A NASA astronaut returned to Earth on Wednesday after spending 355 days on the International Space Station, a record time for the United States.
Mark Vande Hei landed in the Russian Soyuz capsule in Kazakhstan along with Russians Pyotr Dubrov and Anton Shkaplerov, despite Russian threats to let him into space.
A small team of doctors and other NASA personnel were present for the landing and were scheduled to return immediately to Houston with the 55-year-old astronaut.
“It's a beautiful place
,” Vande Hei said of the steppes, donning a face mask and baseball cap.
NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei is carried into a medical tent shortly after landing with the Russian Soyuz MS-19 space capsule in a remote area outside Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, on March 30, 2022.BILL INGALLS /NASA / via REUTERS
Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Vande Hei said he avoided the subject with his two crewmates.
Despite getting along "fantastically", the astronaut assured that he was not sure they wanted to talk about it.
Vande Hei and Dubrov have been in orbit since April 9 last year;
Shkaplerov joined them in October, accompanying a Russian film crew for a short stay.
Before leaving the space station,
Shkaplerov hugged his fellow astronauts, calling them his "space brothers and sisters."
“People have problems on Earth. In orbit ... we are one crew
,” Shkaplerov said in a NASA live broadcast on Tuesday.
The space station is a symbol of "friendship and cooperation and the future of space exploration," he added.
War tensions spilled over into other realms of space, with Russian rocket launches of European satellites suspended and the European-Russian Mars rover stuck on Earth for another two years.
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Vande Hei broke NASA's previous record for longest individual spaceflight by 15 days.
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"The records mean we're making progress,"
said NASA's former space endurance champion, retired astronaut Scott Kelly, whose 340-day mission ended in 2016.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson added: "Mark's mission not only breaks records, but also paves the way for future human explorers on the Moon, Mars and beyond."
Vande Hei said
daily meditation helped him get through the mission
twice as long as his first station four years earlier.
"I've been working indoors 24 hours a day for almost a year, so I'm looking forward to being outside whatever the weather is like," Vande Hei confessed in a recent NASA video series.
As for the food, she assured that she is looking forward to preparing a cup of coffee for him and his wife Julie, eating guacamole and chips.
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During his stay on the International Space Station, Vande Hei experienced some 5,680 orbits of the Earth and a journey of more than 150 million miles, roughly the equivalent of 312 round trips to the Moon.
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His mission will provide researchers with the opportunity to observe the effects of long space flights on humans, as the agency plans to return to the Moon as part of the Artemis program and prepare for exploration of Mars.
The astronaut devoted many hours to scientific activities, conducting everything from plant research to physics studies.
With information from
NASA
and AP.
