The astronaut incommunicado in space

A power outage at NASA headquarters in Houston, USA, caused it. The space agency lost contact with its astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS). Among them is Frank Rubio, who has been stranded for 10 months due to failures in the spacecraft that was to return him to Earth. This is the story of the astronaut stranded in space.

The incident occurred on Tuesday, July 25 at 8 a.m. local time. It forced NASA to request support from the Russian space agency Roscosmos in order to contact its envoys in space. “We were able to talk to the crew through Russian assets about 20 minutes after the failure.” Joel Montalbano, NASA’s ISS program manager, said this.

Astronaut incommunicado in space, Frank Rubio.
The astronaut incommunicado in space, Frank Rubio.

Record of permanence

Montalbano noted that the outage resulted from planned upgrades to the ground power system. “We lost power, telemetry, command and voice communication to the International Space Station,” he said. The communications outage is not the first setback faced by astronaut Frank Rubio, 47.

Rubio, of Salvadoran parents, arrived at the ISS in September 2022 aboard the Russian Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft. The plan was for him to return on the same vehicle in March 2023. But it developed a fault in the cooling system. The same was detected in the rescue spacecraft they sent. It will have to wait until September this year.

This will set a new record. He will be the American who has spent the longest time in space during a single mission. Frank Rubio is a helicopter pilot in the U.S. Army and holds a doctor of medicine degree. He has experience as a professional skydiver, having made more than 650 free-fall jumps. That’s the profile of the astronaut incommunicado in space.

His stay will give rise to a record, the American with the longest time on a single mission.
His sojourn will give rise to a record, the American with the longest time on a single mission.

ISS

The International Space Station is the largest single structure humans have ever sent into space. It orbits the Earth at an altitude of 250 miles (402 kilometers), since 1998. Its trajectory covers more than 90% of the planet’s population. It travels at an average speed of 7.66 km per second. Information on its current location can be obtained from its official website: https://spotthestation.nasa.gov/.

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