Sixty, 62, 64 years old… At what age can you retire as an astronaut? Don’t ask Don Pettit, since NASA’s oldest active astronaut will be blasting off into space again for a six-month mission in September. His age? 69! A “little young” when you remember that John Glenn, for example, was 77 when he took part in the Discovery STS-95 mission in 1998.
Accompanied by Russian cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner, the American will board the Soyuz MS-26 shuttle on September 11, with the aim of spending six months in the international space station (ISS).
In 2003, he remained on the ISS after the Columbia crash.
This will be Pettit’s 4th trip to space, and he has already accumulated 370 days in orbit, or more than a year. His first experience dates from 2003 with Expedition 6, a mission marked by a tragic event. He and the rest of the crew took off aboard the space shuttle Endeavor in November 2002 for a short-term mission.
But on February 1, while in orbit, the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated, killing seven astronauts. As a result, NASA delayed the return to Earth of the members of Expedition 6, and instead of returning with Discovery in February, Pettit and his colleagues took advantage of the Russian Soyuz TMA-1 spacecraft in May of the same year.
For Pettit, there will then be two other flights with the short-term mission of the space shuttle STS-126 in 2008 then Expedition 30/31 in 2012. An astronaut since 1983, he has not flown for twelve years, but his experience is unrivaled. We remember that he accumulated more than 13 hours of spacewalks, and we remember that he participated in the establishment of a device which allows, inside the ISS, to transform urine into drinking water.
A real handyman!
A scientist but also a handyman at heart, he already knows what he’s going to do during these six months since he’s going to test a photographer’s accessory that he invented! “ I made it from a pile of junk I found on the station, and its purpose is to counteract orbital motion and take longer exposures of Earth ” he explains.
« It’s actually a simple piece of equipment that amateur astronomers use: two pieces of wood with a hinge and a bolt in between. You mount the hinge line so that it points toward the North Star. Then you install a camera on one of the platforms. (…) It was really the first time we got high resolution images of cities at night. »
Among Pettit’s other achievements, there is the patent for a “zero-G” coffee cup, the observation of a solar eclipse from space and the historic transit of Venus in front of the sun in 2012.
