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 "It was a textbook homecoming for the Expedition 43 crew," a NASA
presenter said after the descent capsule of the Soyuz TMA-15M
spacecraft touched ground amid waving feathergrass at 1944 local
time, some 92 miles southeast of Zhezkazgan in central Kazakhstan.
"They have landed!" read a big screen at Russia's Mission Control
outside Moscow. The capsule, charred by extreme heat on re-entry,
landed upright, allowing search and recovery teams to expedite the
crew's evacuation.
Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, followed by Samantha
Cristoforetti of the European Space Agency and Expedition 43
Commander Terry Virts of NASA, were carried and put on semi-reclined
chairs a few minutes later for a breath of fresh air under a setting
sun.
A smiling Virts showed a "thumbs up" sign as a medical worker
checked his pulse and blood pressure. "Everything worked by the
second, step by step, the guys were great," Shkaplerov said.
 The return of the crew from the $100 billion, 15-nation ISS had been
delayed for a month after a rocket failed to deliver a Progress
cargo craft on April 28. It harmlessly fell into the Pacific Ocean
in early May. Virts said before departing from the ISS that the extra month in
space amounted to "bonus days" for the crew. Their mission had been
extended to minimize the amount of time the station would be
half-staffed.
The crew’s departure left Russian cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and
Mikhail Kornienko and NASA astronaut Scott Kelly on their own until
at least July 23, when cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, NASA's Kjell
Lindgren and Japan's Kimiya Yui are due to launch.
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Kornienko and Kelly are about 2.5 months into a planned year-long
stay on the station, a first for the 15-nation program. NASA is
currently interested in accumulating medical data about long-term
effects of microgravity in a space station as it lays the groundwork
for eventual human missions to Mars.
Virts, 47, who had one previous space shuttle mission before flying
to the space station last November, turned over command of the
station to Padalka, 56.
Padalka, the first four-time ISS commander, will return to Earth in
September after a cumulative total of some 878 days in orbit, more
than any other person.
The launch of the next crew, which had been slated for late May, was
postponed for two months after the loss of the Progress.
The belated homecoming leaves Cristoforetti as the new record-holder
for the single longest spaceflight by a woman, eclipsing NASA's
Sunita William's 195-day flight in 2006-2007.
(Additional reporting by Irene Klotz in Cape Canaveral, Fla.;
Editing by Tom Heneghan)
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