How Christina Koch Could Become a Spaceflight Legend
When Christina Koch returned to Earth earlier this month, feeling the full force of the planet’s gravity for the first time in a long time, it was the middle of the night in the United States. Her capsule parachuted into the Kazakh desert, and by morning, her name was all over the news. After spending 328 days living on the International Space Station, Koch had set a new record for American women in space.
The volume of attention that morning, however warranted, was somewhat unusual for a modern astronaut. Missions to the space station are routine now, and the last astronaut to have his full name flashing across headlines, as if in marquee lights, was Scott Kelly, who nearly four years earlier broke the American record for long-duration spaceflight.
All of this is to say that, in this era of space travel, most astronauts don’t become household. The public today is more likely to be familiar with nonhuman explorers, like the Mars rover and the spacecraft, which photographed Pluto.
