Staggering moment astronaut was told his country no longer existed before he was stranded in space for 311 days

Sergei Krikalev's mission turned into the plot of Tom Hanks' The Terminal combined with a horror movie.

In 1991, the Soviet cosmonaut was sent on a space mission to guard Mir space station which was a Soviet space station at the time, the pride of the USSR.

Krikalev has been up there for three months, carrying out his duties and keeping in touch with mission control about his health stats, blood pressure and heart rate.

He was counting down the days until he could return to Earth and be reunited with his wife and their one-year-old child. Homesickness was creeping in fast.

LEON NEAL/Staff via Getty

To pass the time, Krikalev often tuned into a radio frequency that connected him with Maggie, a friend in Australia. She’d keep him updated on what was happening back on Earth.

One day, Maggie reported some troubling news.

"Sergei, something bad is happening in your country," she said.

She described that people were sleeping on the streets and shops were out of food as law and order in the USSR began to collapse.

Once a global superpower, the Soviet Union was starting to crumble, with its republics breaking away one by one.

Krikalev asked mission control for confirmation, only to be told not to worry and to focus on his mission.

Until one morning, Krikalev received a message he couldn’t ignore from his handlers on the ground.

"We can't keep this from you anymore," they announced. "It's true, everything is collapsing around us including the Soviet space agency.

(NASA/Handout via Getty)

"We've run out of money, we can't send anyone to replace you. So, we're giving you a choice."

They went on: "You can come back down to Earth as planned and abandon the station to an unknown fate. Or you stay as long as it takes and protect the station, the final post of a falling empire."

The country that was supposed to bring him home no longer existed.

Krikalev's world has just been turned upside down and he had to make a difficult decision. His home nation was grappling with political and economic turmoil, should he be with his family in this time of crisis or risk his life protecting the last remnant of the Soviet Union?

He made the heart-wrenching decision to stay in space.

After 311 days and 5,000 Earth orbits - a record-breaking feat - Krikalev returned to his new home.

The Soviet Union was gone, replaced by newly independent states.

He had left a Soviet Union citizen and returned home as a Russian citizen.