US astronaut Frank Rubio, who broke the record for the longest continuous space flight by an American, and two Russian cosmonauts landed in the steppe of Kazakhstan yesterday after more than a year on the International Space Station (ISS).
Their Soyuz MS-23 capsule undocked from the ISS a minute earlier than scheduled, and took around three and a half hours to make it down to Earth, landing southeast of the city of Zhezqazghan.
“It’s good to be home,” Rubio, 47, said with a smile after landing with Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev, 48, and Dmitry Petelin, 40.
Asked how his crew mates had been, Rubio said: “Fantastic, yeah, everybody did really well.”
Rubio was given a Russian matryoshka doll while Prokopyev was shown smiling beside the capsule and holding a watermelon,…