Sergei Konstantinovich Krikalev (born August 27, 1958) is a Russian cosmonaut and mechanical engineer. As a prominent rocket scientist, he is a veteran of six space flights and ranks third to Gennady Padalka and Yuri Malenchenko for the amount of time in space: a total of 803 days, 9 hours, and 39 minutes. He retired from spaceflight in 2007 and is currently working as vice president of Space Corporation Energia.

Krikalev was in space when the Soviet Union was dissolved on December 26, 1991. With the Baikonur Cosmodrome and the landing area both being located in the newly-independent Kazakhstan, there was a lot of uncertainty about the fate of his mission. He remained in space for months longer than planned and returned to a very different country. These events are documented and contextualized in Romanian filmmaker Andrei Ujică's 1995 documentary 'Out of the Present'.

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