmos later determined that the spacecraft was unsafe to return the astronauts to Earth.

Instead, the Soyuz MS-22 returned to Earth without its crew on March 28, 2023. Roscosmos launched a replacement spacecraft, the MS-23, which docked with the ISS on February 25, 2023. Rubio's return date was pushed back to September 2023 as Russia prepares for the next Soyuz, which is scheduled to carry a NASA astronaut and two Roscosmos cosmonauts to the ISS on September 15.

If all goes according to plan, Rubio will launch on September 27. His 371 days on the ISS will not be the world record for the longest space mission. That title belongs to the late Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov, who spent 437 days in orbit at Russia’s Mir space station from January 1994 to March 1995.

Despite political tensions between Russia and the United States over the Ukraine conflict, NASA has repeatedly affirmed its cooperation with Roscosmos in continuing to maintain operations at the ISS and conducting scientific research on the station. If Russia's Soyuz or SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft were to fail and become inoperable, the swap agreement would ensure that both American and Russian astronauts would still have access to the space station.

An Khang (According to CNN )

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