3 Astronauts’ Long Space Odyssey Finally to End

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. —  They missed out on Christmas and New Year’s celebrations, Easter services, their wives and children’s birthday parties and, now, Memorial Day picnics.

After six months aboard the International Space Station, an exceptionally long time by NASA standards, astronauts Daniel Bursch and Carl Walz and cosmonaut Yuri Onufrienko are more than ready to return to their home planet and savor Earth’s summer.

Space shuttle Endeavour is due to lift off Thursday to pick them up and drop off their replacements.

In the 41 years that astronauts have been rocketing into space, only one other American has spent so much time aloft in a single shot.

“Most of the challenges are more mental and psychological,” observes Bursch, the father of four.

Walz says he and his roommates have gotten along “tremendously well,” a pleasant surprise considering “how hard it is to be in one place with just three people for six months.” He sometimes retreats to an empty chamber to play the space station’s keyboard and guitar, and to get away by himself.

Bursch, Walz and Onufrienko should have been back on Earth by now. Their mission, which began Dec. 5, was extended so Endeavour’s visiting astronauts could fix the space station’s balky robot arm. NASA needed an extra month to prepare for the 12-day flight.

NASA never would have kept the astronauts in orbit for so long without their enthusiastic agreement, says Bill Gerstenmaier, the space station program’s deputy manager. “This was not mandatory by any stretch of the imagination,” he says.

Unlike the Russians, who think nothing of keeping cosmonauts up for a year, NASA prefers to limit flights to about six months, primarily because of concern over bone and muscle deterioration and radiation exposure. All three space station men are in their 40s.

The current U.S. space endurance record is held by Shannon Lucid, whose 1996 mission on the old Russian space station Mir spanned 188 days. (She also holds the world record for women.) The world champion is Valery Polyakov, a Russian doctor whose Mir mission lasted a remarkable 438 days in 1994 and 1995.

Bursch and Walz will miss Lucid’s mark by just several hours. A one-day delay in either their launch or landing, however, will propel them into NASA’s record books.

“I think it’s great,” says Lucid, now working as NASA’s chief scientist. “I’m just surprised it’s taken this long.”