Gennady Padalka

Gennady Ivanovich Padalka was born on June 21, 1958, in Krasnodar, in southern Russia. He graduated from the Yeysk Higher Military Aviation School in 1979 and served as a pilot in the Soviet and later Russian Air Force, logging more than 1,500 flight hours before being selected for the cosmonaut corps in 1989. An avid diver, runner, and parachutist, he brought a fighter pilot's discipline to what would become one of the most enduring careers in the history of human spaceflight, spanning both the Mir station and the International Space Station.

Padalka first launched on August 13, 1998, aboard Soyuz TM-28, commanding one of the final long-duration expeditions aboard Mir over roughly 199 days. His remaining four missions were all to the ISS, and on each he served as commander. In 2004 he led Expedition 9 for about 188 days; in 2009 he commanded Expedition 19/20, overseeing the station's transition to permanent six-person crews; in 2012 he commanded Expedition 31/32; and in 2015, launching on Soyuz TMA-16M, he commanded Expedition 43/44. It was during that final flight that he surpassed the previous cumulative time-in-space record. Over his career he performed ten spacewalks totaling roughly 38 hours and logged well over 21,000 hours in orbit.

Padalka is the only person ever to have commanded the International Space Station four times, a testament to the trust placed in him as a crew leader. When he returned from his fifth mission in September 2015, his cumulative total of 878 days across five flights made him the all-time world record holder for time spent in space — a mark he held until fellow Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko surpassed it in February 2024, leaving Padalka second on the all-time list. A Hero of the Russian Federation, he retired from the cosmonaut corps in 2017 and has since remained an advocate for crewed space exploration, his name synonymous with steady, record-setting endurance in orbit.