A Nasa astronaut has caught a Russian ride back to Earth after a US record 355 days at the International Space Station, returning with two cosmonauts to a world torn apart by war.
Mark Vande Hei landed in a Soyuz capsule in Kazakhstan alongside the Russian Space Agency’s Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov, who also spent the past year in space.
Wind blew the capsule on to its side following touchdown, and the trio emerged into the late afternoon sun one by one.
Mr Vande Hei, the last one out, grinned and waved as he was carried to a reclining chair on the open Kazakh steppes.
“It’s beautiful out here,” he said, putting on a face mask and baseball cap.
Despite escalating tensions between the US and Russia over Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, Mr Vande Hei’s return followed customary procedures.
A small Nasa team of doctors and other staff was on hand for the touchdown and planned to return immediately to Houston with the 55-year-old astronaut.
.@Astro_Sabot is back on Earth after a NASA record-breaking 355 days in space! Next he will fly from Kazakhstan and return to his @NASA_Johnson home base in Houston 24 hours later. pic.twitter.com/S4ZmLlBTlM
— International Space Station (@Space_Station) March 30, 2022
Even before Russia’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine, Mr Vande Hei said he was avoiding the subject with his Russian crewmates.
Despite getting along “fantastically… I’m not sure we really want to go there”, he said.
It was the first taste of gravity for Mr Vande Hei and Mr Dubrov since their Soyuz launch on April 9 last year.
Mr Shkaplerov joined them at the orbiting lab in October, escorting a Russian film crew up for a brief stay. To accommodate that visit, Mr Vande Hei and Mr Dubrov doubled the length of their stay.
Before leaving the space station, Mr Shkaplerov embraced his fellow astronauts as “my space brothers and space sister”.
“People have problem on Earth. On orbit… we are one crew,” he said in a live Nasa TV broadcast on Tuesday, adding that the ISS is a symbol of “friendship and co-operation and… future of exploration of space”.
War tensions have bubbled over in other areas of space exploration with the suspension of European satellite launches on Russian rockets and the Europe-Russia Mars rover stuck on Earth for another two years.
Mr Vande Hei surpassed Nasa’s previous record for the longest single spaceflight by 15 days. Mr Dubrov moved into Russia’s top five, well short of the 437-day, 17-hour marathon by a cosmonaut-physician aboard the 1990s Mir space station which remains the world record.
“Broken records mean we’re making progress,” said Nasa’s previous space endurance champ, retired astronaut Scott Kelly, whose 340-day mission ended in 2016.
Like Mr Kelly, Mr Vande Hei underwent medical testing during his long stay to further Nasa’s quest to get astronauts back to the moon and on to Mars. He said daily meditation helped him cope during the mission, twice as long as his first station stint four years earlier.
“I’ve had an indoor job 24/7 for almost a year so I am looking forward to being outside, no matter what kind of weather,” Mr Vande Hei said in a recent series of Nasa videos.
As for food, he is looking forward to making a cup of coffee for himself and wife Julie, and digging into guacamole and chips.
Remaining on board the ISS are three Russians who arrived two weeks ago and three Americans and one German, who have been aboard since November.
Their replacements are due in three weeks by SpaceX. Next week, SpaceX will fly three rich businessmen and their ex-astronaut escort to the station for a week-long visit arranged by the private outfit Axiom Space.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX began transporting Nasa astronauts to the station in 2020, nine years after the space shuttle programme ended.
During that gap, Russia offered the lone taxi service, with Nasa shelling out tens of millions of dollars per Soyuz seat.
Mr Vande Hei’s ride was part of a barter exchange with Houston-based Axiom.
