MOSCOW – The American astronaut of Salvadoran origin Frank Rubio returned today aboard the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft to Earth after 371 days in space, which made him the NASA astronaut with the most continuous days in space and in the first Hispanic to achieve this feat.
Rubio, 47, landed in the Russian descent capsule from the International Space Station (ISS) at 11:17 am, local time, in the Kazakh steppe, southeast of the town of Zhezkazgan, along with cosmonauts Sergei Prokopiev and Dmitri Petelin.
After the second one left the Soyuz, the NASA astronaut, with his thumbs up and smiling at all times, said that “it’s good to be home”, that is, back on Earth.
A milestone for NASA
On the 19th, in his last communication from the ISS, the NASA astronaut declared that today marks a “unique milestone in American space flights.”
Rubio, the first astronaut of Salvadoran origin to have traveled to space and the twelfth Hispanic in total to do so, returned to Earth after having been on the ISS with four different crews and with two records to his credit.
He is the NASA astronaut with the most continuous days in space after surpassing Mark Vande Hei on September 11, with 355 consecutive days on the ISS.
Furthermore, Rubio, born in Los Angeles but whose mother, Myrna Argueta, still lives in El Salvador, is the first Hispanic to achieve both this mark and the number of days accumulated in space, and that having only completed his first mission aboard the space platform.
A Hispanic proud of his community
“It is a great honor to represent Hispanics. The message for youth is to continue with work, study, that anything is possible. It is important that our community move forward and continue improving our country. I think that Latinos are going to be a big part of America in the future,” she stressed in his last statements from space on the 19th.
The Hispanic astronaut acknowledged that, if he had known before beginning his training for this mission that he would be on the ISS for more than a year, he “probably would have rejected” NASA’s offer, mainly because he has missed important family events during the year he spent. happened in space.
Rubio thanked his wife, Deborah, and his four teenage children for their support, as their “resilience and strength” have helped him overcome this entire mission, for which he had prepared for five years.
In total, the mission of the astronaut, who considers Miami his home and was selected by NASA in 2017, has covered 253.3 million kilometers and 5,963 times around the Earth.
Rubio achieved his records not because his mission was to last more than a year, but because he was stranded for more than six months on the ISS.
A record thanks or despite a breakdown
The American astronaut of Hispanic origin was launched on September 21, 2022 aboard the Soyuz MS-22 and was initially due to return in March 2023.
But in mid-December last year, the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, detected a breakdown in the cooling system in the outer hull of the ship due to the impact of a micrometeroid.
This made the return of Rubio, Prokopiev and Petelin aboard this Russian ship too risky, which returned on March 28 without a crew to the Russian Baikonur Cosmodrome.
Roscosmos sent an unmanned replacement spacecraft, the Soyuz MS-23, to the ISS on February 24 to pick up the NASA astronaut and the two cosmonauts and finally return them to Earth today.
Rubio admitted last week that it was hard when the decision “became real” that he would remain on the international orbital platform for a year.
In this sense, he also commented that the “psychological factor” was more exhausting than he thought on the ISS, but it helped him to have an excellent team around him, keep busy and at the same time have time to relax and, above all, stay in contact with your loved ones at home.
It will take Rubio between two to six months on Earth to fully recover from his mission, according to himself.
Once he arrives at his Californian home from Houston, where he will be taken by a NASA plane from Kazakhstan, he just wants to “hug” his wife and children for a while.
And “enjoy the trees and the silence” in his garden, since on the ISS there is a constant noise of machines, he confessed.
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