Oldest astronaut lands back on Earth on his 70th birthday

Telegraph

20-04-2025

Nasa's oldest serving astronaut turned 70 as he hurtled back to Earth after a seven-month mission in space.
Don Pettit landed in Kazakhstan in the early hours of his milestone birthday, marking the end of his sixties and his mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
A Soyuz capsule carrying Mr Pettit, who is American, and two Russian cosmonauts landed on Sunday morning, hours after undocking from the ISS.
'Today at 0420 Moscow time (0120 GMT), the Soyuz MS-26 landing craft with Alexei Ovchinin, Ivan Vagner and Donald (Don) Pettit aboard landed near the Kazakh town of Zhezkazgan,' Russia's Roscosmos space agency said.
Space remains a rare avenue of cooperation between Russia and the US, whose relationship broke down after Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Mr Pettit and his crew mates, Mr Ovchinin and Mr Vagner, spent 220 days in space, orbiting the Earth 3,520 times and completing a journey of 93.3 million miles over the course of their mission.
It was Mr Pettit's fourth space flight, with the astronaut now having logged more than 18 months in orbit throughout his 29-year career.
Despite turning 70 as the mission ended, Mr Pettit is not the oldest person to fly in orbit. In 1998, the late John Glenn flew on a Nasa mission aged 77.
Images of the landing released by Nasa showed the small capsule parachuting down to Earth with the sunrise as a backdrop.
The trio landed in a remote area in Kazakhstan at 6:20am local time, after undocking from the space station just over three hours earlier.
One picture showed a frail-looking Mr Pettit giving a thumbs up as he was carried to a medical tent in his white space suit after landing back on Earth.
Nasa said Mr Pettit was 'doing well and in the range of what is expected for him following return to Earth'.
He is expected to travel to the Kazakh city of Karaganda and spend some time readjusting to gravity before boarding a Nasa plane to the agency's Johnson Space Center in Texas.
Meanwhile, Mr Ovchinin and Mr Vagner will go to Russia's space training base in Zvyozdniy Gorodok (Star City) near Moscow.
Mr Pettit spent his time on the ISS researching water sanitisation technology, 3D printing capabilities, plant growth in various conditions and fire behaviour in microgravity, Nasa said.
His time on the ISS largely overlapped with US astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams who were 'stranded' in space for nine months after the Boeing spacecraft they were testing suffered technical issues and was deemed unfit to fly them back to Earth.
The astronauts boarded a Boeing Starliner in June last year for what was meant to be an eight-day mission to the space station, but their return date was repeatedly pushed back after the shuttle's thrusters encountered problems.
They splashed down off the Gulf of Florida last month aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule after spending 278 days on the ISS.
Their protracted stay became a political flashpoint, with Donald Trump and Elon Musk blaming former president Joe Biden for leaving them up there for political reasons.
Mr Wilmore and Ms Williams, whose initial eight-day mission was beset with delays, said last month they would return to space on the Boeing aircraft.
'We're going to rectify all the issues that we encountered. We're going to fix it, we're going to make it work', Mr Wilmore said.
'This is a tough business,' he added. 'The analogy about it's always a curvy road. It's never straight in this business.'