MOSCOW (AP) – An American astronaut and two Russians have returned to Earth after six months aboard the International Space Station.
A Soyuz space capsule containing NASA’s Kate Rubins and Russians Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov landed Saturday at 0455 GMT (12:55 p.m. EDT) in the steppes of Kazakhstan.
Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Russian space agency Roskosmos, said all three felt good after being taken out of the capsule and starting to acclimate again to the pull of gravity.
The three had arrived at the laboratory complex in orbit on October 14.
There are now seven people on board the ISS: NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei and Russians Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov arrived April 9; Americans Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, and Japan’s Soichi Noguchi, boarded the SpaceX Crew Dragon Resilience, the first ISS to dock under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, in November.