On Wednesday, a 59-year-old Russian cosmonaut became the first person to spend 1,000 days in space, according to the Russian space agency Roscosmos.
This milestone was reached by Oleg Kononenko on Tuesday after he had been on five trips to the International Space Station since 2008.
His current trip to the ISS started on September 15, 2023 when he launched alongside Nasa astronaut Loral O’Hara and his countryman Nikolai Chub.
Kononenko grabbed away cumulative space time record from Gennady Padalka in February 2024 after going beyond total of 878 days, 11 hours, 29 minutes and forty-eight seconds established by Padalka back in two thousand fifteen.
If his mission ends as scheduled on September twenty-three released from orbit and landed in Baikonur Cosmodrome Kazakhstan where it was originally due to land but due too unforeseen technical problems with its atmospheric reentry system will be have had complete one thousand one hundred and ten days spent in orbit.
“It’s like you’ve done something for the first time that is really important. It’s like you’ve turned another page in your journey towards an unknown end”, said Mr Kononenko. “It fills you with confidence and pride about what you have done.”
He also told TASS that his American colleagues were among those who congratulated him first at ISS.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in Feb. 2022, there are only a few areas where American-Russian collaboration is still significant if not substantial; this includes the international space station. In December, Roscosmos announced that their cross-flight program with Nasa carrying astronauts would continue until twenty-twenty-five (Roscosmos).
