Boeing Starliner astronauts will spend at least 240 days stuck in space — is that a new record?

On Saturday (Aug. 24), NASA announced its long-awaited plan to bring astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams home from the International Space Station (ISS) no earlier than February 2025 — at least eight months longer than the initial eight-day trip they signed up for.

The return flight — which will ditch the troubled Boeing Starliner spacecraft that the crew rode to the ISS, in favor of a SpaceX vehicle — has no confirmed date. However, in the best-case scenario of an early-February return, the Starliner crew's time in space will amount to no fewer than 240 consecutive days since the spacecraft's launch on June 5, 2024. A March departure could bump that number up to nearly 270 days.

Eight straight months in space sounds like a lot, but it's far from a new record. Astronauts typically spend an average of six months aboard the ISS, where they conduct experiments and maintain the space station before returning to Earth, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. However, missions can extend many months longer, for a variety of reasons, including long-duration experiments and unforeseen incidents.

Who has spent the longest time in space?

The record for the most consecutive days in space by an American goes to astronaut Frank Rubio, who spent 371 days aboard the ISS from September 2022 to September 2023.

Rubio was initially expected home in March 2023, but his stay in space more than doubled after a small meteoroid or piece of space junk slammed into the Russian Soyuz spacecraft that was meant to carry him home in December 2022, causing irreparable damage. Rubio, along with Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, had to wait another six months in space before a replacement Soyuz capsule arrived to bring them home.

Related: How do tiny pieces of space junk cause incredible damage?

While Prokopyev and Petelin also clocked 371 consecutive days in space, they did not break any Russian records. Cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov — who holds the record for the most consecutive days spent in space by any human — worked aboard Russia's now-defunct Mir space station for 437 days, or more than 14 months, from January 1994 to March 1995. Polyakov volunteered for this mission as part of a study of the effects of long-term spaceflight on human health.