Three people who lived and worked on the International Space Station for nearly 200 full days are safely back on Earth.
NASA astronaut Terry Virts, European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti and cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov landed in central Kazakhstan at 9:44 a.m. ET (7:44 p.m. local time) Thursday, after leaving the ISS about three hours earlier, as they flew above Mongolia. A Russian-made Soyuz space capsule brought them back to Earth from the space station.
Cristoforetti broke a record during her time in orbit. The 199-day mission (the crew was just a few hours shy of a full 200 days in space) makes her the world record holder for longest-duration single spaceflight by a woman.
"It was a real pleasure spending time up here with you," Scott Kelly, NASA astronaut and one-year ISS crew member, said as the trio departed the station. Kelly and two other crew members are remaining on the ISS.
In total, Virts, Cristoforetti and Shkaplreov completed about 3,184 orbits of Earth during their time on the ISS.
Their landing was delayed from May after the failure of a Russian cargo spacecraft. Ground controllers decided to push back the landing while investigating the cause of the failure. The cargo ship — somewhat similar to the Soyuz that was used to ferry the astronauts to and from the ISS on Thursday — appears to have failed due to an issue during launch.
Cristoforetti leaves behind two other crew members on the ISS going for spaceflight records. Kelly is aiming to be the first American to spend a continuous year in space, while cosmonaut Gennady Padalka is set to become the record holder for most time spent in space over the course of a lifetime, after his six-month mission. Cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko is also participating in the yearlong mission with Kelly.
Padalka, Kornienko and Kelly will be joined by three new crew members on the ISS at the end of July.
Currently, NASA relies on Russia's Soyuz vehicles to bring American astronauts to and from the space station, but that could change in a few years. NASA is planning to buy seats for their astronauts aboard private American spacecraft built by SpaceX and Boeing, as part of the agency's commercial crew program. Both SpaceX's Crew Dragon and Boeing's CST-100 are undergoing a series of tests ahead of their expected first flights to the ISS in 2017.
However, there's a chance that timeframe could be delayed. The Senate Appropriations Subcommittee approved a bill this week that would not fund the commercial crew program at the level NASA requested for 2016, potentially delaying planned milestones in the program.
"I am deeply disappointed that the Senate Appropriations subcommittee does not fully support NASA's plan to once again launch American astronauts from U.S. soil as soon as possible, and instead favors continuing to write checks to Russia," NASA administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement. "Remarkably, the Senate reduces funding for our Commercial Crew Program further than the House already does compared to the President’s Budget."
“By gutting this program and turning our backs on U.S. industry, NASA will be forced to continue to rely on Russia to get its astronauts to space — and continue to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into the Russian economy rather than our own."
Fuente: mashable.com
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