SEE: Astronauts land on Earth transformed by a coronavirus pandemic

Two NASA astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut made a safe return from the International Space Station (ISS) on Friday to find the planet transformed by the coronavirus pandemic.

Andrew Morgan, Jessica Meir and Oleg Skripochka landed in central Kazakhstan at 05:16 GMT on the first return mission since the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a global pandemic in March.

Morgan had been on the ISS since July last year, while Meir and Skripochka arrived in September.

“TOUCHDOWN! Welcome home, Oleg Skripochka, Andrew Morgan and Jessica Meir!” The Russian space agency Roscosmos wrote on Twitter.

Unusually, NASA and Roscosmos did not show live images of the trio parachuting into their Soyuz landing pod.

This was ruled out “due to technical limitations associated with the epidemiological situation,” Roscosmos said.

Subsequent images of the landing site showed recovery teams wearing face masks and rubber gloves as they pulled crew members out of the Soyuz MS-15 capsule, which was lying on its side.

“Please keep your distance,” one ground crew member was heard saying to another.

Airport closed

While the trio’s landing site southeast of the Kazakh city of Dzhezkazgan is the same as for previous crews, the pandemic has forced changes to the end-of-mission protocol.

The crew will not fly back home through Kazakhstan’s Karaganda Airport as usual because it has been closed, like many other airports around the world.

Instead, Skripochka will fly from the Baikonur cosmodrome used to launch missions to the ISS, while the NASA duo will take off in a plane from the steppe city of Kyzlorda after a journey of several hours.

In a media appearance aboard the ISS prior to his departure, Meir said it would be difficult to give up on hugs with family and friends as he faces a new culture of physical estrangement on Earth.

“I think I will feel more isolated on Earth than here,” reflected Meir, who made history as half of the first women’s spacewalk with NASA colleague Christina Koch in October.

End of the Russian monopoly

As the astronaut home planet fights in the global battle against Covid-19, the ISS is also entering a new era as it prepares to welcome the first team flown by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company in early May. .

NASA has said that the SpaceX flight bringing NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the ISS could launch as early as the second half of May, ending the nearly-decade-long Russian monopoly on manned missions to the ISS from its Baikonur launch pad.

After taking off from Kennedy Space Center, the pair will spend two to three months aboard the orbital laboratory, interrupting the usual pace aboard the ISS, where missions typically last around six months or more.

They will meet Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner of Roscosmos and Chris Cassidy of NASA, who arrived at the ISS from Baikonur on April 9, the first new crew members to join after the pandemic began.

The International Space Station, a rare example of cooperation between Russia and the West, has been orbiting Earth at about 28,000 km / h (17,000 miles per hour) since 1998.