Peggy Whitson has just broken record for the longest amount of time in space by a US astronaut. Currently serving an extended stay aboard the International Space Station, Whitson passed the prior record of 534 days, 2 hours and 48 minutes of cumulative time in space at 1.27am (ET) on April 24th. When she finally returns to Earth, she will have spent over 650 days in space.
Whitson is already the first female astronaut to command the space station and also holds the record for the most spacewalks by a female (7). She is also the oldest woman to have traveled to space. In addition to her new time-in-orbit mark, Whitson has spent more than 53 hours outside an airlock, engaged in spacewalks that added modules to the space station, among other duties.
Whitson is an American biochemist and astronaut. Raised on a small working farm in the outskirts of a 20-person town in Iowa, she decided to become an astronaut at age 9 when she watched Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong walking on the moon on TV. When Sally Ride was named as the first female American astronaut the same year Whitson graduated from high school (1978), that sealed the deal. She sold chickens along the way to get her pilot’s license.
She joined Johnson Space Center at NASA as National Research Council Resident Research Associate after completing a PhD and postdoctoral fellowship in biochemistry at Rice University. She was 26. Ten years later and now thirty-six, she was selected as an Astronaut Candidate. Following more years of rigorous training, she took her first trip to space in June 2002 as a flight engineer. She went aboard the space shuttle Endeavour on Expedition 5. It launched from Kennedy Space Center on June 5 and docked at the International Space Station on June 7. After spending 184 days in space they returned to Earth in December. During these six months on the board of International Space Station, Whitson conducted twenty-one experiments in microgravity and human life sciences. In addition, she installed commercial payloads and hardware systems. To install shielding on a service module and to deploy a science payload, she had to perform a four-hour and 25-minute Orlan spacewalk.
In 2007, she made her second trip serving as commander of the Expedition 16 mission aboard spacecraft Soyuz-TMA, launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. After spending nearly 192 days in space, the team returned to Earth aboard Soyuz TMA-11. She is the first female commander to lead the space station. Two others commanded the space shuttle during the life of that program, Eileen Collins and Pamela Melroy.
Over her career she has served as project scientist of the Shuttle-Mir Program, Co-Chair of the U.S.-Russian Mission Science Working Group, chief of the Astronaut Office where she was entrusted with the responsibility of supervising all the activities of NASA astronauts. Whitson was the first non-military personnel to hold that position. She has also served as Deputy Chief of NASA Astronaut Office and Chief of the Station Operations Branch, Astronaut Office.
Whitson’s most recent trip began in November 2016 as part of Expedition 50/51. She ws selected as the commander of Expedition 51 for her second tour as commander. Following a three-month extension of the mission, she is now expected back to Earth in September.
In one interview following the most recent milestone, Whitson said “Breaking records has never been my goal. I think it’s important that we’re continually pushing our limits and showing that we can extend beyond what we have done before. One of the most fun things to do while living here is to just be here,”
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