First space station crew of COVID age returns to Earth

An American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts touched down safely on the Kazakhstan steppe on Thursday.

Anatoly Ivanishin gets a medical check on Thursday. Picture: AFP

An American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts touched down safely on the Kazakhstan steppe on Thursday, 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.

A seated Captain Cassidy bumped elbows with one member of the crew at the recovery site and saluted another after they exited the Soyuz MS-16 spacecraft, before they were taken to medical tents ahead of their onward journeys to Moscow and Houston.

“How are things?” asked Captin Cassidy in Russian, smiling.

The three-man crew had blasted off minus the usual fanfare in April with about half the world’s population living under national lockdowns imposed to contain the spread of the coronavirus. They did not face questions from a press pack in Baikonur and were not waved off by family and friends — time-honoured traditions before the pandemic.

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 ­tycoon Elon Musk’s SpaceX company as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, has helped fuel talk of a new “space race” between a number of countries. But Russian space agency Roscosmos, which enjoyed a lucrative monopoly on travel to and from the space station from 2011, remains the fastest player in the game in terms of travel to and from the ISS.

Robert Behnken and Doug Hurley’s May journey to the space station and August return to Earth in the SpaceX craft saw the pair spend the best part of two days in transit.

Captain Cassidy, Mr Ivanishin and Mr Vagner’s touchdown on Thursday by contrast came less than 3 ½ 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, Captain Cassidy, 50, tweeted a picture of blood samples that astronauts have to submit at various points in their mission, including just before undocking.

“What is the price of a return ride back to Earth?....8 tubes of blood!!”

AFP