Russian Cosmonauts Break Record for Longest Stay on ISS as New Crew Arrives Amid NASA Changes

The return module landed in the Kazakh steppe on Monday at 13:59 CEST, about three and a half hours after it was disconnected from the ISS and after an apparently uneventful descent, according to information from the groups AP a Reuters.

In the final stage, the cabin descended to the Earth with the help of a parachute at a speed of about 7.2 meters per second, with the ignition of the small engines reducing the impact in the last seconds.

Kononenko and Chub arrived at the ISS last September 15, and their mission became the longest in the ISS program, the Russian agency noted TASS. Dyson arrived in March and spent half a year on the International Space Station.

He is now still on the ISS nine astronauts including Americans Butch Wilmore and Sunita (Suni) Williams, who have been at the orbital center since June and were originally supposed to spend only eight days there.

However, due to technical problems with the Boeing Starliner spacecraft, which was sent back to Earth without them, they may extend their stay until February, and they are supposed to return with a SpaceX ship.

Williams has now become station commander after Kononenko, as cosmonautics expert Michal Václavík of the Czech Space Agency and CTU in Prague wrote on the X network.

In this context, it should be remembered that the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) recently removed two female astronauts from the upcoming Crew-9 mission to the ISS to make room for a crew of Starliner space, or to return in February.

Four astronauts were scheduled to fly to the ISS on September 24 in the Crew Dragon spacecraft of SpaceX, a competitor of Boeing. First, it will last on Thursday, September 26 at the earliest, the portal said Space.comand secondly, the Crew-9 mission essentially counts only NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian Roskosmos cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov.

Americans Zena Cardman and Stephanie Wilson will remain on Earth, but “could be reassigned to a future mission,” according to a NASA statement.

The 59-year-old Kononenko holds several space records, including the longest total time spent in space. The record for the cumulative time of space flights, which he achieved during his five different missions, is 1110 days, 14 hours, 57 minutes and seven seconds for Kononenko, Václavík recalled.

The record holder for the longest continuous stay in space is Russian cosmonaut Valery Polyakov. He spent 437 days on the Russian orbital station Mir between 1994 and 1995. In second place is the Russian Sergei Avdeyev, who spent 379 days on Mir at the end of the previous millennium.

And speaking of records, a Russian Soyuz spacecraft recently arrived at the ISS with two Russians and one American, the station’s oldest long-term crew member in orbit, Donald Pettit (69).

The International Space Station is one of the last places where Russia and the United States are working together despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has left relations between the two powers at their worst in decades.