What’s it like to be 70 years old in space? “All those little aches and pains heal up.”

"When the flight docs say I'm ready to go back, I'm ready to do it."

Not many people celebrate their birthday by burning a fiery arc through the atmosphere, pulling 4.4gs in freefall back to planet Earth, thudding into the ground, and emptying their stomach on the steppes of Kazakhstan.

No one has ever done it on their 70th birthday.

Perhaps this is appropriate because NASA astronaut Don Pettit is a singular individual. His birthday is April 20, and when the Soyuz spacecraft carrying him landed at dawn in Kazakhstan, the calendar had turned over to that date. John Glenn, then 77, was older when he went to space. But no one as old as Pettit had spent as long as he had in orbit, 220 days, on a mission.

On Monday, a little more than a week after returning from orbit, Pettit met with reporters at Johnson Space Center. "It's good to be back on planet Earth," he said. "As much as I love exploring space, going into the frontier, and making observations, you do reach a time when it's time to come home."

Flying in space at 70 years old

Pettit first went into space at the age of 47 for his first of three long-duration missions to the International Space Station. Since then, he has flown a shorter shuttle mission and two more space station increments. All told, he has lived in space for 590 days, the third-most all-time among NASA astronauts.

"I've got a few creaks and groans in my body, but basically I feel the same as I did 20 years ago, and coming back to gravity is provocative," he said.

After every one of his missions, Pettit said the readjustment to gravity for him has been a challenge. He added that the surprising thing about spaceflight is that it's not so much your large muscles that ache, but the smaller ones.

"A week ago, I was on station, and I was doing really heavy squats, I was doing dead lifts, I could float around with the greatest of ease, even though I had no trapeze," he said. "I was at the peak of my game. And then you come back to Earth, and it's like, God, I can't even get up from the floor anymore. It's humbling. But it isn't about the large muscle groups. It's about the little, tiny muscles that everybody forgets about because they're just there and they work. When you're in weightlessness, these muscles don't work anymore. And they take a six-month vacation until you come back to Earth. And now, all of a sudden, they start groaning and talking to you, and it takes a while to get all these little muscles tuned back up to being an Earthling."

In terms of aging, Pettit said, like a lot of older people, he wakes up after a night sleeping on Earth with a sore shoulder or a stiff neck. That's just part of the process. But microgravity took some of those aches and pains away.

"I love being in space," he said. "When you're sleeping, you're just floating, and your body, all those little aches and pains heal up. You feel like you're 30 years old again and free of pain, free of everything. So I love being on orbit. It's a great place to be for me and my physiology."

The space station isn’t old, either

Pettit has visited the space station on all four of his spaceflights. He lived there, near the beginning of the station's lifetime, as part of Expedition 6 in 2002. More than two decades later he said the station is operating at full capacity, delivering on its promise of robust scientific research, studies of long-duration spaceflight, and much more. Asked if he felt nostalgic about the station coming to an end in 2030—NASA plans to de-orbit the facility at that time—Pettit said the laboratory should live on.

"I'm a firm believer we don't need to dump the space station in the ocean at 2030 if we don't want to," he said. "If we as a society decided to keep [the] space station, we could keep it like a B-52. I mean, how many years is it they've been flying? It'll be flying close to 100 years by the time the Air Force finally retires the B-52, and it's basically the same airframe with the same aerodynamics, but everything else is new. There's no limit to what we can do to [the] space station, except for our will to keep refurbishing it and having the funding necessary."

Pettit said he never looked out the window of the space station without a camera at hand. This image shows cities streaking by below.

Credit: Don Pettit/NASA

And maybe that's because he wants to go back. Pettit did not rule out flying into space again. For now, he wants to take a few weeks to allow his body time to re-adjust to gravity. He wants to enjoy some time with his family. But soon, he knows, space will start to call to him again.

"I call it the explorer's paradox," he said. "When you're back in civilization, you want to be out there wherever your wilderness happens to be; and then when you're in your wilderness, it's like, wow, I need to be back with my family. I think it's probably gone on for as long as humanity has had people who go off into the wilderness. When the flight docs say I'm ready to go back, I'm ready to do it. And I know John Glenn flew at age 76, something like that, and I'm only 70, so I've got a few more good years left. I could see getting another flight or two in before I'm ready to hang up my rocket nozzles."

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