Two Russian cosmonauts and NASA astronaut Chris Williams landed in Kazakhstan early Sunday after undocking from the International Space Station and re-entering aboard Soyuz MS-28.
Strapped into the Soyuz MS-28/74S ferry ship, commander Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, flight engineer Sergey Mikaev and NASA's Chris Williams undocked from the station's Russian Rassvet module at 3:03 a.m. EDT and slowly backed away from the lab complex.
Two-and-a-half hours later, with the craft properly lined up for re-entry, the Soyuz's braking rockets fired for four minutes and 42 seconds, dropping the vehicle out of orbit on a southwest-to-northeast trajectory toward Kazakhstan.
After rapidly decelerating in a blaze of atmospheric friction, the Soyuz crew module's main parachute unfurled and inflated for a 10-minute descent to a jarring rocket-assisted touchdown at 6:27 a.m. EDT (3:27 p.m. local time) near the town of Dzhezkazgan.
The mission lasted 241 days over 3,856 orbits and covered 102 million miles since launch last Nov. 27.
Russian recovery crews stationed nearby quickly raced to the crew module to help the returning fliers out of the cramped capsule as they began re-adjusting to gravity after eight months in weightlessness, and the astronauts were carried to nearby recliners for initial medical checks, fresh fruit and satellite phone calls home.
All three crew members were given personalized Russian matryoshka dolls as welcome home gifts. "There is vodka inside," someone said through a translator. "Well, actually, this is why I flew to space in the first place," one of the crew members joked.
"I am feeling better and better with each moment," Kud-Sverchkov said from his recliner. "I would like to thank everyone who supported this landing. Everything was smooth and perfect. Everything was just excellent."
The trio were to be flown by helicopter to the town of Karaganda some 285 miles away; Williams faced a long flight back to the Johnson Space Center in Houston aboard a NASA jet while his crewmates headed home to Star City near Moscow. Williams and flight engineer Mikaev completed their first space flight while Kud-Sverchkov wrapped up his second, having logged 185 days aboard the space station in 2020-2021.
During the mission, Williams participated in two spacewalks: one to replace a joint in the lab's robot arm and another to prepare for installing new roll-out solar blankets, and Kud-Sverchkov and Mikaev staged a maintenance spacewalk outside the Russian segment of the station.
Left behind aboard the station were NASA Crew 12 commander Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway, European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot and cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, and also on board were Soyuz MS-29/75S commander Pyotr Dubrov, cosmonaut Anna Kikina and NASA astronaut Anil Menon, who launched to the station from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on July 14 to replace Williams and his crewmates. The Crew 12 fliers, launched last Feb. 13, will be replaced by a fresh NASA-sponsored crew launching from Florida on Sept. 12.
Williams is a former volunteer firefighter and emergency medical technician who went on to earn a Ph.D. in astrophysics from MIT and was serving as a board-certified medical physicist at Harvard Medical School when he was selected to join NASA's astronaut corps in 2021. "As far back as I can remember, so when I was a little kid, I was always fascinated by exploration and, in particular, space," he told an interviewer while aboard the station.