BACK TO EARTH

KAZAKHSTAN is home to the Baikonur Cosmodrome which hosts the facilities, equipment, and personnel that are needed to support launch and recovery operations for the International Space Station. Currently, the only way to get crew to and from the ISS is to use a Soyuz spacecraft. Baikonur Cosmodrome is the world’s oldest and largest operating space launch facility. It was the location of the first space launch ever, the flight of Sputnik-1, the world’s first artificial satellite which left Earth on October 4, 1957. It was also the launch site for Yuri Gagarin’s first manned spaceflight aboard the Vostok 1.

French astronaut Thomas Pesquet and his Russian colleague Oleg Novitskiy recently returned back to Earth on Soyuz MS-03 after a marathon 196-day trip. The space capsule landed in a remote area outside the town of Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan. Three people remain on the ISS. They will be joined in late July by the crew of Soyuz MS-05, which will include Russian cosmonaut Sergey Ryazansky, ESA astronaut Paolo Nespoli, and astronaut Randy Bresnik from NASA. Oleg Novitskiy after his safe return from the ISS