Christina Koch is ending the decade with a ground-breaking record. Koch is a NASA astronaut who set a new record on Saturday for the longest single spaceflight by a woman. Koch is expected to have spent a total of 328 days in orbit around the earth. The record was held by Peggy Whitson from 2016-2017 for spending 288 days in spaceflight. It was March 14th when Koch launched to the space station, it was planned as a six-month mission but her stay was extended by the NASA to gather more data on the effects of long-duration spaceflight and now the date has been extended to February 2020. Speaking about the record she made Koch says,“I like to think of the record as not so much about how many days you're up here, but what you bring to each day, so [it is] another great reminder to just bring your best."
Koch is inspired by Peggy and she also mentioned that Peggy was kind enough to mentor her through the years. Earlier this year she along with a fellow astronaut Jessica Meir completed the first-ever all-female spacewalk outside the International Space Station. They stepped out in space without any male crewmember in order to fix a broken part of the power network on the ISS. This has also happened for the first time in 50 years of walking in space. The record for the longest single stay in space is held by Russia’s Valeri Polyakov, he spent 438 consecutive days on Russia’s former space station Mir. It stayed there from January 1994 to March 1995.
