Astronauts Excited For First Yearlong Trip to International Space Station

The two men preparing for the first-ever yearlong mission to the International Space Station are looking forward to the challenge, they said today (Dec. 5).

Friends and family are supportive of the mission, said astronaut Scott Kelly, though perhaps none more so than his 9-year-old daughter.

"When I told her on the phone that I was going to spend a year on the space station, she screamed out, 'Awesome!'" Kelly said today during a press conference at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Kelly and Russian Federal Space Agency cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko are due to launch on the yearlong mission in 2015.

The flight is designed to help scientists understand how the human body adapts to spaceflight longer than six months, the usual length of stints aboard the space station. [Most Extreme Human Spaceflight Records]

No one has ever spent a continuous year on the International Space Station (ISS), though four Russian cosmonauts have experienced nearly year-long or longer missions in low-Earth orbit. One, Valery Polyakov, stayed aboard the Russian space station Mir for 428 consecutive days in 1994 and 1995.

All of these cosmonauts flew in the early era of spaceflight, said ISS program scientist Julie Robinson. The last long-duration mission ended in 1999. Kelly Kornienko will become the first people since then to spend a year in orbit.

Testing the human body

NASA and other space agencies know a lot about how the body responds to six months in space, Robinson told reporters, but little about what happens next though that sort of knowledge is crucial as agencies contemplate sending humans back to the moon, to an asteroid, or to Mars.

NASA has several major concerns about the health effects of long-duration spaceflight. One of the most pressing is a recently discovered side effect: vision problems created by increased pressure in the skull in microgravity. Researchers aren't yet sure if some of those vision changes might be permanent, Robinson said.

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Astronauts Excited For First Yearlong Trip to International Space Station