A woman took command of the International Space Station for only the second time Monday as three of her US and Russian colleagues made a safe return from the orbiting space lab to the Kazakh steppe. The Soyuz TMA-04M capsule made a pin-point landing with US astronaut Joe Acaba and Russian cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin aboard a vessel whose origins stretch back to the early days of Soviet space flight.
NASA television footage showed the smiling men relaxing in lounge chairs and sipping warm drinks from thermoses while medical teams checked their pulses and chatted to them about their trip. "It's good to be home," a NASA official quoted Acaba as saying the moment he was pulled out of the Russian capsule to mark the formal end of his 125-day stay in space.
The crew then set what may become a new tradition by signing their names on the black Soyuz capsule in honour of their journey. "I have not seen that before," a NASA television commentator observed. The three leave behind another trio led by new commander Suni Williams - a US space veteran who has logged the most days in orbit by a woman as well as the greatest number of hours conducting space walks.
"I appreciate all the lessons learned and all the great humour that we have had up here," Williams told outgoing commander Padalka in televised images moments before the hand-off. "It has been a lot of fun and that is mostly because of you and your crew. And we hope that our crew ... can maintain that and pass it on" when the replacement team comes up at the end of next month. Williams is now in charge of a crew also comprised of Japan's Aki Hoshide and the Russian Yury Malenchenko.
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