An American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts yesterday touched down safely on the Kazakhstan steppe, completing a 196-day mission that began with the first launch under lockdown conditions.
NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and Russian cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner landed about 150km southeast of the Kazakh city of Zhezkazgan at 2:54am GMT, footage broadcast by the Russian space agency Roscosmos showed.
Footage from the landing site showed a seated Cassidy bumping elbows with one member of the crew at the recovery site and saluting another after they exited the Soyuz MS-16 spacecraft, before they were taken to medical tents ahead of their onward journeys to Moscow or Houston, Texas.
Photo: AFP / Russian space agency Roscosmos / handout
“How are things?” asked Cassidy in Russian, smiling.
The three-man crew had blasted off minus the unusual fanfare in April with about half of the world’s population living under national lockdowns imposed to contain the spread of COVID-19.
They did not face questions from a press pack in Baikonur and were not waved off by family and friends — both time-honoured traditions before the pandemic.
Their preflight quarantine was also intensified as they eschewed customary sightseeing trips to Moscow from their training base outside the Russian capital.
Their mission also coincided with the arrival at the space station in May of the first astronauts to blast off from US soil for almost a decade.
The mission, carried out by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company as part of NASA’s commercial Commercial Crew Program, has helped fuel talk of a new “space race” between a number of countries.
However, Russia’s Roscosmos, which enjoyed a lucrative monopoloy on travel to and from the space station from 2011, remains the fastest player in the game in terms of travel between the International Space Station (ISS) and Earth.
Robert Behnken and Doug Hurley’s journey in May to the space station and their return to Earth in August in the SpaceX craft saw the pair spend the best part of two days in transit.
Cassidy, Ivanishin and Vagner’s touchdown on Thursday by contrast came 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, setting a new absolute record.
Prior to returning from his third mission in space, former US Navy SEAL Cassidy, 50, posted on Twitter a picture of blood samples that astronauts have to submit in their mission, including just before undocking.
“What is the price of a return ride back to Earth?....8 tubes of blood!! The 7 shown in this picture were taken in the morning to be placed in our deep freezer, and the 8th will be drawn just prior to undock for ground processing soon after landing,” sudoku puzzle fan Cassidy wrote.
First-time-flyer Vagner was a rare Roscosmos presence on Twitter, where most NASA astronauts have a profile.
“Mama, I’m coming home,” the 35-year-old wrote 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 stint aboard the station on Wednesday last week along with Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov of Roscosmos.
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