Mariah Cain, Staff Writer
After being in space for a little over a year, a NASA astronaut, Frank Rubio, and two Russian cosmonauts, Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, returned to Earth. The trip initially was supposed to be a six-month mission turned into 371 days after their original Soyuz capsule’s radiator was pierced by suspected space junk.
Due to the prolonged mission, Rubio set the record for the longest U.S. space flight. In a news conference last week, Rubio said the following when asked if he would have committed to the mission if he knew it would be a year, “I probably would’ve declined. It would have hurt, but I would have declined, and that’s only because of family things that were going on this past year. And had I known I would have had to miss those very important events, I just would have had to say, ‘Thank you, but no thank you.’”
