A Russian-US crew returned safely to Earth today from the international space station, their Soyuz space capsule streaking through the atmosphere and landing on target in the steppes of Kazakhstan.
The bell-shaped Soyuz TMA-4, carrying Russian cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Yuri Shargin and American Mike Fincke, parachuted down to the landing site, some 55 miles north of the Kazakh town of Arkalyk, at 4:36 a.m. Moscow time.
Search crew members helped the three men out of the capsule. They sat in chairs, sipping hot drinks and bundled up in blankets, and then underwent brief medical checks in a nearby tent before flying to Moscow's Star City, the home-base of Russia's space program.
"The cosmonauts are in a good mood, they are feeling fine," Russian Space Agency head Anatoly Perminov told reporters at Russian Mission Control outside Moscow, where Russian and U.S. space officials had gathered to monitor the Soyuz's descent.
Padalka and Fincke had been in space since April, and had conducted four space walks, including a crucial mission to repair a gyroscope that orients the station in space. Shargin had spent eight days on the station after arriving with the new crew, Salizhan Sharipov of Russia and Leroy Chiao of the United States.
The two crews bid each other farewell hours earlier at the space station.
"Good luck. I wish you a fortunate mission. We'll meet you back on Earth," Padalka told Sharipov and Chiao before entering the Soyuz and strapping himself in.
Fincke, Padalka's American partner, said the mission had been a "great adventure," adding "we were successful only because we were working together."
Space officials at Mission Control echoed those sentiments.
The Soyuz's return flight "was another successful effort for a continuous presence on the international station," said NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe.
O'Keefe also praised the Russian space agency workers, especially the helicopter-based search and rescue crews, for their "tremendous professionalism."
The crews took just 14 minutes to reach the capsule after its landing, compared with an average 1 1/2-hour search after nighttime arrivals, said Vasily Tsibliyev, head of the Cosmonauts' Training Center at Star City, outside Moscow.
Russia's non-reusable Soyuz has become the linchpin of the global community's manned space program, filling in for the U.S. shuttle fleet, which has been grounded since Columbia burned up on re-entry in February 2003.
The spacecraft, the workhorse of Russia's cash-strapped space program, boasts a stellar safety record.
But minor glitches occasionally occur. Earlier this month, the crew arriving at the space station had to turn off the autopilot and manually connect the Soyuz to the docking point after an unidentified problem resulted in the craft approaching the station at a dangerously high speed.
In May 2003, the first time American astronauts returned on the Soyuz, a computer malfunction sent the crew on a dive so steep that the astronauts' tongues rolled back in their mouths. The crew landed so far off target that more than two hours elapsed before rescuers knew the men were safe.
Now the Soyuz is outfitted with satellite phones and a global positioning satellite system. Russia also requests that the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan close off a large area of its airspace before the scheduled landing.
NASA has said that its shuttles should be flying again by early summer.
AP