A Nasa astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts returned to Earth on Wednesday after being stuck in space for just over a year. American Frank Rubio set a record for the longest US spaceflight – a result of the extended stay.
The trio landed in a remote area of Kazakhstan, descending in a Soyuz capsule that was rushed up as a replacement after their original ride was hit by space junk and lost all its coolant while docked to the International Space Station.
What should have been a 180-day mission turned into a 371-day stay. Rubio spent more than two weeks longer in space than Mark Vande Hei, who held Nasa’s previous endurance record for a single spaceflight. Russia holds the world record of 437 days, set in the mid-1990s.
There wasn’t another Soyuz to launch a fresh crew until this month. Their replacements finally arrived nearly two weeks ago.
It was the first spaceflight for Rubio and Petelin, 40, an engineer. Prokopyev, 48, an engineer and pilot, has now pulled two long station stints. They logged 157m miles (253m km) since launching from Kazakhstan last September and circled the world nearly 6,000 times.
They’ll have to organize a waste and recycling collection up there. I wonder which company could do it. Sounds like a full time job by now. Although what they could retrieve must be worth a few bob and accidents like this must have a large cost!
In November 2018, the cargo ship Cygnus delivered a gift from NASA to the astronauts working on the International Space Station (ISS) - the scientific laboratory located in low Earth orbit. It was a recycling system called “Refabricator” that transforms plastic waste into 3D printing materials in a gravity-free environment.
3D printing and additive manufacturing technologies have many applications in the conquest of space, be it upstream of a space mission (making satellite parts, for example), aboard a spaceship or even on a planet (constructing habitation spaces on Mars).
Long-duration human space exploration missions to the Moon and Mars need solutions for managing trash and other waste generated by the crew. NASA’s Advanced Exploration Systems logistics reduction project is developing technologies to mitigate issues with waste. Four astronauts can generate 2,500 kilograms of waste during a yearlong mission. Trash takes up space and presents a safety risk to the crew from biological and physical hazards. Current waste disposal methods on the International Space Station rely on astronauts manually processing trash by placing it into bags then loading it onto a designated vehicle for short term storage, which depending on the craft, returns the trash to Earth or burns up in the atmosphere. This disposal method will not be available for missions beyond low-Earth orbit.
Recycling trash is one method for mitigating these issues, as well as potentially transforming waste into a source of supplies for the mission. Astronauts can process small pieces of trash in a high-temperature reactor, which breaks the waste down into water, oxygen, and other gases which the crew can use or vent as needed. Besides the gases, the remainder of the waste is greatly reduced in size, and no longer biologically active.
