While I’m quite apt to cover launches of missions to the International Space Station, I often times don’t address the fact that 6 months later the Space Station crews return home in the Soyuz craft that took them up there to begin with.
Today, the crew of Expedition 51, Peggy Whitson, Oleg Novitskiy and Thomas Pesquet, boarded their Soyuz MS-03 spacecraft, undocked with the space station and a few hours later were back on Earth safely.
This isn’t the time where I’ll go into the details of the process – I have some future articles planned to go over the general details of how Soyuz operates, especially in regards to the International Space Station, but you don’t need to understand the process in detail to imagine the details of going from orbiting the Earth to making a landing at a particular spot on Kazakhstan.
To that end, have a video covering the undocking of Soyuz MS-03 from the ISS, and it’s eventual landing in Kazakhstan! Oh, and in case your wondering about the blast as the capsule lands, that’s normal – they use small rockets to brake the vehicle at the moment of landing – it’s supposed to make for quite a soft landing compared to how it could be, or even compared to the water landing the US used back in Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo!