The NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore are in spite of everything on their as far back as Earth after 9 months on the Global Area Station. However they weren’t the primary to stick hastily in house (a lot) longer than deliberate.Listed below are every other notable examples:On Would possibly 18, 1991, Sergei Krikalev spark off into house for a keep on the Mir, the Soviet Union’s house station on the time. Whilst Mr. Krikalev was once up there, the Soviet Union disbanded, and he was once requested to increase his keep by way of nearly 5 months, partly a results of the rustic’s disintegration and cash issues in Moscow. (The episode grew to become Mr. Krikalev into slightly of a media famous person, incomes him the nickname “the ultimate Soviet citizen”). He stayed in house for 313 days, returning on March 25, 1992.In 2003, 3 astronauts — Ken Bowersox and Donald Pettit, each American, and Nikolai Budarin, a Russian — needed to extend their keep at the moderately new Global Area Station by way of about 3 months. Whilst they have been in house, a NASA house travel disintegrated because it re-entered Earth’s setting and killed all seven astronauts on board in an incident that turned into referred to as the Columbia crisis. As a security measure, NASA suspended its house travel flights. Ultimately, after greater than 5 months in house, the 3 astronauts landed again on Earth in a Russian tablet in Would possibly 2003. (Dr. Pettit, now 69, returned to the gap station aboard a Russian automobile ultimate fall for some other keep, and is scheduled to go back to Earth in April.)In 2022, the American astronaut Frank Rubio headed to the Global Area Station for a six-month keep. As an alternative, he stayed simply over a 12 months — 371 days — in what turned into the longest unmarried spaceflight for a U.S. astronaut. In December 2022, after coolant leaked from the Russian spacecraft that was once for use to carry Mr. Rubio house, his go back commute was once behind schedule whilst a special spacecraft was once despatched to select up him and two Russian astronauts. Like other folks serving within the army, “You more or less develop up with the state of mind of, ‘It’s a must to be able for the sudden,’” he stated in an interview ultimate August, “as a result of that’s a quite common factor.”
