US and Russian astronauts return to Earth from the ISIS

Moscow. An American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts returned to Earth on Saturday after six months aboard the International Space Station.

The Soyuz capsule carrying NASA’s Kate Rubins and Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov of Roscosmos landed at 12:55 a.m. in the steppes of Kazakhstan.

The three were well after being removed from the spacecraft and began to reclimatize to Earth’s gravity, said Dmitry Rogozin, director of the Russian space agency.

Rubins, Ryzhikov and Kud-Sverchkov had arrived at the orbital laboratory on 14 October.

There are now seven people on board the EEI: NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei and Russians Oleg Novitski and Pyotr Dubrov, who arrived on April 9; and Americans Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, and Japan’s Soichi Noguchi, who arrived in November aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Resilience, the first spacecraft in NASA’s Commercial Crew Program to go get to the stop.