2 record-breaking Russians and an American who lived on space station for 6 months return to Earth

[September 24, 2024]  MOSCOW (AP) — A Soyuz capsule carrying two Russians and one American from the International Space Station landed Monday in Kazakhstan, ending a record-breaking stay for the Russian pair.
 
The capsule landed on the Kazakh steppe about 3 1/2 hours after undocking from the space station in an apparently trouble-free descent. In the last stage of the landing, it descended under a red-and-white parachute at about 7.2 meters per second (16 mph), with small rockets fired in the final seconds to cushion the touchdown. 

In this photo taken from video released by Roscosmos space corporation, the NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson holds a Russian traditional Matryoshka wooden doll depicting her shortly after the landing of the Russian Soyuz MS-25 space capsule carrying the NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson and the Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub, south-east of the Kazakh town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, Monday, Sept. 23, 2024. (Roscosmos space corporation via AP)

The astronauts were to be extracted from the capsule and placed in nearby chairs to help them adjust to gravity, then given medical examinations in a nearby tent.

Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub returned after 374 days aboard the space station; on Friday they broke the record for the longest continuous stay there. Also in the capsule was American Tracy Dyson, who was in the space station for six months.

Eight astronauts remain in the space station, including Americans Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who have remained long past their scheduled return to Earth.

They arrived in June as the first crew of Boeing’s new Starliner capsule. But their trip was marred by thruster troubles and helium leaks, and the U.S. space agency NASA decided it was too risky to return them on Starliner.

The two astronauts are to ride home with SpaceX next year.

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