On Sunday, the Crew Dragon ship of Elon Musk, located on the International Space Station (ISS), will break the American record for the longest flight of a crewed spacecraft held for almost half a century, NASA said.
The Apollo spacecraft held the US record with a crew of Gerald Carr, Edward Gibson, and William Pogue, which in 1973-1974 stayed on the Skylab space station for 84 days.
The NASA website notes that this record will be broken on Sunday. For comparison, the world record for the duration of a crewed spacecraft’s flight belongs to the Russian Soyuz TMA-9, which in 2006-2007, together with the Russian Mikhail Tyurin and the American Michael Lopez-Alegria, spent 215 days on the ISS.
Crew Dragon in November 2020 delivered to the ISS a crew of Americans Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker, as well as Japanese Soichi Noguchi. Their return to Earth is expected in late April-early May, so that the Crew Dragon flight duration will be 160-170 days.
Currently, Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, and American astronaut Kathleen Rubins, brought to the station by Soyuz MS-17, are also working on the ISS. Their landing is scheduled for April 17.
