Frank Rubio has spent over 355 days in low Earth orbit, breaking the record for the longest space mission by a U.S. astronaut.
Astronaut Frank Rubio poses for a photo in front of the cupola window of the ISS. Image: NASA.
Rubio has been living and working on the International Space Station (ISS) since September 2022, surpassing the previous record held by astronaut Mark Vande Hei on September 12th at 00:40 (Hanoi time), according to a NASA spokesperson. Additionally, Rubio is on track to reach another significant milestone in a few weeks. It is expected that the Russian Soyuz spacecraft will return him and his two colleagues, Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, to Earth on September 27th. This means that Rubio will have spent at least 371 days in orbit upon completing his mission. He will become the first American to spend over a year in a microgravity environment.
Initially, Rubio’s mission was not designed to break records. When he and his Russian colleagues departed for the ISS on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft on September 21, 2022, they believed they would undertake a six-month mission. However, the spacecraft carrying Rubio and the two Russian cosmonauts experienced a coolant leak in December of the same year. Russian space agency Roscosmos later confirmed that the spacecraft was not safe for returning astronauts to Earth.
Instead, the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft returned to Earth on March 28, 2023, without carrying astronauts. Roscosmos launched a replacement spacecraft, MS-23, which docked with the ISS on February 25, 2023. Rubio’s return date was postponed to September 2023 as Russia prepared for the next Soyuz spacecraft, scheduled to carry a NASA astronaut and two Roscosmos cosmonauts to the ISS on September 15.
If everything goes according to plan, Rubio will depart on September 27. His 371 days on the ISS will not be a world record for the longest space mission. That record 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 due to the conflict in Ukraine, NASA has repeatedly affirmed its cooperative relationship with Roscosmos in maintaining operations on the ISS and conducting scientific research on the station. In the event of issues with Russian Soyuz or SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, the intergovernmental agreement ensures that both American and Russian astronauts can still access the space station.