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.

FMI: www.nasa.gov, www.roscosmos.ru (in Russian; English website www.roskosmos.com under construction)