Space Station Team Lands Safely on Earth

KOSTANAI, Kazakhstan — A Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying a U.S.-Russian-Dutch crew returned to Earth today from the international space station, landing on target in the steppes of Kazakhstan.

The snug Soyuz TMA-3 capsule carried American astronaut Michael Foale and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Kaleri, who spent some six months on the ISS, and European Space Agency astronaut Andre Kuipers of the Netherlands, who returned after a nine-day mission on the station.

“We landed amazingly softly,” Kaleri said as he sat in a chair outside the capsule, alongside his two crew mates, wrapped in blankets and sipping hot tea to stave off the early-morning chill.

Sean O’Keefe, the administrator of the U.S. space agency NASA, monitored the landing at mission control. He said it was “flawless.”

“It was a testimonial to the depth of the partnership of the International Space Station,” he said.

The homeward journey took about 3 1/2 hours, ending on the vast, wide-open steppes of Kazakhstan at 4:11 a.m. Moscow time (5:11 p.m. PDT Thursday). The first helicopter reached the site within minutes and its crew reported that the capsule was lying upright, on its bottom.

Search and rescue helicopters glimpsed the space capsule as it neared the ground, and the space officials broke into applause when the landing was reported.

It was the third time an American astronaut had come back to Earth aboard a Russian craft since the U.S. manned space program grounded its shuttle fleet following the February 2003 Columbia disaster.

The landing of the space station’s previous American-Russian crew in October was smooth and on target — unlike the dramatic landing of the first American astronaut in a Russian Soyuz capsule in May 2003, when a computer error sent the crew on a wild descent 250 miles off course.