Cosmonaut Commanding ISS Breaks Record for Spaceflight
A Russian Cosmonaut quietly broke the all-time time-in-space
record, previously held by a countryman, last week. Sergei Krikalev
Tuesday surpassed the 748-day record held by Sergei Avdeyev.
Then, Thursday, Krikalev and US Astronaut John Phillips made
their first spacewalk since arriving on the station four months
ago. For Phillips, it was his first extra-vehicular activity (EVA),
but for the veteran Krikalev, it was number eight. The EVA was cut
short and didn't complete one task because the earlier tasks had
run overtime.
As of today, Monday, August 22nd, Krikalev has spent 755 days in
space.
That's an incredible two years and twenty-five days; or put
another way, Krikalev has spent 18,120 hours in space. And
counting: he's still up there on the International Space Station,
commander of the eleventh ISS crew. His replacement, Bill McArthur,
is expected in October; Valery Tokarev will be the Russian member
of Crew 12, and the third seat on Expedition 12's Soyuz will be
filled by space tourist Greg Olsen.
A hoped-for third ISS crewmember, ESA Astronaut Thomas Reiter,
was pencilled in to NASA's shuttle schedule. But the renewed
grounding of the embattled shuttles, after the failure of NASA's
very public $1.4 billion repairs, means that the new crew will
comprise only two astronauts. (Olsen will return to Earth in the
Soyuz with Krikalev and Phillips. They will arrive via the more
dependable and reliable Soyuz capsule. Equipment that they had
hoped to have delivered by shuttle Atlantis with Reiter may be
delivered by an unmanned Progress cargo ship.
The two-crewmember limit
results from emergency planning. With the Shuttle unavailable, a
Soyuz craft can only evacuate two crew members (the third seat is
filled by the Soyuz pilot coming up), making an emergency
evacuation of three or more personnel impractical. But with a crew
of only two, the station is in caretaker mode. The crew can sustain
itself, but can't resume construction of the station, now
hopelessly behind schedule.
Krikalev's long career tells the story of international
cooperation -- and competition -- in space. He made two flights to
the Space Station Mir under the flag of the USSR. Indeed, he was
aboard Mir, as a member of the crew of Soyuz TM-12, when the Soviet
Union collapsed in 1991. He has since flown twice on the Shuttle
(STS-60 and STS-88), and was in fact the first Russian cosmonaut to
do so. He was a member of the crew that started building the ISS,
and was a member of the first crew to live aboard.
This is his first mission in command. On all previous flights
he's been rated as Flight Engineer (on Russian spacecraft) or
Mission Specialist (on US spacecraft).
Krikalev's record may be safe for some time. Avdeyev, by
definition the man closest to him in spaceflight time, retired in
2003. He's about two years older than Krikalev, who will celebrate
his 47th birthday in space on Saturday, August 27th.
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