3 astronauts return from 115 days on the International Space Station

Ground personnel help astronaut Kate Rubins get out of the Soyuz space capsule

(Image credit: Dmitri Lovetsky/Getty Images)

published 30 October 2016

Three astronauts returned to Earth on Sunday morning after spending nearly four months on board the International Space Station (ISS). American astronaut Kate Rubins, Anatoly Ivanishin of Russia, and Takuya Onishi of Japan landed in a Soyuz space capsule in southeast Kazakhstan.

The trip to Earth took less than four hours, though the astronauts had to spend some time simply sitting in the field where they landed to readjust to Earth's gravity. Three astronauts still on the ISS now await the arrival of three new crew members.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Explore More

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.