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An American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts landed safely on the Kazakh steppe on Thursday, completing a 196-day mission that began with the first launch in lockdown conditions.
NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and Russian cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner landed about 150 kilometers (90 miles) southeast of the Kazakh city of Zhezkazgan at 0254 GMT, images transmitted by Russia’s space agency Roscosmos showed.
Footage from the landing site showed Cassidy sitting up slapping elbows with one crew member at the recovery site and waving to another after they exited the Soyuz MS-16 spacecraft, before being taken to medical tents before of his next trips to Moscow and Houston. .
“How are the things going?” Cassidy asked in Russian, smiling.
The three-man crew had taken off without the usual fanfare in April with about half of the world’s population living under national closures imposed to contain the spread of the coronavirus.
They faced no questions from a press pack in Baikonur and were not turned away by family and friends, both time-honored traditions before the pandemic.
Their pre-flight quarantine was also intensified, as they avoided the usual tourist trips to Moscow from their training base outside the Russian capital.
Its mission also coincided with the arrival at the space station in May of the first astronauts to take off from US soil for nearly a decade.
The mission, carried out by tycoon Elon Musk’s SpaceX company as part of NASA’s commercial crew program, has helped fuel talks about a new “space race” between various countries.
But Russia’s Roscosmos, who enjoyed a lucrative monopoly on travel to and from the space station since 2011, remains the fastest player in the game in terms of travel to and from the International Space Station (ISS).
Robert Behnken and Doug Hurley’s May trip to the space station and August’s return to Earth on the SpaceX spacecraft saw the pair spend the better part of two days in transit.
In contrast, the landing of Cassidy, Ivanishin and Vagner on Thursday occurred less than three and a half hours after undocking, while a three-person crew reached the ISS from Baikonur in just three hours and three minutes last week, establishing a new all-time record. .
Before returning from his third mission in space, former US Navy SEAL Cassidy, 50, tweeted an image of blood samples that astronauts must send at various points on their mission, including right before uncoupling.
“What is the price of a trip back to Earth? …. 8 tubes of blood! The 7 shown in this picture were taken in the morning to be placed in our freezer, and the 8 will be taken out right before undocking for ground processing shortly after landing, “wrote Cassidy, a fan of sudoku puzzles.
Vagner, who was flying for the first time, was a rare Roscosmos presence on the microblogging platform, where most NASA astronauts have a profile.
“Mom, I’m coming home,” the 35-year-old tweeted on Wednesday.
Ivanishin, 51, is wrapping up his third mission, after NASA’s Kathleen Rubins, with whom he launched to the ISS in 2016, arrived for a second season aboard the station last Wednesday along with Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey. Kud-Sverchkov from Roscosmos.
The ISS has been a rare example of cooperation between Moscow and Washington.
Members recently reported problems with the oxygen production system, a toilet, and the oven for preparing food.
But Roscosmos said in a statement Tuesday that the problems had been “completely resolved by the crew.”
“All the station systems are working well and there is no danger to the crew or the ISS.”
Next month will mark the 20th anniversary of the permanent occupation of the orbital laboratory by humans, but the station is expected to be decommissioned in the next decade due to structural fatigue.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)
