NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei scheduled to return to Earth in Russian space capsule

Image: NASA

Mark Vande Hei will return to Earth on March 30th in a Russian rocket along with two Russian cosmonauts. His journey back to the planet has been a source of tension between the United States and Russia since the invasion of Ukraine.

Vande Hei has been on the International Space Station since April 2021. The standard length of stay for most astronauts is six months. In September, NASA announced that Vande Hei's stay had been extended to better accommodate a few visiting tourists and a Russian movie crew that Russia sent to the ISS at the end of last year. Vande Hei will hold the record for the longest continuous stay in space by an American, 355 days.

Vande Hei will return to Earth in a different capsule than the one he launched in, though the plan has always been for him to return in a Russian Soyuz. Some wondered what the invasion of Ukraine by Russia would mean for Vande Hei's trip. NASA assured the public that the space agency and Russia's state space corporation continued to work together to maintain normal operations of the space station. Vande Hei was going to come home in a Soyuz.

On March 5th, RIA Novosti, a Russian state news program, shared a video on Telegram that included footage of Vande Hei on the International Space Station, as well as two Russian cosmonauts. The video was edited so that it looked like the cosmonauts were going to leave Vande Hei behind. The Russian portion of the space station was shown in a video detaching from the rest of the space station.

RIA Novosti described the video as a joke, but some media outlets took the depictions seriously, interpreting the footage as Russia threatening to strand Vande Hei in space. The video was shared to his Telegram channel by the head of Roscosmos. The Russian space partnership has been the subject of a number of wild threats by the Russian space agency, at one point suggesting that the International Space Station could come crashing down on Earth if Russia pulled out of the program.

Good Morning America and Fox News speculated that Vande Hei would be leaving the International Space Station.

In a press conference on March 14th, NASA stated that operations would continue as usual. During the conference, the program manager at NASA said that there was nothing to add about the video. Montalbano said that there were no plans to end the partnership between NASA and the Russian space agency. He said that they were aware of what was happening, but they were able to continue operations.

Image: NASA

Vande Hei and his two crewmates will say their goodbyes to the rest of the astronauts on the International Space Station before entering the Soyuz and closing the capsule. The space station will be detached from it around 3:21AM. The capsule will perform a burn of its thrusters in order to get out of the air, and will land in the middle of the day. Vande Hei will return to Houston, Texas, on a NASA jet the same way previous astronauts have returned from the International Space Station. NASA will provide live coverage of each major milestone starting at 11:30PM tonight.

The crew of the International Space Station showed their unity ahead of the return of the Soyuz. On Tuesday, the crew conducted a change of command ceremony, with Shkaplerov handing over the symbolic key to the space station to Tom Marshburn. Shkaplerov said that people have problems on Earth. We are one crew.