American and Russian astronauts return to Earth from the ISS

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 Kate Rubins from NASA and Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov from Roscosmos landed at 12:55 in the morning on the steppes of Kazakhstan.

All three were well after being removed from the spacecraft and began to re-acclimatize to the Earth’s gravity, explained Dmitry Rogozin, director of the Russian space agency.

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

There are now seven people aboard the ISS: NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hey and Russians Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov, who arrived on April 9; and Americans Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, and Japanese Soichi Noguchi, who arrived in November aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Resilience, the first spacecraft of NASA’s commercial program to arrive at the station.