Rocket Man's 1,000 Days in Space

Untethered spacewalkPhoto byNASA

Ruscosmos Astronaught Oleg Kononenko, 60, has become the first human to accumulate 1,000 hours of spaceflight over a 16-year career visiting and living aboard the International Space Station.

The milestone comes on his fifth flight to space and during his third stint as the commander of the ISS. In February, he passed the previous record of 878 days, held by fellow Ruscosmos pioneer Gennady Paldaka.

Arriving aboard the Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft last September alongside cosmonaut Nikolai Chub and NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara, he won’t touch down again for another four months. At that point, he will become one of the world’s most valuable human biology specimens.

Ruscosmos Astronaught Oleg Kononenko during a 2012 spacewalkPhoto byNASA.

Given that both the Artemis Accords and the Chinese/Rest of World alternative—the International Lunar Research Station initiative—aim to send men and women on longer and longer voyages to space.

These initiatives include a semi-permanent habitation of the moon and, eventually, a journey to Mars.

Astrophysiology needs to understand the long-term exposure to the rigors of outer space and its effects on the human body.

Photo byNASA

To that end, Kononenko, who has routinely spent hundreds of consecutive days and even years in low-Earth orbit, will provide data points days, months and years after his return. - Emmanuel Urquieta, the former chief medical officer of the NASA-funded Translational Research Institute for Space Health.

Urquieta participated in research concerning several astronauts who have traveled to low Earth orbit for varying lengths of time, including the first all-civilian mission, Inspiration4, in 2021. He pointed to five main areas of research that he and his colleagues hone in on when it comes to better understanding long-duration spaceflight:

• Communication across a large distance from Earth
• Radiation exposure
• Isolation and confinement
• Altered gravity fields (i.e. being in a zero-g environment)
• Living in a hostile and closed environment

Onboard ISSPhoto byNASA

Urquieta explains that medicine in space is an emerging field. How the space environment affects eye health, bone loss, and blood flow isn’t well known, nor are the effects of prolonged radiation exposure and prolonged space motion sickness.

Expedition 70 NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara, left, Roscosmos cosmonaut and mission commander Oleg Kononenko, and Nikolai Chub, right, at a press conference in advance of their September 2023 mission to the ISS aboard Soyuz 24 – NASA/Bill Ingalls.

I’m sure that there will be a lot of research when he comes back to Earth, and I’m sure that there will be a very long follow-up with him, you know, days, months, and years after, to try really to understand these unique data points.

Ready for takeoffPhoto byNASA

I’m sure that there will be a lot of research coming up in the future when he comes back to Earth, and I’m sure that there will be a very long follow-up with him, you know, days, months, and years after, to try really to understand these unique data points. When you extrapolate the data that we have from six-month missions to 900 days, there’s still a huge gap of data that we need to fulfil, that we need to get so that we can safely say that, ‘ok, we have enough data that we can confidently say that we’re able to send someone to Mars and make sure that that person is going to come back as healthy as they left Earth. - Urquieta

Though the sixty-year-old Kononenko was born in the Soviet Union and is thus Russian today, he is from Turkmenistan. He is profoundly proud and connected to his homeland.

Crew portrait- Expedition 70Photo byNASA

Across his long career, Kononenko has completed over 18 hours of spacewalks, during which he performed experiments, repairs, and fortifications on the exterior of the ISS Zvezda Service Module.

In December of 2015, Kononenko completed a rare night-time re-entry. Due to distinguished collaboration with his colleagues across the Atlantic, he has received the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal and the NASA Space Flight Medal.