Cosmonaut Alexander Serebrov broke the world record for spacewalks Friday, becoming the first man ever to venture outside an orbiting spacecraft nine times.
Serebrov and fellow cosmonaut Vasily Tsibliyev left the Mir space station at 6:47 p.m. (9:47 MDT) to check on equipment for testing special materials in space. They returned 38 minutes later.The two cosmonauts also did routine maintenance on the 7-year-old space station and replaced materials that were exposed to space radiation to study its influence, the ITAR-Tass news agency said.
The walk was to have lasted nearly five hours, but officials said the cosmonauts finished the work early.
Soviet cosmonauts Leonid Kizim and Vladimir Solovyov set the previous record of eight spacewalks in 1986.
No American astronaut has walked in space more than four times, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration said. There are five U.S. astronauts with four spacewalks each.
The two Russian cosmonauts have been in orbit since July. The newspaper Red Star said they will remain for 195 days instead of the planned 146 because a booster rocket will not be available until January to carry a replacement crew to the station about 200 miles above Earth.
The endurance record for living in space was a 366-day mission by cosmonauts Vladimir Titov and Musa Manarov that ended in December 1988.
Financial and political problems have plagued the Russian space program since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Russia must now bargain with other former Soviet republics such as Kazakhstan, where the main launching site is located, and Ukraine, which makes rocket engines.
To gain hard currency, Russia has allowed paying customers from such countries as Japan, Britain, Austria, France and Germany to ride Russian rockets and visit the space station.