Pettit Wants More Spaceflights, ISS Beyond 2030

After just coming back from seven months on the International Space Station, NASA astronaut Don Pettit insists there is no reason to “dump” it into the ocean in 2030.  It has a lot of life left and with proper maintenance could last as long as the Air Force’s legendary B-52 airplanes.  He also hopes for one or two more trips to space. At 70, he’s seven years younger than the current record-holder for orbital flight — John Glenn, who made his second spaceflight at the age of 77.

Pettit landed in Kazakhstan with his two Russian Soyuz MS-26 crewmates on April 20, 2025 local time in Kazakhstan, his 70th birthday. Cameras cut away as he was extracted from the capsule, raising concerns about his health. During a post-mission briefing today he explained that “I was right in the middle of emptying the contents of my stomach onto the steppes of Kazakhstan” and the cameraman kindly gave him the privacy he needed. He added that his body reacts to the return to Earth about the same way every time regardless of duration.

He looked fit today, just a week later.

He returned to Earth with Roscosmos cosmonauts Aleksey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner after they spent 220 days on the ISS. This was Pettit’s fourth spaceflight, all to the ISS, three for long-duration missions and one shorter space shuttle flight. He’s accumulated 590 days in space all together.

• STS-113/Soyuz TMA-1, November 2002-May 2003 (Expedition 6)
• Soyuz TMA-03M, December 2011-July 2012 (Expedition 30/31)
• STS-126, a 16-day mission in November 2008 that delivered the Leonardo Multi-Purpose Logistics Module (MPLM)
• Soyuz MS-26, September 2024-April 2025 (Expedition 71/72)

The space station has changed markedly since his first visit when it was still in the early stages of construction. Back then it had “half the crew, one-quarter the electrical power, probably one-quarter the pressurized volume, and we were still in the process of building it” while NASA learned how to operate a space station, something it hadn’t done since Skylab 30 years earlier.

Today the ISS “is a well oiled machine” and the seven-person crew is “as efficient as we’ll ever be” with scientific work using furnaces, centrifuges and biological facilities supported by the necessary electrical power and command and data downlinks.

“Station is a hoppin’ place right now.  Never a dull moment. It’s expanded into what it was really designed to be.

“And in terms of the end of space station, I’m a firm believer we don’t need to dump space station in the ocean in 2030 if we don’t want to. If we as a society decided to keep space station, we could keep it like a B-52. … There’s no limit to what we could do with space station except for our will to keep refurbishing it and having the funding necessary for doing that.”

The Air Force B-52s long-range heavy bombers began flying in the early 1950s. Some still in use date back to the early 1960s and are undergoing a modernization effort that will keep them flying into the 2050s, a century later. Refurbishing aircraft on the ground is a lot easier than orbiting spacecraft, but major repairs and upgrades were made to the Hubble Space Telescope by five space shuttle crews, and spacewalking astronauts and cosmonauts routinely service the exterior of the ISS.

Getting funding to continue the ISS beyond 2030 of course would be major issue and at least two NASA advisory committees are concerned about safety risks posed by air leaks in the Russian segment.

Pettit’s mission this time was fairly routine, unlike his first in 2003.  Pettit, fellow NASA astronaut Ken Bowersox (now head of NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate), and Russia’s Nikolai Budarin, were aboard the ISS on February 1, 2003 when the Space Shuttle Columbia was destroyed during reentry, killing the six NASA and one Israeli astronauts aboard.  The space shuttle was grounded for more than two years. Russian Soyuz spacecraft were used to ferry crews back and forth in the interim and in May 2003 they returned to Earth on Russia’s Soyuz TMA-1 instead of NASA’s Space Shuttle Discovery.  It was the first reentry of the new version of Soyuz and a guidance system failure caused it to make a ballistic reentry, landing 400 kilometers (250 miles) short of the intended landing site with the crew experiencing high gravitational (g) forces, 8g.

The experience clearly did not deter him. Not only has he made three more flights already, but hopes for another one or two.

“I’m ready to go back when the flight docs say I’m ready to go back. Being an explorer in space is what seems to be my lot in life and I’m ready to do it. And I know John Glenn flew at age 76, something like that and I’m only 70, so I’ve got a few more good years left. I could see getting another flight or two in before I’m ready to hang up my rocket nozzles.”

Glenn was the first U.S. astronaut to orbit Earth in 1962. He made a second spaceflight as a U.S. Senator from Ohio in 1998 at the age of 77 on STS-95,  a 10-day mission. Older people have made suborbital flights — Wally Funk, 82, William Shatner, 90, and Ed Dwight, about two months older than Shatner — but Glenn is the oldest to orbit the planet.

Pettit sees no reason humans can’t make long duration spaceflights to places like Mars, either.  Humans are adaptable and “I don’t see any rate-limiting aspects of human physiology for going to Mars.”

A Ph.D. chemical engineer, Pettit was a staff scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory before joining the NASA astronaut corps in 1996. He loves doing science in space.

Space photography is another passion.  He posted many on X (@astro_Pettit), including this one.

Cosmic colors at sunrise; never get tired of seeing what the new day brings pic.twitter.com/jLLzMIbOzi

— Don Pettit (@astro_Pettit) February 26, 2025