Russian Soyuz brings three home after 8 months at space station

Two Russian cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut closed out a 241-day stay aboard the International Space Station early Sunday with a fiery plunge back to Earth and an on-target touchdown on the broad steppe of Kazakhstan.

Strapped into the Soyuz MS-28/74S ferry ship, commander Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, flight engineer Sergey Mikaev and NASA's Chris Williams undocked from the station's Russian Rassvet module at 3:03 a.m. EDT and slowly backed away from the lab complex.

Two-and-a-half hours later, now a safe distance away and properly lined up for re-entry, the Soyuz's braking rockets fired for four minutes and 42 seconds, dropping the craft out of orbit on a southwest-to-northeast trajectory toward Kazakhstan.

After rapidly decelerating in a blaze of atmospheric friction, the Soyuz crew module's main parachute unfurled and inflated for a 10-minute descent to a jarring rocket-assisted touchdown at 6:27 a.m. EDT (3:27 p.m. local time) near the town of Dzhezkazgan.

Mission duration: 241 days over 3,856 orbits covering 102 million miles since launch last Nov. 27.

Russian recovery crews stationed nearby quickly raced to the crew module to help the returning fliers out of the cramped capsule as they began re-adjusting to gravity after eight months in weightlessness.

As with virtually all Soyuz landings, Kud-Sverchkov, Mikaev and Williams were carried to nearby recliners for initial medical checks, a bit of fresh fruit and satellite phone calls home to family and friends.

"I am feeling better and better with each moment," Kud-Sverchkov said from his recliner. "I would like to thank everyone who supported this landing. Everything was smooth and perfect. Everything was just excellent."

All three crew members were given personalized Russian matryoshka dolls as welcome home gifts.

"There is vodka inside," someone said through a translator. "Well, actually, this is why I flew to space in the first place," one of the crew members joked.

After doffing their bulky pressure suits, the trio was to be flown by helicopter to the town of Karaganda some 285 miles away. From there, Williams faced a long flight back to the Johnson Space Center in Houston aboard a NASA jet while his crewmates headed home to Star City near Moscow.

With landing Sunday, Williams and flight engineer Mikaev completed their first space flight while Kud-Sverchkov, a seasoned veteran who logged 185 days aboard the space station in 2020-2021, wrapped up his second.

Over the course of the flight, Williams participated in two spacewalks: one to replace a joint in the lab's robot arm and another to prep