NASA’s Christina Koch has set a new spaceflight record for female astronauts as she returns to earth almost a year aboard the International Space Station.
Channels TV reports that Koch touched down on the Kazakh steppe at 0912 GMT after 328 days in space along with Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency and Alexander Skvortsov of the Russian space agency.
The 41-year-old Michigan-born engineer by training surpassed the previous record set for a single spaceflight by a woman — 289 days, held by NASA veteran Peggy Whitson — on December 28, 2019.
had already made history by that point after she became one half of the first-ever all-woman spacewalk along with NASA counterpart Jessica Meir in October.
Koch told NBC on Tuesday that she would “miss microgravity” as she answered questions from journalists ahead of her three-and-a-half-hour journey back to Earth.
