Perhaps this is appropriate because NASA astronaut Don Pettit is a singular individual. His birthday is April 20, and when the Soyuz spacecraft carrying him landed at dawn in Kazakhstan, the calendar had turned over to that date. John Glenn, then 77, was older when he went to space. But no one as old as Pettit had spent as long as he had in orbit, 220 days, on a mission.<\/p>\n
On Monday, a little more than a week after returning from orbit, Pettit met with reporters at Johnson Space Center. \u201cIt\u2019s good to be back on planet Earth,\u201d he said. \u201cAs much as I love exploring space, going into the frontier, and making observations, you do reach a time when it\u2019s time to come home.\u201d<\/p>\n
Flying in space at 70 years old<\/h2>\n
Pettit first went into space at the age of 47 for his first of three long-duration missions to the International Space Station. Since then, he has flown a shorter shuttle mission and two more space station increments. All told, he has lived in space for 590 days, the third-most all-time among NASA astronauts.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve got a few creaks and groans in my body, but basically I feel the same as I did 20 years ago, and coming back to gravity is provocative,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
After every one of his missions, Pettit said the readjustment to gravity for him has been a challenge. He added that the surprising thing about spaceflight is that it\u2019s not so much your large muscles that ache, but the smaller ones.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
\u201cA week ago, I was on station, and I was doing really heavy squats, I was doing dead lifts, I could float around with the greatest of ease, even though I had no trapeze,\u201d he said. \u201cI was at the peak of my game. And then you come back to Earth, and it\u2019s like, God, I can\u2019t even get up from the floor anymore. It\u2019s humbling. But it isn\u2019t about the large muscle groups. It\u2019s about the little, tiny muscles that everybody forgets about because they\u2019re just there and they work. When you\u2019re in weightlessness, these muscles don\u2019t work anymore. And they take a six-month vacation until you come back to Earth. And now, all of a sudden, they start groaning and talking to you, and it takes a while to get all these little muscles tuned back up to being an Earthling.\u201d<\/p>\n
In terms of aging, Pettit said, like a lot of older people, he wakes up after a night sleeping on Earth with a sore shoulder or a stiff neck. That\u2019s just part of the process. But microgravity took some of those aches and pains away.<\/p>\n
\u201cI love being in space,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen you\u2019re sleeping, you\u2019re just floating, and your body, all those little aches and pains heal up. You feel like you\u2019re 30 years old again and free of pain, free of everything. So I love being on orbit. It\u2019s a great place to be for me and my physiology.\u201d<\/p>\n
The space station isn\u2019t old, either<\/h2>\n
Pettit has visited the space station on all four of his spaceflights. He lived there, near the beginning of the station\u2019s lifetime, as part of Expedition 6 in 2002. More than two decades later he said the station is operating at full capacity, delivering on its promise of robust scientific research, studies of long-duration spaceflight, and much more. Asked if he felt nostalgic about the station coming to an end in 2030\u2014NASA plans to de-orbit the facility at that time\u2014Pettit said the laboratory should live on.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m a firm believer we don\u2019t need to dump the space station in the ocean at 2030 if we don\u2019t want to,\u201d he said. \u201cIf we as a society decided to keep [the] space station, we could keep it like a B-52. I mean, how many years is it they\u2019ve been flying? It\u2019ll be flying close to 100 years by the time the Air Force finally retires the B-52, and it\u2019s basically the same airframe with the same aerodynamics, but everything else is new. There\u2019s no limit to what we can do to [the] space station, except for our will to keep refurbishing it and having the funding necessary.\u201d<\/p>\n Pettit said he never looked out the window of the space station without a camera at hand. This image shows cities streaking by below.<\/p>\n Credit: And maybe that\u2019s because he wants to go back. Pettit did not rule out flying into space again. For now, he wants to take a few weeks to allow his body time to re-adjust to gravity. He wants to enjoy some time with his family. But soon, he knows, space will start to call to him again.<\/p>\n \u201cI call it the explorer\u2019s paradox,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen you\u2019re back in civilization, you want to be out there wherever your wilderness happens to be; and then when you\u2019re in your wilderness, it\u2019s like, wow, I need to be back with my family. I think it\u2019s probably gone on for as long as humanity has had people who go off into the wilderness. When the flight docs say I\u2019m ready to go back, I\u2019m ready to do it. And I know John Glenn flew at age 76, something like that, and I\u2019m only 70, so I\u2019ve got a few more good years left. I could see getting another flight or two in before I\u2019m ready to hang up my rocket nozzles.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Not many people celebrate their birthday by burning a fiery arc through the atmosphere, pulling 4.4gs in freefall back to planet Earth, thudding into the ground, and emptying their stomach on the steppes of Kazakhstan. No one has ever done it on their 70th birthday. Perhaps this is appropriate because NASA astronaut Don Pettit is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44737,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[9639,1301,190,21],"class_list":["post-44736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-70-years-old","tag-don-pettit","tag-nasa","tag-space"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44736"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44736\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/pettit-nasa.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Don Pettit\/NASA<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n