Astronaut to set mark for longest spaceflight
NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei is extending his stay on the International Space Station.
Vande Hei and Russian cosmonaut Pyotr Dubrov had planned to fly home this fall, but NASA announced Tuesday that their trip will be extended to March 2022.
It’s being lengthened so the Russian space agency Roscosmos can bring spaceflight participants — not professionally trained astronauts or cosmonauts — to the space station in October.
Typically, cosmonauts and astronauts fly to the space station for six-month missions. When a new crew arrives, those who’ve been in microgravity for six months fly home. The spaceflight participants won’t stay for six months, so they will need Vande Hei and Dubrov’s seats on the Soyuz spacecraft to get home more quickly.
When Vande Hei returns to Earth, he will hold the record for the longest single spaceflight by an American. Retired NASA astronaut Scott Kelly currently holds that record at 340 days.
“I’ll be staying on @Space_Station until March 2022 for a ~353-day mission, a possibility that I was prepared for from the beginning,” Vande Hei said on Twitter. “The opportunity to experience this with wonderful crewmates while contributing to science and future exploration is exciting!”
The Roscosmos mission will fly a Russian film director and actress to the space station.
The extended trip has another potential benefit for NASA. It could help the agency better understand how the human body adapts to long periods in microgravity. This information will be important as NASA prepares to send people to the moon and, one day, Mars.
And while the body behaves differently in space, there are similarities. Pinched nerves, for instance, don’t go away because an astronaut is floating. Vande Hei recently had a pinched nerve in his neck that caused NASA to reschedule a spacewalk. He wasn’t sure what caused the injury.
“I’m pretty confident it’s not from sleeping funny,” he said.
Vande Hei and his colleague on the space station, NASA astronaut Megan McArthur, spoke with the Houston Chronicle on Friday on topics ranging from life in microgravity to seeing hurricanes from above.
McArthur shared photos of Hurricane Larry that she took from the International Space Station. As someone who lost her home to Hurricane Ike in 2008, she wanted to help people understand the seriousness of these storms and why it’s important to take the appropriate precautions.
She said seeing the Earth from above provides a different vantage. The atmosphere looks thin and fragile compared to the size of
Earth and the vast blackness of space.
“That’s what is keeping us safe on our own spaceship Earth,” she said. “So it’s very important to do what we can to protect it.”
McArthur had been to space before, but this is her first long-duration mission on the space station. She provided advice for living on the station and explained why it’s important to have a piece of gray tape nearby when brushing her hair.
On Earth, strands of hair naturally fall out in small amounts. But on the space station (where she said her hair doesn’t tangle more than it does on Earth), clumps of hair come out as she washes and combs it. McArthur uses the piece of tape to collect it.
“So we don’t get big clumps of Megan’s hair floating around the space station,” she said.
Vande Hei similarly discussed how difficult it can be adjusting to life in microgravity. Simple acts, such as leaving something in one spot so it can be retrieved later, require an extra step.
“If you’re not really careful about making sure they’re attached to something in that particular spot, when you turn your back on it and come back … it won’t be there,” he said. “The habits you formed on the ground over a lifetime just don’t apply anymore, so you’ve got to put effort into forming habits.”