A NASA astronaut has safely returned to Earth in a Russian Soyuz capsule along with two other International Space Station crew members after the three spent six months in space.
Landing in Kazakhstan at 9:58 p.m. ET May 13, NASA's Rick Mastracchio, Japanese crewmember Koichi Wakata and cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin completed their orbital mission and marked the end of Expedition 39, Space.com reported.
According to NASA officials, the three men spent 188 days in space, lapping the Earth 3,000 times and traveling more than 78 million miles.
Their journey back to Earth comes in the midst of international tension as sanctions due to the Ukraine conflict complicate the space relationship between America and Russia.
After the annexation of Crimea, the U.S. and Europe have imposed sanctions against Russia, but NASA has continued to work with the country to keep shuttling astronauts to the ISS.
The situation has led to tension, most recently when Russia's deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin told Russian news agencies on Tuesday that RD-180 engines, which power American missions, will not be allowed to launch U.S. military payloads, CBS News reported.
Rogozin offered an additional blow when he said Moscow plans to reject America's request to use the ISS after 2020, according to Reuters.
"We are very concerned about continuing to develop high-tech projects with such an unreliable partner as the United States, which politicizes everything," said Rogozin, as quoted by Reuters.
After space collaborations with Russia were scaled back in light of the Ukraine conflict, NASA recently called for more funding to end such ties with the country completely. The space agency has had to work with Russia to send astronauts into space since the American space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011.
"NASA is laser focused on a plan to return human spaceflight launches to American soil, and end our reliance on Russia to get into space," said a NASA blog post shared on Google+. "This has been a top priority of the Obama Administration's for the past five years, and had our plan been fully funded, we would have returned American human spaceflight launches--and the jobs they support--back to the United States next year."
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