MOSCOW (RUSSIA) – Three members of the International Space Station’s crew returned safely to Earth on Saturday on a Russian Soyuz craft, as reported by Russia’s Roscosmos space agency.
The Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft carrying NASA astronaut Kate Rubins, a microbiologist who became the first person in 2016 to sequence DNA in space, and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov landed in Kazakhstan at 0455 GMT.
The three had been at the space station since mid-October 2020.
Theirs was the last such scheduled mission of Russian flight carrying a US crew member. This will mark an end to a long dependency as the US reworks on its own crew launch capability in an attempt to bring down the cost of sending astronauts to space.
