Astronaut Mark Vande Hei peers at the Earth below from inside the International Space Station on … [+]
ASSOCIATED PRESS
On Wednesday, March 30, you can watch live as NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei wraps up a record-breaking 355-day mission aboard the International Space Station.
The landing will mark the end of what became the longest spaceflight by an American on March 15 when Vande Hei surpassed the previously held record of 340 consecutive days in space. He will return to Earth in a Soyuz MS-19 capsule, touching down in Kazakhstan in the early morning of March 30.
NASA announced they will be providing live coverage of Vande Hei’s landing. Viewers can watch the farewells, undocking, and landing along at home via the NASA event live stream and on the NASA app.
The livestream event schedule according to NASA is as follows:
- 11:30 pm EST, Tuesday, March 29 – Farewells
- 2:45 am EST, Wednesday, March 30 – Undocking
- 6:15 am EST, Wednesday, March 30 – Deorbit
- 7:28 am EST, Wednesday, March 30 – Landing
Roscosmos cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov will be ending their missions aboard the ISS and returning to Earth in the Soyuz capsule alongside Vande Hei.
Earlier this month, NASA assured the public that Vande Hei would be returning to Earth from the ISS on the Russian spacecraft as planned. The agency’s assurances were given amid concerns about US-Russian space relations following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The previous spaceflight duration record holder is former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, who completed the “One-Year Mission” on March 1, 2016. The mission, which went for 11 months, was a research project set up to study the effects of long-term spaceflight with Kelly and Roscosmos cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko as the participants.
The longest spaceflight in history was completed by former Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos. From 1994 to 1995 Polyakov spent 14 months aboard the space station Mir.
Vande Hei took off for the ISS on April 5, 2021. By the end of what will be a 355-day mission, Vande Hei will have completed 5,680 orbits of Earth and covered more than 150 million miles.
