Three astronauts return from the International Space Station

Three members of the International Space Station crew returned safely to Earth on Saturday with a Russian Soyuz craft, Russian space agency Roscosmos reported.

The Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft with NASA astronaut Kate Rubins, a microbiologist who became the first person to sequence DNA in space in 2016, and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov landed in Kazakhstan at 0455 GMT.

The three had been in the space station since mid-October 2020.

Their mission was the last planned Russian flight with a US crew member, ending a long dependency as the US is reviving its own crew launch capability in an effort to reduce the cost of sending astronauts to space.

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