After 241 Days in Orbit, NASA Astronaut and Russian Cosmonauts Return to Earth Together

After 241 days living and working 250 miles above Earth, NASA astronaut Chris Williams and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev are coming home. Their Soyuz MS-28 spacecraft will undock from the ISS's Rassvet module at precisely 3:02 a.m. EDT on Sunday, July 26, with touchdown scheduled for 6:26 a.m. EDT — a parachute-assisted landing on the Kazakh steppe that caps one of the longer continuous human spaceflights in recent ISS history. That 241-day figure is worth sitting with. For the better part of a year, this crew ate, slept, exercised, and conducted science in microgravity — enduring bone density loss, fluid shifts, and the psychological weight of orbital isolation — all in service of understanding how the human body and mind adapt to deep space conditions. Every day logged is data that informs future missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. What makes this return quietly remarkable is its international character. An American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts are landing together in a Russian spacecraft, the product of decades of joint operational trust between NASA and Roscosmos. Whatever turbulence exists on the ground, the ISS partnership continues to function with precision — undocking times measured in seconds, landing windows calculated to the minute. NASA is providing live coverage of the undocking and landing. The crew's safe return marks the close of Expedition operations for this increment and the handoff to those remaining aboard — a relay race that has kept humans continuously present in space since November 2000, now 24 years and counting.