Record-breaking NASA astronaut Frank Rubio has finally returned to Earth, feeling the pull of the planet’s gravity for the first time in more than a year.
Record-breaking NASA astronaut Frank Rubio has finally returned to Earth, feeling the pull of the planet’s gravity for the first time in more than a year.
Rubio and his two Russian colleagues cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin parachuted to a landing in Kazakhstan aboard the Russian Soyuz MS-23 capsule at 5:17 p.m. local time (7:17 a.m. ET) on Wednesday.
The crew’s arrival marked the end of a long — and unexpected — journey for Rubio, who had been slated to spend only six months aboard the International Space Station. He instead logged a total of 371 days in space following the discovery of a coolant leak coming from his original ride while docked to the orbiting outpost.
Rubio’s stay set a new record for the longest a US astronaut has ever spent in microgravity. He also became the first American to log an entire calendar year in orbit.
His record-breaking mission also marked other notable firsts for Rubio: This was his first journey to space after being selected for the NASA astronaut corps in 2017, and at the outset of the mission, he became the first astronaut of Salvadoran origin to travel to low-Earth orbit.
In a recent interview with CNN, Rubio said that if he had known his stay on the space station would be twice as long as originally planned, he “probably would have declined” the assignment before he began training.
“And that’s only because of family things that were going on this past year,” he said. “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, who has four children, is now expected to begin the journey home from the Soyuz spacecraft’s landing site near the town of Dzhezkazgan in Kazakhstan. He will first fly to Karaganda, which lies about 330 miles (530 kilometers) northeast of Dzhezkazgan, before boarding a flight to Houston. Source; CNN
