Three-man crew returns from space station

DZHEZKAZGAN, Kazakhstan — Two astronauts, from the US and Italy, and a Russian cosmonaut on Thursday landed in Kazakhstan after almost five months on the International Space Station, footage from the Russian space agency showed.

Randy Bresnik of the United States, Paolo Nespoli of Italy and Sergey Ryazanskiy of Russia landed on the Kazakh steppe at 2:37 pm local time in a Soyuz MS-05 spacecraft.

Over 139 days in space the three “have supported hundreds of experiments in biology, biotechnology, physical science and Earth science aboard humanity’s only microgravity laboratory,” NASA said.

Bresnik took part in several spacewalks to fix a robotic arm that latches onto incoming spaceships packed with supplies, while all three men were involved in a live video chat with Pope Francis from the space station.

On Sunday, Scott Tingle of NASA, Anton Shkaplerov of Roscosmos and Norishige Kanai of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency will blast off from Kazakhstan’s Baikonur cosmodrome to replace the returning astronauts and cosmonaut.

The space travelers will join three other crew members currently on the ISS.

In October Russia’s space agency said a manned Soyuz rocket had suffered a partial loss of pressure as it returned to Earth from the ISS in April.

The incident did not put the lives of the crew in danger, Roscosmos said.

NASA stopped its own manned launches to the ISS in 2011 but recently moved to increase its crew complement aboard the ISS as the Russians cut theirs in a cost-saving measure announced last year.

The ISS laboratory, a rare example of US and Russian international cooperation, has been orbiting Earth at about 28,000 km/h since 1998.