NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei said on Tuesday that the coexistence between Americans and Russians on the International Special Station (ISS) was positive, despite tension between the two countries over the invasion. Russian from Ukraine.
Mark Vande Hei landed last Wednesday (30) in Kazakhstan in a Russian capsule that brought him back to Earth along with Russian cosmonauts Anton Chkaplerov and Piotr Dubrov.
Russian cosmonauts “were, are and will be very dear friends,” he said. “There was never any concern about my ability to continue working with them,” he told reporters in Texas.
Vande Hei confirmed that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a topic of conversation on the ISS. But the conversations were “mostly about how they felt about it, and those are things I’d rather let them share.”
Moscow and Washington are partners in managing the ISS and NASA has ensured that cooperation between the two countries continues unhindered, despite friction between the two governments.
However, the head of the Russian space agency, Dmitri Rogozin, has launched inflammatory and threatening messages on Twitter in recent weeks.
Mark Vande Hei said he did not access social networks, but he learned of the statements from his wife.
Vande Hei, 55, holds the record for days in space: 523. In his last mission, he spent 355 consecutive days in space.
The purpose of such a long mission was to observe the lingering effects of the space environment on humans, anticipating future long-range missions, such as to Mars, for example.
The record for staying in space belonged to Russian Valeri Polyakov, who spent 437 days at the Mir station between 1994 and 1995.
