ISTANBUL (AA) - After his ride back to Earth sprang a leak, astronaut Frank Rubio on Monday became an accidental record breaker for spending the most continuous days on the International Space Station.
“Astronaut Frank Rubio has just set a new U.S. spaceflight record, eclipsing the previous record of 355 consecutive days aboard the space station,” the agency said on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, sharing a photo of Rubio on the ISS.
“This is now the single longest mission for any of our NASA astronauts. He is set to return to Earth on Sept. 27, when he will have spent 371 days in space,” the agency added.
The previous record was set in March 2022 by astronaut Mark Vande Hei.
Rubio launched aboard Russia’s Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft on Sept. 21, 2022 along with cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin.
The crew were slated to return to Earth after about six months on the space station but due to a major coolant leak, their space capsule had to return to Earth without its crew this March.
A new spacecraft has been sent to fetch the crew home, but not before Rubio broke the US record for the longest stay in space.
Researchers are interested in the effects of long-term space flight on the human body, including how microgravity affects bone mass.
But the world record for the longest single stay in space belongs to Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov, who spent 437 days straight in Earth orbit. Polyakov died last September at age 80.
Rubio was selected by NASA to join the 2017 Astronaut Candidate Class, according to NASA, and he reported for duty in August 2017.
In 1998, the Florida native graduated from the US Military Academy and in 2010 he earned a doctorate of medicine from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. Rubio also served as a Blackhawk helicopter pilot and flew more than 1,100 hours, including during deployments to Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq.