Two Russian cosmonauts and an American female NASA astronaut landed in Kazakhstan on Monday after a record stay aboard the International Space Station (ISS), according to a television broadcast by the Russian agency Roscosmos.
The ship’s capsule Soyuz MS-25 with veteran Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, his comrade Nikolai Chub and American astronaut Tracy Dyson landed at 4:59 p.m. local time (7:59 a.m. in Quebec) in the steppes of this immense Central Asian country.
Cosmonauts Kononenko and Chub spent 374 days in space, the longest mission aboard the ISS, while Dyson took off in late March 2024.
The absolute record for the longest single stay in space is still held by Russian Valery Polyakov, who spent 438 days aboard the former Mir space station in 1994-1995.
Oleg Kononenko, 60, has set another record, having now accumulated 1,111 days in orbit after his fifth trip into space.
As part of sanctions against Russia in retaliation for its invasion of Ukraine, Western countries have ended their partnership with the Russian space agency Roscosmos, but Soyuz spacecraft remain one of the only means of transporting crews to the ISS.
The Russian space sector has suffered for years from chronic underfunding, corruption scandals and failures such as the loss of the lunar probe Luna-25 in August 2023.
These problems have not, however, dampened Russia’s ambitions, which ultimately want to build its own orbital station to replace the aging ISS and resume missions to the Moon.
Roscosmos also plans to look to countries in Southeast Asia, Africa and the Middle East to find new partnerships, breaking away from the United States.
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