Congratulations are in order. NASA astronaut Jeff Williams just broke the U.S. record for cumulative spaceflight hours, previously set by Scott Kelly. Five hundred and twenty days is a lot of time to spend away from home, and especially when that time is spent weightless in a tiny metal capsule, orbiting miles above earth in the endless vacuum of space.
Luckily for Williams, he’s returning on September 5. Then, he’ll have logged 534 cumulative days in space. Williams began his current visit to the station with more than 362 days in space. He launched to the station from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on March 18, and kicked off his third long-duration mission as part of Expedition 47/48.
Since his last visit, the space station had been declared complete, but he’s still finding some construction work to do, he was on board for the arrival and deployment of the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, and took part in Friday’s spacewalk to add the international docking adapter that will allow future commercial crew vehicles to dock to the station.