ISLAMABAD: Nasa astronaut Frank Rubio achieved a remarkable feat by setting a new record for the longest stay in microgravity by a US astronaut, making him the first American to spend an entire calendar year in orbit.
After experiencing a delay in their Soyuz spacecraft’s return due to damage, Rubio, along with Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, safely landed in rural Kazakhstan on September 27.
In a recent interview, Rubio expressed that had he known his stay on the space station would be twice as long as originally planned, he would likely have declined the assignment before commencing his training.
Rubio mentioned that this decision would have been primarily due to family commitments and important events that occurred during the extended mission. He stated, “And if I had known that I would have had to miss those very important events, I just would have had to say, ‘thank you, but no thank you.’”
Rubio, the first Salvadoran astronaut to travel to low-Earth orbit, returned home to Houston after his mission, which involved traveling 157.4 million miles and completing 5,963 orbits of the Earth on a Russian spacecraft. A ride-sharing agreement between the US and the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, made this journey possible.
Furthermore, during this mission, Rubio shattered the previous record set by NASA’s Mark Vande Hei in 2022 for the longest space stay by a US astronaut, which stood at 355 days. The late Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov still holds the overall record for the longest continuous stay in space. He spent 437 nonstop days in orbit aboard the Mir space station between January 1994 and March 1995.
