NASA's oldest astronaut felt the decades melt away in space before
returning on his 70th birthday
[April 29, 2025]
By MARCIA DUNN
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Fresh from space, NASA’s oldest full-time
astronaut said Monday that weightlessness made him feel decades younger,
with everyday aches and pains vanishing.
Don Pettit marked his 70th birthday on April 20 by plunging through the
atmosphere in a Russian Soyuz capsule to wrap up a seven-month mission
at the International Space Station.
In his first public remarks since touchdown, Pettit said he threw up all
over the Kazak steppes upon touchdown, the result of feeling gravity for
the first time in 220 days.
Returning to Earth has always been “a significant challenge” for his
body, Pettit said from NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.
“I didn't look too good because I didn't feel too good,” he said, adding
that his body's normal “creaks and groans" returned.
In weightlessness, on the other hand, Pettit felt the decades melt away.
“It makes me feel like I’m 30 years old again," said Pettit, an
astronaut since 1996 who ventured to space four times. "All that kind of
stuff heals up because you’re sleeping, you're just floating and your
body, all these little aches and pains and everything heal up."
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This image provided by NASA shows astronaut Don Pettit boarding a
NASA airplane to take him from Karaganda, Kazakhstan to Houston
after he, Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin, and Ivan Vagner
landed in their Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft near the town of Zhezkazgan,
Kazakhstan on Sunday, April 20, 2025. (NASA/Bill Ingalls)
 Mercury astronaut John Glenn was 77
when he returned to orbit on a short shuttle flight in 1998. But
he’d been gone from NASA for decades and was close to wrapping up
his Senate career.
Even a pair of 90-year-olds have flown to space, but only on
10-minute up-and-down hops by Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin rocket
company.
Pettit, an engineer who still feels "like a little kid inside,"
focused on his astrophotography while at the space station,
capturing auroras, comets and satellites streaking off in the
distance.
He also conducted a slew of physics experiments in his spare time,
like blowing and stacking bubbles, and forming a perfect ball of
honey on a spoon with peanut butter, in order to share the
experience with others.
“I’ve got a few more good years left," Pettit said. “I could see
getting another flight or two in before I’m ready to hang up my
rocket nozzles.”
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