Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

NASA astronaut Kate Rubins safely returns to Earth

Trevor Mogg
By
NASA astronaut Kate Rubins emerging from the Soyuz spacecraft shortly after landing in Kazakhstan on Saturday, April 17. NASA

NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and two Russian cosmonauts have safely returned to Earth after a six-month stay aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

Rubins, Sergey Ryzhikov, and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov returned aboard a Soyuz spacecraft, landing in Kazakhstan shortly before 1 a.m. ET (11 a.m. Kazakhstan time) on Saturday, April 17. The journey from the space station took around three-and-a-half hours.

Recommended Videos

Welcome home! At 12:55am ET (4:55 UT), after 185 days in space, Kate Rubins of @NASA_Astronauts and Sergey Ryzhikov & Sergey Kud-Sverchkov of @Roscosmos touched down in their Soyuz spacecraft on the steppe of Kazakhstan. pic.twitter.com/cOVT9M9Tmf

— NASA (@NASA) April 17, 2021

All three were quickly extracted from the spacecraft and are now undergoing routine health checks. Once complete, the crew members will go their separate ways, with Rubins returning to her home in Houston, Texas, and the cosmonauts flying back to their training base in Star City, Russia.

????‍???? Astronaut Kate Rubins is all "high fives and smiles" as she takes her first breath of fresh Earth air in 185 days. Aboard the @Space_Station, Rubins conducted hundreds of hours of @ISS_Research, including advancing her work in DNA sequencing. pic.twitter.com/dAAq7Yx3WT

— NASA (@NASA) April 17, 2021

The animation below explains how the spacecraft and crew made it back to Earth.

This animation shows what the Soyuz spacecraft descent to Earth will be like as it returns with the Exp 64 crew. #AskNASA | https://t.co/cBNqC61h27 pic.twitter.com/Dx0rjnF4qx

— International Space Station (@Space_Station) April 17, 2021

During her time aboard the space station, Rubins took part in two spacewalks, voted in the U.S. presidential election, and worked on a range of experiments.

The three astronauts experienced 2,960 orbits of Earth and traveled a total of 78.4 million miles during their half-year mission.

This was Rubins’ second spaceflight after another in 2016, with 300 cumulative days spent in space. Ryzhikov has now completed his second spaceflight, with 358 cumulative days in space, while Kud-Sverchkov was on his first spaceflight.

The departure of the Soyuz spacecraft from the ISS on Friday marked the formal start of Expedition 65 aboard the station. The current inhabitants of the orbiting outpost are NASA astronauts Shannon Walker, Victor Glover, Michael Hopkins, and Mark Vande Hei, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Soichi Noguchi, and cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Trevor Mogg
Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
How NASA’s astronaut class of 1978 changed the face of space exploration
Sally Ride NASA

When you look back on the long history of crewed spaceflight, one group stands out for its radical challenge to the conventional wisdom of who could become an astronaut. NASA's astronaut class of 1978 saw not only its first women and people of color working as astronauts such as Sally Ride and Guy Bluford, but also the first Asian American astronaut, El Onizuka, the first Jewish American astronaut, Judy Resnik, and the first LGBT astronaut, once again Sally Ride.

A new book, The New Guys: The Historic Class of Astronauts That Broke Barriers and Changed the Face of Space Travel, chronicles the story of this class and its impact on both NASA and the wider world’s perceptions of who could be an astronaut. We spoke to the author, Meredith Bagby, about this remarkable group of people and how they changed the face of human spaceflight.
Breaking the mold
Throughout the 50s and 60s, NASA almost exclusively chose fighter pilots for its early human spaceflight program, Project Mercury. That meant that not only were astronaut groups like the famous Mercury Seven entirely composed of white men, but they also came from very similar military backgrounds.

Read more
A spacecraft at the ISS is about to take a very short trip
The Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft is seen approaching the Poisk module of the space station prior to docking at 7:58 p.m. EST as the space station was flying 260 miles above northern Mongolia.

Three astronauts at the International Space Station (ISS) are about to take a very short ride aboard a Soyuz spacecraft.

In a maneuver designed to make room for the arrival of the Roscosmos Progress 84 cargo spacecraft later this year, astronaut Frank Rubio of NASA, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, will this week hop aboard the Soyuz MS-23 capsule and pilot it from the Poisk module on the space-facing side of the complex to the Prichal module on the Earth-facing side of the outpost.

Read more
NASA and Boeing reveal new date for first crewed Starliner flight
A graphic rendering of the Boeing Starliner orbiting Earth.

NASA and Boeing had been hoping to perform the first crewed flight of the Starliner spacecraft next month, but on Wednesday they announced the mission will now take place no earlier than Friday, July 21.

“While the Starliner spacecraft build is complete, additional time is needed to close out verification and validation work prior to the system’s first flight with crew on board,” Boeing said in a statement posted on its website.

Read more