NASA's oldest astronaut felt the decades melt away in space before returning on his 70th birthday

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Fresh from space, NASA’s oldest full-time astronaut said Monday that weightlessness made him consciousness decades younger, with mundane aches and pains vanishing.

Don Pettit marked his 70th day connected April 20 by plunging done the atmosphere successful a Russian Soyuz capsule to wrapper up a seven-month ngo astatine the International Space Station.

In his archetypal nationalist remarks since touchdown, Pettit said helium threw up each implicit the Kazak steppes upon touchdown, the effect of feeling gravity for the archetypal clip successful 220 days.

Returning to Earth has ever been “a important challenge” for his body, Pettit said from NASA's Johnson Space Center successful Houston.

“I didn't look excessively bully due to the fact that I didn't consciousness excessively good,” helium said, adding that his body's mean “creaks and groans" returned.

In weightlessness, connected the different hand, Pettit felt the decades melt away.

“It makes maine consciousness similar I’m 30 years aged again," said Pettit, an astronaut since 1996 who ventured to abstraction 4 times. "All that benignant of worldly heals up due to the fact that you’re sleeping, you're conscionable floating and your body, each these small aches and pains and everything heal up."

Mercury astronaut John Glenn was 77 erstwhile helium returned to orbit connected a abbreviated shuttle formation successful 1998. But he’d been gone from NASA for decades and was adjacent to wrapping up his Senate career.

Even a brace of 90-year-olds person flown to space, but lone connected 10-minute up-and-down hops by Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin rocket company.

Pettit, an technologist who inactive feels "like a small kid inside," focused connected his astrophotography portion astatine the abstraction station, capturing auroras, comets and satellites streaking disconnected successful the distance.

He besides conducted a slew of physics experiments successful his spare time, similar blowing and stacking bubbles, and forming a cleanable shot of chromatic connected a spoon with peanut butter, successful bid to stock the acquisition with others.

“I’ve got a fewer much bully years left," Pettit said. “I could spot getting different formation oregon 2 successful earlier I’m acceptable to bent up my rocket nozzles.”

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