US astronaut returns to Earth with Russian cosmonauts after record-breaking mission
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Loading... - Danny Jones
- 01 Apr 2022
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A Nasa astronaut caught a Russian ride back to Earth on Wednesday 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.
Despite escalating tensions between the US and Russia over Vladimir Putin’s war with Ukraine, 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.
Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Vande Hei said he was avoiding the subject with his two 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 Vande Hei and Dubrov since their Soyuz launch on 9 April last year. Shkaplerov joined them at the orbiting lab in October, escorting a Russian film crew up for a brief stay. To accommodate that visit, Vande Hei and Dubrov doubled the length of their stay.
Before departing the space station, Shkaplerov embraced his fellow astronauts as “my space brothers and space sister”.
“People have problem on Earth. On orbit … we are one crew,” Shkaplerov said in a live Nasa TV broadcast Tuesday. The space station is a symbol of “friendship and cooperation and … future of exploration of space”.
The war tensions bubbled over in other areas of space with the suspension of European satellite launches on Russian rockets and the Europe-Russia Mars rover stuck on Earth for another two years.
Just one day after Russia invaded Ukraine, Dmitry Rogozin, the director-general of Russia’s space agency, accused the US of trying to “destroy” cooperation at the ISS.
“If you block cooperation with us, then who is going to save the ISS from an uncontrolled descent from orbit and then falling onto the territory of the United States or Europe?” he said.
Nasa, however, played down the provocative comments. The agency said that it would continue to work with all its international partners – including Russia – and that export sanctions continue to allow it to work with Russia.
“That’s just Dmitry Rogozin,” Nelson told the Associated Press. “He spouts off every now and then. But at the end of the day, he’s worked with us.
“The other people that work in the Russian civilian space program, they’re professional. They don’t miss a beat with us, American astronauts and American mission control.”
The Russian invasion has resulted in canceled launches and broken contracts. Besides threatening to pull out of the space station and drop it on the US, Europe or elsewhere, Rogozin had the flags of other countries covered on a Soyuz rocket awaiting liftoff with internet satellites. The launch was called off after the customer, London-based OneWeb, refused Rogozin’s demand that the satellites not be used for military purposes and the British government halt financial backing. Read More…
