A Soyuz capsule swung down under its parachute onto the Kazakh steppe on Sunday afternoon, southeast of Dzhezkazgan, and three people who had been off the planet since November stepped back onto it. NASA astronaut Chris Williams and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev had spent 241 days aboard the International Space Station – 3,856 orbits and more than 102 million miles since their launch on 27 November 2025.
The descent itself was undramatic, which is rather the point. Soyuz MS-28 departed the station at 2:03 a.m. Central time and touched down at 5:27 a.m., mid-afternoon in Kazakhstan. Recovery teams flew the crew by helicopter to Karaganda; from there Williams boarded a NASA aircraft for the Johnson Space Center in Houston, while his two colleagues headed for their training base at Star City outside Moscow. It was a first spaceflight for Williams and Mikaev, and a second for Kud-Sverchkov.
What eight months produced
Williams spent the mission on a mixed portfolio of research, including work supporting new cancer treatments and improvements to the manufacturing in orbit of materials used in high-performance computers and electronics – a field where the absence of gravity changes what is physically possible. He also carried out two spacewalks: one preparing the station for power system upgrades, the other replacing a faulty joint on the Canadarm2 robotic arm, the manipulator the outpost relies on for capture and maintenance work.
Continuity is the quieter story here. People have now lived and worked aboard the station without a break for more than 25 years, and the handover was complete before this crew left. On 14 July, NASA's Anil Menon and Roscosmos cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina arrived for an eight-month stay of their own, having launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome that Russia leases in Kazakhstan. They joined NASA's Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, the European Space Agency's Sophie Adenot and Roscosmos' Andrei Fedyaev as Expedition 75.
That launch drew an unusual guest: NASA administrator Jared Isaacman attended in person, the first visit to Baikonur by the agency's chief in eight years. Rivals during the Cold War space race, the two agencies have kept the station running jointly through years of political strain between Washington and Moscow, with American and Russian crews continuing to fly aboard each other's spacecraft. On Sunday that arrangement delivered its most basic result: three people home, safely, on schedule.