Astronauts from America, Russia, and Belarus return to Earth

Astronauts from America, Russia, and Belarus return to Earth

 An American astronaut from NASA and two astronauts from Russia and Belarus returned to Earth, Saturday, after a mission on the International Space Station, the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos) announced.

The agency said in a statement: “Today (Saturday), at 10:17 Moscow time (07:17 GMT), the lander of the manned spacecraft Soyuz MS-24 landed near the Kazakh town of Dzhezkazgan.” The Russian Space Agency explained that the landing process occurred "normally."

The Roscosmos statement indicated that Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky and the first Belarusian astronaut in history, Marina Vasilevskaya, “spent 14 days in orbit,” while American astronaut Loral O’Hara returned from a mission that lasted 204 days.

In a statement, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko congratulated “the crew of the Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft on the successful landing.” Two weeks ago, the takeoff of the Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station, with Vasilevskaya and Novitsky on board, was postponed for a few days until March 23.

This postponement represented a new setback for the Russian space sector, which has been suffering for years due to problems related to financing, corruption scandals, and failures. Despite diplomatic tensions between Washington and Moscow, cooperation continues between the American and Russian space agencies on the International Space Station, which constitutes one of the rare areas of cooperation remaining between the two parties.