In March 2022, NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei touched down with two Russian cosmonauts in Kazakhstan. He had set an American record for longest continuous spaceflight: 355 days—almost a year! In space, he worked aboard the International Space Station (ISS), maintaining the spacecraft and conducting scientific experiments. NASA was also observing him.
With the United States setting its sights on longer human trips to the Moon and future human flights to Mars, astronauts will be required to spend extended periods in space. (A flight to Mars will take humans about nine months, and the full round-trip will require about 21 months, according to NASA.) To get ready, NASA is sending astronauts into space for longer periods to study how they do. It’s the same strategy the space agency used in the 1960s to first
