Next time you tell harrowing stories about how you were cabined, cribbed, confined for weeks on end during the Covid lockdown, recall these three names: Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitri Petelin and Frank Rubio. You’ll either feel better, or worse, upon hearing their fate – that, thankfully, ended earlier this week happily. The two Russian cosmonauts and American astronaut (by the way, India should continue referring to its spacepersons as gaganauts when we do send them up there) were up in the International Space Station for a 180-day mission. Then, disaster struck. Well, actually, what Russian space engineers suspect to be space junk/debris struck the capsule in which the three were supposed to come back down to Earth, damaging its cooling system badly. So, instead of risking the Big Fry-Up on their way down, the three spacefarers were told to stay put in the ISS a bit longer – an additional 191 days.
No, none of the three, after landing in a replacement vehicle in what should be a blessed spot for them in a remote spot in Kazakhstan, found the extended ‘spacation’ pleasant. And, while the world record for the longest time a human has ‘hung out’ extraterrestrially is still a staggering 437 days, held by Russia’s Valery ‘In Exile?’ Polyakov, the fact none of this trio was planning to stay up so long makes their sojourn downright unearthly.
