Mark Vande Hei landed in Kazakhstan last Wednesday, brought back by a Russian capsule alongside two cosmonauts, Anton Chkaplérov and Piotr Doubrov.
A trust
The American has since returned to the United States, and was speaking on Tuesday April 5 at a press conference in Houston, Texas.
Russian cosmonauts “were, are and will continue to be very dear friends”, he said. “And I never had any concerns about my ability to continue working with them. »
Mark Vande Hei confirmed that the war in Ukraine had indeed been a topic of conversation on board the space station (ISS). But the discussions were “mostly about what they thought about it, and I’d rather they could share that themselves,” he said.
The discussions were ‘mostly about what they thought about it, and I’d rather they could share that themselves’
Moscow and Washington are partners in the management of the ISS. NASA has repeatedly assured that the cooperation is continuing for the moment without incident.
But the head of the Russian space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, has been increasing his incendiary and threatening tweets for weeks.
Mark Vande Hei said he did not watch social media, but was made aware of statements by his wife. “I was simply too confident in our cooperation thus far to take these tweets for anything other than being addressed to an audience other than myself,” he commented.
At 55, the astronaut now holds the record for consecutive days spent in space for an American, with 355 days.