American astronaut Anne McClain, Canadian David Saint-Jacques and Russian Oleg Kononenko returned to Earth on Tuesday after a six-month mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
Anne McClain, Oleg Kononenko and David Saint-Jacques – who broke the record for time spent in space by a Canadian – landed in the Kazakhstan steppe at 2:47 GMT.
Their departure for the orbital station on 3 December had been a matter of concern as he was following the misadventure that occurred in mid-October to the Russian Alexey Ovchinin and the American Nick Hague: about two minutes after their take-off, their Soyuz spacecraft had exploded and they had been forced to an emergency landing.
The two men had survived unscathed, but the incident, the first of this magnitude in the history of post-Soviet Russia, was another blow to the country’s space industry.
Before their departure for space, Anne McClain, Oleg Kononenko and David Saint-Jacques were optimistic and the tone did not change during their stay aboard the Orbital Station, one of the last examples of cooperation active between Moscow and Western countries.
“A beautiful night over Africa for my last night on the ISS”, noted on Twitter Anne McClain, 40, who made two space trips during this first mission.
The ISS circling the Earth in about 90 minutes, his colleague David Saint-Jacques, 49, was able to marvel one last time of the vision of Canada before returning home. “British Columbia and Nunavik … I will miss the sight of these great Canadian landscapes!”, Tweeted the astronaut from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).
David Saint-Jacques, who was also on his first trip, pushed back the record time spent in space by a Canadian: 204 days, against 187 for his compatriot Robert Thirsk.
– Records in series –
The trio was joined in March by Alexey Ovchinin and Americans Nick Hague and Christina Koch. The latter is expected to spend nearly eleven months on the station, breaking the record for the longest space stay made by a woman, NASA said in April.
The current record is held by another US astronaut, Peggy Whitson, who spent 288 days on the ISS between 2016 and 2017.
Russians dominate the accumulation of days spent in weightlessness. On his return to Earth on Tuesday, Oleg Kononenko reached 737 days in orbit at the end of his fourth mission. At 55, he is on a mission to break the absolute record of his compatriot Gennady Padalka (879 days).
Since 2011, Russia is the only country able to send crews to the ISS. But the failure of last October, the corruption scandals in the Roskosmos space agency and the competition of the company SpaceX Elon Musk jeopardize the future of this exclusivity.
In early June, NASA indicated that it will be organizing for the first time on-board ISS tourist trips operated by Boeing and SpaceX. Estimated price for a 30-day stay: $ 58 million per passenger.
Russia has already sent seven tourists to the station and plans, according to the agency Roskosmos, resume these shipments from 2021. An agreement to this effect was signed at the beginning of the year between Roskosmos and the American company Space Adventures.
The next launch to the ISS is scheduled for July 20: it will carry an American, a Russian and an Italian.
