Scott Kelly had held the record for longest US human spaceflight since 2016, but Mark Vande Hei has broken it.
Vande Hei has been in space for 341 days, beating the previous record set by Kelly.
Relations between the US and Russia in space are volatile. Russia stopped selling rocket engines to the US after President Biden imposed sanctions against Russia.
Kelly got into a spat with Russia's top space official, who made inflammatory comments about the ISS falling to Earth without Russia's help. The CEO of the company and an astronomer sparred with the astronomer.
NASA officials maintain that operations on the International Space Station are unaffected by the situation in Ukraine. Vande Hei is going to return to Earth in a Russian spaceship on March 30.
In a spacewalk press briefing on Monday, the NASA program manager said nothing had changed in the last three weeks.
I can tell you that Mark is coming home. We are talking to our Russian colleagues. There is no fuzz on that.
He will have spent 355 days in space by the time he lands.
Vande Hei told Insider in August that he didn't think it was his record. I don't think that will last very long because we're doing bigger and better things all the time.
Vande Hei, a former Army colonel from New Jersey and Minnesota, wasn't originally scheduled to stay in space for so long. He was planning for a six-month shift of spacewalks, science experiments, and station maintenance when he launched to the International Space Station.
Vande Hei and Pyotr Dubrov knew they could do a double shift. Russia's space agency was launching a film director and actress to the International Space Station for a week of movie-making. Vande Hei and Dubrov were asked by the agency to give the film crew their seats back on the spaceship. The astronauts would ride on the next ship.
Dubrov spent 355 days in space. That is not a record for Russia. The longest continuous human spaceflight was held by Valery Polyakov, who was on the Mir space station in the 90s.
The station has been the target of a series of rants by Rogozin. On February 24, he claimed that the International Space Station would fall to Earth if Russia withdrew its spaceships, which fire their engines to push the station higher.
NASA Watch reported that a Russian state media outlet posted a video to Telegram with edited footage of Vande Hei leaving the International Space Station. Insider doesn't know if the video came from Roscosmos.
Vande Hei's mother, Mary, told The Daily Mail that her son was being threatened.
I cried when I first heard it. It is very troubling. She told the Mail that it was a shame that it had been politicized. It is quite a shock.
Vande Hei's wife, Julie, is very worried, she said.
Vande Hei's father, Tom, told the Mail that the other people within the space agency seem very cooperative, despite the fact that the head of the Russian space agency is speaking.
The only vehicles that can carry humans to the International Space Station are the Soyuz spaceships. NASA has been using the Crew Dragon spaceships to ferry astronauts to and from the station.
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