The Russian space capsule bringing two women and a man from the International Space Station (ISS) landed safely on the steppe of Kazakhstan on Saturday April 6.
The craft, a Soyuz MS-24 carrying Russian Oleg Novitsky, American Loral O’Hara and Belarusian Marina Vasilevskaya, touched down southeast of the isolated town of Jezkazgan at 12:17 p.m. Kazakhstan time ( 9:17 a.m. Paris time). NASA astronauts Michael Barratt, Matthew Dominick, Tracy Caldwell Dyson and Jeanette Epps as well as Russian astronauts Nikolaï Tchoub, Alexandre Grebionkin and Oleg Kononenko remained on board the station.
Mme O’Hara arrived aboard the ISS on September 15, 2023 and spent a total of 204 days there, said the NASA. As for Mr. Novitsky and M.me Vasilevskaya, they blasted off into space on March 23, two days later than planned. The launch was canceled at the very last minute due to a voltage drop in an energy source, according to Yuri Borissov, director of the Russian space agency Roscosmos.
The space station, which served as a symbol of post-Cold War international cooperation, is now one of the last areas of collaboration between Russia and Western countries amid war-related tensions in Ukraine.