SJU Grad Vande Hei Considers What’s Next After Record-Breaking Space Journey By Kevin Allenspach Imagine living and working in quarters the size of a six-bedroom house for 355 consecutive days. And you can’t go outside, because that first step is a doozy.
cupola before the other astronauts were awake. This was how he reached one new frontier while contemplating another.
The International Space Station is 250 miles above Earth, something Saint John’s University graduate Mark Vande Hei ’89 never touched between April 9, 2021 and March 30, 2022.
Vande Hei set a U.S. record for longest continuous space flight and, combined with his first mission four years earlier, spent 523 of 1,600 days off the planet before he touched down in Kazakhstan at the epicenter of global tensions ignited by the war in Ukraine.
He orbited 5,680 times at more than 17,500 mph, and just about every day began with meditation while looking out from a quiet spot in the observation
Long before then, he promised his wife, Julie, he would never blast off again. Mark turns 56 on Nov. 10 and, despite no immediate plans to leave NASA – for
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which he has worked since 2006 – it was time to determine his next challenge. For someone who craves backpacking and watersports, perhaps it’s no surprise he’s spent as much time as possible outdoors since his return. He and Julie embarked on a six-week trip during the summer. It included living in a tent on a ferry as it traveled the intercoastal waterway to Alaska, where they stopped to hike the glaciers around Juneau, and whitewater rafting in Montana with a group of friends from his days at Saint John’s. And this fall, Mark’s enrolled in a month-