On 4 February 2024, at 07:30:08 UTC, he broke the record for the most time spent in space previously held by Gennady Padalka at 878 days.

[3][4][5] Oleg Kononenko was born on 21 June 1964 in Chardzhou, Turkmen SSR (now Türkmenabat, Turkmenistan) to a simple family.

His father Dmitry Ivanovich Kononenko worked as a driver in a freight trucking company, and his mother Taisiya Stepanovna Churakova was a communications operator at the Türkmenabat Airport.

He returned home, worked for a year in the tool shop of the Türkmenabat Airport aviation technical base.

[2] In October 1998 he began training as part of the group of cosmonauts selected for the International Space Station (ISS) program.

[2] From December 2001 through April 2002, Kononenko trained as a backup flight engineer for the Soyuz TM-34 vehicle for the third ISS visiting crew.

[7] Kononenko conducted his first spacewalk on 10 July 2008 when he ventured into space from the Pirs docking compartment airlock of the ISS.

They also continued to outfit the station's exterior, including the installation of a docking target on the Zvezda service module.

[13][14][15] On 21 December 2011, Kononenko, along with André Kuipers and Donald Pettit, launched to the International Space Station to join the crew of Expedition 30.

[17] On 12 February 2012, Kononenko and colleague cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov were scheduled to conduct a six-hour spacewalk outside the ISS.

As part of the Vynoslivost or "Endurance" experiment, two trays of metal samples would be left exposed on the surface of the Poisk Module.

[19] On 22 July 2015, Kononenko launched to the International Space Station as Soyuz commander, together with NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren and Kimiya Yui from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) on Soyuz-TMA-17M.

[20] Kononenko and fellow crew members Anne McClain and David Saint-Jacques returned to Earth on 24 June 2019, after 203 days 15 hours and 16 minutes in space.