Oleg Kononenko floats by way of the Future laboratory of the Worldwide House Station in 2008. Credit score: NASA.
As Moscow’s clocks tick previous midnight to welcome Wednesday, June 5, the world heralds a brand new hero: a person who already is a nationwide icon in Russia and his homeland Turkmenistan. Six many years after Yuri Gagarin first conquered house, Oleg Kononenko — a quiet, unassuming mechanical engineer, avid reader, and volleyball participant — turns into the primary particular person to log 1,000 days off planet Earth.
“I typically return in time and analyze the steps and actions I took,” he as soon as stated in an interview. “And I understand that the vector was all the time pointed in direction of house.”
Unfold over 16 years and 5 Worldwide House Station (ISS) expeditions, Kononenko’s feat equates to 33 months, or 1.6 % of his life — he was born in June 1964. He’s orbited Earth 16,000 instances and flown 420 million miles (675 million kilometers) — sufficient “house mileage” for a whole bunch of spherical journeys to the Moon, a voyage to Mars, or perhaps a one-way ticket to Jupiter.
Kononenko’s “kilo-versary” locations humanity in ample stead to discover deep house. Since April 2008, he’s shared the ISS with 55 people from 13 nations, together with the primary astronauts from South Korea, Denmark, Türkiye, and Belarus. He flew twice with Gennady Padalka, the Russian cosmonaut who first held the world report for the longest space-time with 878 days — which Kononenko broke February 4 of this yr.
A bit background on Oleg Kononenko
Kononenko had a extremely eventful profession as a mechanical engineer with an aviation specialty and as a cosmonaut since 1996. He had a full residence life as effectively, a husband to Tatyana Mikhailovna Kononenko and a father to 2 youngsters. His household understood his dedication and fervour when he commanded 4 Soyuz missions, spent three Christmases and New Years in orbit, and celebrated 4 off-planet birthdays. They proceed supporting him as he completes a monumental milestone not just for himself however for humanity.
Humanity’s journey in house started with a number of cosmonauts. After Gagarin’s 108-minute, single-orbit flight in April 1961, Gherman Titov spent a day in house in August 1961, Andriyan Nikolayev logged almost 4 days (94 hours) in August 1962 and Valery Bykovsky’s 5 days in June 1963 stays the longest solo mission in historical past.
Three years later the USA took the lead in house exploration. In August 1965, Gemini 5’s Gordon Cooper and Charles “Pete” Conrad flew a week-long endurance mission to check whether or not a lunar mission was doable — which they wryly dubbed “8 Days or Bust.”
The almost eight-day report fell to Gemini 7’s crewmembers Frank Borman and Jim Lovell in December 1965. Their 14-day mission — dirty, cramped, and decidedly unglamorous — proved that people might survive a round-trip flight to the Moon. Afterward, Lovell flew three extra instances, accruing 29 days in house by 1970; he was Earth’s most skilled astronaut from 1966 to 1973.
In the meantime, in June 1970 cosmonauts Nikolayev and Vitali Sevastyanov smashed Gemini 7’s report with a 17-day orbital keep on Soyuz 9. A yr later, Georgi Dobrovolski, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev spent 23 days aboard the Salyut 1 (the world’s first house station) however tragically died when a malfunction led to untimely depressurization of their Soyuz 11 capsule throughout re-entry.
The competitors heats up
In June 1973, Conrad eclipsed Lovell’s report aboard NASA’s Skylab — America’s first house station — amassing a 49-day profession complete all through his 4 missions. In September of that very same yr, Alan Bean superior the result in 69 days. And Gerald “Jerry” Carr, Edward Gibson, and William Pogue completed Skylab’s final mission, Skylab 4, in February 1974 after 84 days.
The benefit then returned — and remained — with Russian endurance missions. Six flights to their Salyut 6 house station handed 96 days in March 1978 (Soyuz 26), 139 days in November 1978 (Soyuz 29), 175 days in August 1979 (Soyuz 32), and 184 days by October 1980 (Soyuz 35).
Salyut 7 facilitated new data of 211 days in December 1982 with its first crew arriving on the Soyuz T5, and of 237 days when Leonid Kizim, Vladimir Soloviev, and Olef Atkov ended their house mission on Oct. 2, 1984.A number of years later, Vladimir Titov and Musa Manarov spent a steady yr from December 1987 to December 1988 (12 months, 22 hours) off Earth on the Soviet house station Mir.
