American astronaut (click here) Mark Vande Hei, currently aboard in the International Space Station high above the Earth, may have his planned return to the planet in jeopardy due to escalating tensions with Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.
Vande Hei, who has now been in space for nearly a year after his mission was extended last September, said then that he was to return from the over 350 day stay in space around March 2022...
Russia is never in a hurry to do anything.
Krikalev on the International Space Station in 2005
Kirkalev (click here) went to work on the Mir Space Station on May 18, 1991 and didn't come hom
until March 1992. He went to work as a Soviet, and returned as a Russian — because, on December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved and Krikalev became a cosmonaut without a country.
Krikalev, fellow cosmonaut Anatoly Artsebarsky, and British astronaut Helen Sharman climbed into their Soyuz capsule at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on May 18, 1991. At the time, Kazakhstan was still one of the “Soviet Socialist Republics.”...
...Krikalev’s days in the spring of 1991 were filled with exercise and conducting multiple EVAs to service the Mir space station. He had trained for, and planned on, staying aboard Mir for five months before returning to the Soviet Union and his native Leningrad. He would wind up staying in space for almost a year, returning to the new Russian Federation and a city returned to its name before the Bolshevik revolution, St. Petersburg....
...Though Gorbachev retained power, the country was economically and politically weakened and by December, the republics began to splinter into the Commonwealth of Independent States, an effort spearheaded by Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia, and signed by nine other former republics.
Then, on Christmas Day 1991, Gorbachev resigned as president of the Soviet Union, which effectively dissolved it altogether....
...Kirkaliv was less concerned with the political implications of this, Lewis says, than its implications for him personally. “He was more concerned about prolonging his mission and the impact that would have on his physical health,” she says. Bone and muscle mass deteriorate with time in space, and “he had trained for five months; he had not trained for a year-long mission.”...
...These people were still on the job, very dedicated to it,” Lewis says. Whatever successor state would arise in place of the former Soviet Union, “they recognized the need for the national prestige, to maintain the space station.”...
...Finally relieved from duty, Krikalev returned to Earth in March 1992 a severely weakened man needing assistance to walk on the snow-covered soil of the Republic of Kazakhstan after 311 days aboard the Mir space station....
