NASA astronaut Frank Rubio says spending an extra six months in space made him better at the job than before.
Rubio, who unexpectedly spent more than a year on the International Space Station (ISS), did periodic self-assessments to be more efficient as his time in space accrued, he told Space.com during a livestreamed press conference Friday (Oct. 13) from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
“I was able to … see what things things I had done well, what things I had done poorly and try to improve on those for the next half of the expedition,” Rubio said. He emphasized that he still wasn’t perfect but was “incredibly lucky in the fact that you’re able to take those lessons learned and immediately implement them. A lot of people have to wait five, six or 10 years [for a second mission] until they are able to implement those things that they just learned.”Rubio accidentally broke a U.S. record for spaceflight, spending 371 continuous days in space after his Russian Soyuz spacecraft sprung a leak in December 2022 while docked to the ISS. After a complicated series of spaceship schedulings, Rubio and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin safely arrived home on Sept. 27 in a replacement craft, six months past their originally planned arrival date.
The leak that stalled Rubio’s Soyuz was the first of three coolant problems for Russian ISS hardware in the last year. Following that incident, a Progress cargo spacecraft sprang a leak in February 2023, also during Rubio’s mission; the Russian federal space agency Roscosmos has said both Rubio’s Soyuz and the Progress were likely damaged by micrometeoroid strikes.
A new coolant leak arose this week with Russia’s Nauka module as well. A 13-year-old backup radiator on the two-year-old science hub ejected coolant into space on Monday (Oct. 9) for reasons that are still unclear. Nauka remains…
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