NASA astronaut Frank Rubio is home after a year in space – Ars Technica

NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and two Russian crewmates parachuted to a landing on the remote steppe of Kazakhstan on Wednesday, capping a 371-day mission at the International Space Station, the longest single spaceflight ever undertaken by an American.

It was also the third-longest mission off the planet in the history of human spaceflight, eclipsed only by two Russian cosmonauts who lived on the Mir space station in the 1990s.

Rubio, a US Army lieutenant colonel who grew up in El Salvador and Miami, was supposed to spend about six months in low-Earth orbit on the International Space Station. He launched on September 21, 2022, on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft with commander Sergey Prokopyev and flight engineer Dmitri Petelin.

Three months into Rubio’s mission, the Soyuz spacecraft he rode into orbit suddenly started leaking coolant. Russian engineers determined the leak was most likely caused by an impact from a tiny fragment of rock from deep space, called a micrometeoroid, which ruptured a coolant line and sent a spray of snowflake-like particles into space as the Soyuz remained docked at the station.

Russian space officials decided it was too risky to have the crippled Soyuz spacecraft return to Earth as planned with its three-man crew, so they launched a replacement Soyuz to the station in February without anyone on board. That meant the crew originally assigned to fly on that spacecraft got bumped until the next Soyuz would be ready to launch in September.

Rubio and his Russian colleagues would have to wait for their replacements to arrive, extending their stay in orbit from six months to more than a year. NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara, Russian commander Oleg Kononenko, and cosmonaut Nikolai Chub launched to the space station on September 15, setting the stage for Rubio, Prokopyev, and Petelin to finally come home.

On the final leg of their voyage, the crewmen floated into their Soyuz MS-23 return vehicle overnight, closed hatches, and undocked from the space station a few hours later. The Soyuz spacecraft backed away from the orbiting research complex, fired thrusters for a braking burn, then descended into the atmosphere, pulling about 4.5 Gs as it streaked toward the landing site in Kazakhstan.

After deploying a large parachute, the capsule touched down on the barren plains of Kazakhstan at 7:17 am EDT (11:17 UTC) Wednesday. A Russian recovery team converged on the capsule with helicopters and all-terrain vehicles to help the crewmen out of the spacecraft.

“It’s good to be home,” Rubio told a member of the recovery team after landing.

Through a translator, Petelin said he and his crewmates were “waiting impatiently to get back” to Earth. “It was my first landing. I didn’t know what to expect. Today, I felt it to the fullest.”

Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft was the only means of transporting astronauts to and from the space station for nine years, from the retirement of NASA’s space shuttle until SpaceX’s Crew Dragon began human flights in 2020. NASA astronauts are still flying on Soyuz through a no-funds-exchanged barter agreement between NASA and Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, that also allows Russian cosmonauts to fly to the space station on US crew vehicles.

Hugs in Houston

Rubio’s mission spanned 5,936 orbits of the Earth and covered more than 157 million miles (253 million kilometers). He was expected to board a NASA jet in Kazakhstan for the flight back to Houston, where he will reunite with his family.

“Hugging my wife and kids is going to be paramount, and I’ll probably focus on that for the first couple of days,” Rubio said. He added that he’s looking forward to the “peace and quiet” of his backyard. “Up here, we kind of have the constant hum of machinery that’s keeping us alive.”

Like Petelin, this was Rubio’s first flight to space. Rubio was an Army physician and a UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter pilot before NASA selected him to join the agency’s astronaut corps in 2017. His medical training gave him an idea of what to expect as he re-adapts to Earth’s gravity after floating around in orbit for more than a year.

Astronauts on the space station follow a strict exercise regimen to counteract the loss of bone and muscle mass due to microgravity. Eyesight degrades in some astronauts flying in space, and research has shown spaceflight can diminish the effectiveness of the immune system. Many astronauts feel sick for a couple of days after reaching space and again after returning to Earth.

Rubio said last week he expects it to take two to six months to fully re-adapt to Earth’s gravity.

Scientists will closely track how Rubio responds to Earth’s gravity over the coming days and weeks. More than 600 people have flown in space, but only seven humans have logged a year off the planet on a single mission, a list that nearly doubled with the yearlong expedition that ended Wednesday.

Here’s a list of the longest-ever human spaceflight missions to date:

• Valery Polyakov spent 437.7 days in orbit in 1994 and 1995

• Sergei Avdeyev spent 379.6 days in orbit in 1998 and 1999

• Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitri Petelin, and Frank Rubio spent 370.9 days in orbit in 2022 and 2023

• Vladimir Titov and Musa Manarov spent 365.9 days in orbit in 1987 and 1988

A human mission to Mars, NASA’s long-term goal, will likely take several years. Researchers want to know more about how the human body changes after such a long time in space and how the body re-adapts to gravity as it would when landing on Mars or returning to Earth.

A difficult situation

Rubio’s yearlong mission, though unplanned, follows several NASA astronaut expeditions on the International Space Station that extended beyond the usual six-month flight duration on the orbiting lab.

Astronaut Scott Kelly logged 340 days in orbit in 2015 and 2016. At that time, Kelly’s mission was, by far, the longest spaceflight ever by an American. Kelly reported body soreness and skin irritation after returning to Earth. After Kelly, several more astronauts flew missions lasting nearly a year on the International Space Station. Mark Vande Hei held the record for an American with a 355-day expedition; that mission ended last year.

“A lot of people have seen the endurance and the sacrifice that it takes to go this long, and I’m just lucky to have gone a couple of extra weeks,” Rubio said.

Reflecting on his mission earlier this month, Rubio said if NASA had asked him upfront, before starting his training, to fly in space for a year, he probably would have declined.

“It would have hurt, but I would have declined, and that’s only because of family things that were going on this past year,” Rubio said. “Had I 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.'”

Those missed events included milestones for his four children: A daughter completed her freshman year at the US Naval Academy, and a son entered West Point.

“Having the International Space Station going for 23 years requires a lot of individual and family sacrifices, but sometimes that’s what you have to do,” Rubio said.

Once he was committed to the mission, Rubio answered the call when his mission went into orbital overtime. NASA astronaut Steve Bowen, one of the 28 crewmates who visited or lived on the station during Rubio’s tenure on board, said last month the mission extension put Rubio in a “difficult situation.”

“That would be a huge mental challenge to overcome, not just for me but also for my family,” Bowen said. “I hope I would respond as well as Frank has. He’s been absolutely amazing to watch.”