Vande Hei has lived on the ISS for just under a year. He left on April 9 last year. Never before has an American been in space for so long. It has orbited the Earth 5,680 times and covered more than 150 million miles, calculated the American space agency NASA. On Wednesday, he takes a seat in a Soyuz capsule, along with two Russians. Their craft will disconnect from the space station at 9:21 AM Dutch time. This takes place at an altitude of more than 400 kilometers. The Soyuz then sinks into the atmosphere and should come down gently on the vast steppe of Kazakhstan around 1.28 pm.
In recent years, space travel has been one of the few areas where Russia and Western countries have continued to work together despite all the conflicts. That collaboration now seems to be a thing of the past. Russian-Western missions have been put on the back burner. The head of Russia’s space program, Dimitri Rogozin, is a staunch ally of President Vladimir Putin. When the West imposed sanctions on Russia, he threatened that Russia could wreck the ISS. He had the life-size letters Z and V applied to the launch installation in Baykonur, the symbols that Russia also used in the war.
The Russian space agency Roskosmos recently shared a video in which the Russian part of the ISS was disconnected from the rest. Vande Hei and the others were left alone in the universe. His mother said in interviews that she burst into tears when she saw the video.