MOSCOW (AP) – An American astronaut and two Russians have returned to Earth after six months aboard the International Space Station.
A Soyuz space capsule carrying Kate Rubins from NASA and Russians Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov landed on Saturday at 0455 GMT (12:55 am EDT) in the steppes of Kazakhstan.
Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Russian space agency Roskosmos, said the three were fine after being removed from the capsule and began to readjust to the attraction of gravity.
The three had arrived at the orbiting lab complex on Oct. 14.
There are now seven people aboard the ISS: NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei and Russians Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov arrived on April 9; Americans Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, and Japanese Soichi Noguchi, boarded the SpaceX Crew Dragon Resilience, the ISS’s first docking as part of NASA’s commercial crew program.