However humanity’s longest-ever mission was volunteered for and flown by a doctor, Valeri Polyakov. Initially deliberate for 18 months from November 1993 to Might 1995, a mixture of launch delays, technical woes, and schedule conflicts truncated it to 16 months, then 14 months. It will definitely launched in January 1994, the place Polyakov flew 437 days, 17 hours and 58 minutes, circled Earth 6,927 instances, and traveled 183 million miles (295 million kilometers).
Regardless of a decline in his temper early within the flight, Polyakov’s blues stabilized and he exhibited no cognitive or efficiency shortfalls. He returned residence in March 1995 and walked unaided from the Soyuz capsule to show that people might at some point work on Mars after a multi-month weightless transit to the purple planet.
Feminine astronauts simply wish to have enjoyable
Right this moment, girls characterize 12 % of all astronauts, however in fact, this quantity was almost non-existent simply 60 years in the past. Russia’s Valentina Tereshkova, a manufacturing facility employee picked by Soviet propagandists to cynically one-up the USA, was the primary feminine house traveler. Nonetheless, regardless of her headline-breaking mission of almost three days and finishing 48 orbits in June 1963, twenty years elapsed earlier than one other girl adopted in her footsteps.
The second feminine astronaut was Svetlana Savitskaya, whose flights to Salyut 7 in August 1982 and July 1984 made her the primary feminine to fly twice, stroll in house, and carry out an extravehicular exercise, and pushed her space-time tally to 19 days. Then again, America had a bigger corps of ladies astronauts and rapidly utilized its numerical benefit. By November 1993, Shannon Lucid amassed 34 space-days, longer than any girl on the time.
Dovetailed into the latter half of Polyakov’s mission, the primary long-term feminine cosmonaut arrived aboard Mir. In October 1994, Yelena Kondakova boarded Mir and when she returned residence 169 days later with Polyakov, they set two empirical data: Polyakov for the longest spaceflight by a person and Kondakova for the longest spaceflight by a girl.
However whereas Polyakov’s report nonetheless stands, Kondakova’s fell in September 1996 when Lucid wrapped up a 188-day Mir keep and a profession spanning 223 days. Her achievement lasted greater than a decade. In June 2007, Sunita Williams broke Lucid’s single-flight report on a 194-day ISS mission. And in November 2007, Peggy Whitson eclipsed Lucid’s complete, returning residence in April 2008 after 376 days — the primary girl to accrue a yr in house.
Accumulating time in house
Again in August 1980, after Leonid Popov and Valeri Ryumin spent 184 days in house, Ryumin took it a step additional and prolonged the report for many logged space-time by a male house traveler with 371 days over 4 missions (two short-term and two long-term).
Aboard the Mir house station in July 1986, Kizim turned the primary particular person to surpass a full yr (374 days) all through his profession. And Yuri Romanenko’s 326-day mission on Soyuz TM-2 allowed him to accrue 400 days in November 1987; whiling away the quiet hours on Mir by enjoying guitar and singing salubrious love songs. And in April 1991, throughout one other Mir keep, Manarov handed 500 days in house (a complete of 541 days) for the primary time.
In September 2017, Whitson accomplished one other ISS mission, lasting 9½ months. Throughout that epic voyage, she handed 400 cumulative days in house in December 2016, then 500 in March 2017 and 600 in June 2017. She additionally commanded a privately financed AxiomSpace mission in Might 2023, pushing her private tally to 675 days (22 months), with over 10,500 orbits and 283 million miles (455 million kilometers) flown.
Regardless of having twice as a lot space-time as every other girl, one in all Whitson’s data fell in February 2020 when Christina Koch completed a 328-day ISS keep, the longest-ever spaceflight by a feminine. Koch flew 5,200 orbits and 139 million miles (223 million kilometers). “Information are supposed to be damaged,” Whitson wrote in a congratulatory observe to Koch. “It’s an indication of progress.”
Russia’s Sergei Avdeyev first accrued 700 days in July 1997, then Sergei Krikalev exceeded 800 days in October 2005. Now, Oleg Kononenko has handed 900 days this previous February on the twenty sixth. He’ll attain 1,000 days on Wednesday, June fifth. By the point he returns residence on 24 September, he’ll amass 1,111 days — over 17,300 orbits and 466 million miles (750 million kilometers) — throughout his stellar profession.
To discover the photo voltaic system and sometime lay human footprints on the Moon and Mars calls for extra than simply longevity. Data from Kononenko’s profession will furnish new insights into protecting astronauts wholesome, mitigating radiation hazards, and understanding how people operate beneath circumstances of maximum isolation and profound stress.
And Kononenko is actually a person with a watch on what comes subsequent. “I’m an individual who doesn’t analyze the previous,” he stated. “I stay within the current. And just a little bit sooner or later.”
