NASA astronaut candidate Francisco Rubio waves as he is introduced as one of 12 new astronaut candidates, Wednesday, June 7, 2017, during an event at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. (U.S. Army)
The reality facing American astronaut and Army Lt. Col. Frank Rubio dawned on him slowly, he said, as a tangle of unexpected hiccups unfolded hundreds of miles above Earth on the International Space Station.
First, a Soyuz capsule — the Russian spacecraft that had brought Rubio to the ISS last September — sprung a coolant leak in mid-December, jeopardizing his ride home. The discovery of a similar leak in another spacecraft attached to the ISS slowed plans to send Rubio and his crewmates a replacement in February.
Rubio and his two Russian crewmates, Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, were never in grave danger aboard the ISS as NASA and Russian space agency Roscosmos scrambled to secure their journey home.
But the incident disrupted the timeline of their six-month-long mission. Rubio, who launched into space with Prokopyev and Petelin on his first spaceflight in September 2022, would spend twice the amount of time he’d planned to in orbit.
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