Mark Vande Hei landed in a Soyuz capsule in Kazakhstan with Pyotr Dubrov of the Russian Space Agency, who also spent last year in space, and Anton Shkaplerov. The wind blew the capsule to her side after the touch, and the trinity emerged in the sun late in the afternoon one by one. Vande Hei, the last to come out, smiled and nodded as he was taken to a reclining chair outside in the open steppes of Kazakhstan. “Beautiful out here,” Vande Hay said, wearing a face mask and cap. Despite escalating tensions between the United States and Russia over Vladimir Putin’s war with Ukraine, Vendée’s return followed the usual procedures. A small team of doctors and other NASA personnel were on standby for the touchdown and planned to return immediately to Houston with the 55-year-old astronaut. Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Vande Hei said he was avoiding the issue with his two Russian counterparts. “Even though we were doing ‘fantastic … 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 the launch of Soyuz on April 9 last year. Shkaplerov came with them to the orbiting laboratory in October, accompanying a Russian film crew for a short stay. To serve this visit, Vande Hei and Dubrov doubled their stay. Before leaving the space station, Shkaplerov hugged his fellow astronauts as “my space brothers and space sister.” “People have problems on Earth. “We are on a trajectory; we are a crew,” Shkaplerov told NASA Live on Tuesday. The space station is a symbol of “friendship and cooperation and… the future of space exploration”. Tensions erupted in other parts of the world with the suspension of European satellite launches with Russian missiles and the Europe-Russia rover Mars stuck to Earth for another two years. Vande Hei surpassed NASA’s previous record for the longest solo space flight by 15 days. Dubrov entered the top five in Russia, far short of the 437-day, 17-hour marathon by a cosmonaut-doctor on the Mir space station in the 1990s, which remains the world record. “Broken records mean we are making progress,” said former NASA space endurance champion retired astronaut Scott Kelly, whose 340-day mission was completed in 2016. Like Kelly, Vande Hei underwent medical examinations during his long stay to advance NASA’s effort to get the astronauts back to the moon and Mars. He said daily meditation helped him cope during the mission, twice as much as his first stop four years earlier. “I’ve been working indoors 24-7 for almost a year, so I can’t wait to be outside regardless of the weather,” Vande Hei said in a recent NASA video series. As for food, he is looking forward to making a cup of coffee for himself and his wife Julie and will look for guacamole and chips. Staying on board: Three Russians who arrived two weeks ago and three Americans and a German, who have been on board since November. Their replacements are expected to be made in three weeks through SpaceX. Next week, SpaceX will fly three wealthy businessmen and their former astronaut companion to the station for a weekly visit organized by the private Axiom Space. Elon Musk SpaceX began transporting NASA astronauts to the station in 2020, nine years after the end of the bus program. During this vacuum, Russia offered the solitary taxi service, with NASA paying tens of millions of dollars per Soyuz location. The Vande Hei ride was part of an exchange with Houston-based Axiom. —Marcia Dunn, The Associated Press RELATED: Space travel can improve everyone’s lives, says Canadian astronaut Chris Huntfield NASARussiaSpaceUSA
