Mark Vande Hei landed on a Soyuz capsule in Kazakhstan with Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov of the Russian Space Agency, who also spent the past year in space. 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 staff were on standby and planned to return immediately to Houston with the 55-year-old astronaut. Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, 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 track; 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. Just one day after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Dmitry Rogozin, the director general of the Russian space agency, accused the United States of trying to “destroy” cooperation with the ISS. “If you block cooperation with us, then who will save the ISS from an uncontrolled descent from orbit and then fall to the territory of the United States or Europe?” he said. The Soyuz MS-19 space capsule crashes into Earth in Kazakhstan on Tuesday. Photo: ROSCOSMOS / Reuters Nasa, however, downplayed the provocative comments. The agency said it would continue to work with all of its international partners – including Russia – and that export sanctions would continue to allow it to work with Russia. “This is just Dmitry Rogozin,” Nelson told the Associated Press. “It simply came to our notice then. But at the end of the day, he has worked with us. “The other people who work in the Russian political space program are professionals. “They do not miss a single minute with us, the American astronauts and the American mission control.” The Russian invasion resulted in canceled launches and broken contracts. In addition to threatening to withdraw from the space station and drop it in the US, Europe or elsewhere, Rogozin had covered other countries’ flags on a Soyuz rocket waiting to take off with Internet satellites. The launch was canceled after a customer, London-based OneWeb, denied Rogozin’s demand that the satellites not be used for military purposes, and the British government cut off financial support. Meanwhile, the European Space Agency has confirmed that it has suspended indefinitely the ExoMars rover mission with Roscosmos due to the war in Ukraine. “Nevertheless, in space, we can have a partnership with our Russian friends, our colleagues,” Nelson said. “The professional relationship between astronauts and cosmonauts has not been lost. This is the cooperation that we continue in the political space program “. Landing in the landing strip – about 400 kilometers (250 miles) northeast of Russia’s space launch site at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan – Vande Hei surpasses NASA’s previous record for the longest solo space flight in 15 days. Dubrov moved to the top five in Russia. Both are 437 days and 17 hours away from a cosmonaut-doctor on the Mir space station of 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. Three Russians – who arrived two weeks ago – and three Americans and a German, who arrived in November, remain on board. 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’s SpaceX began transporting Nasa astronauts to the station in 2020, nine years after the end of the bus program. For most of that decade, Russia offered the solitary taxi service, with Nasa paying tens of millions of dollars per Soyuz position. The Vande Hei ride was part of an exchange with Houston-based Axiom. The US and Russian space agencies are still working on a system in which a Russian would be launched with a SpaceX capsule in the fall and an American would fly to Soyuz, helping to ensure the presence of US and Russian stations at all times.
