Updated December 9, 2025 / 1:16 AM EST / CBS News
A NASA astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts returned to Earth early Tuesday after undocking from the International Space Station and completing an eight-month mission. The Soyuz MS-27/73S crewed ferry, with commander Sergey Ryzhikov seated at the center, cosmonaut Alexey Zubritsky on his left and NASA astronaut Jonny Kim on his right, departed the station Monday evening.
The Soyuz undocked at 8:41 p.m. ET. After drifting to a safe distance, the spacecraft fired its braking motors at 11:09 p.m. for four minutes and 42 seconds, reducing the vehicle’s roughly 17,100-mph orbital speed by about 286 mph and lowering the opposite side of the orbit into the atmosphere.
The descent module endured peak re-entry temperatures near 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit and heavy deceleration before deploying its large orange-and-white parachute. The capsule touched down on the cold Kazakh steppe at 12:03 a.m. EST Tuesday (05:03 UTC; 10:03 a.m. local time) and came to rest tipped on its side.
Russian recovery teams and NASA support personnel reached the scorched module in sub-freezing conditions, opened the hatch, helped the crew out and conducted initial medical checks as the astronauts readjusted to gravity. Kim briefly rested in a nearby recliner and appeared in good spirits; recovery personnel presented him with a nested matryoshka doll painted with his likeness. After more comprehensive medical exams inside a heated inflatable facility, the crew was scheduled to be flown by helicopter to Dzhezkazgan. Kim planned to board a NASA jet there for the trip back to Johnson Space Center in Houston, while Ryzhikov and Zubritsky were to return to Star City near Moscow for debriefings and family reunions.
Several crew members remain on the station: NASA Crew-11 astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui and cosmonaut Oleg Platonov. Also aboard are Soyuz MS-28/74S commander Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, flight engineer Sergei Mikaev and NASA astronaut Christopher Williams, who arrived Nov. 27 to replace Ryzhikov, Zubritsky and Kim.
At a change-of-command ceremony Sunday, Kim reflected on what he would remember most from his eight months in orbit: the close relationships formed with his crewmates. He said the essential quality that enabled their work wasn’t just technical skill or loyalty but an ability to give each other grace and support — a kind of love that underpins long-duration spaceflight.
Over the course of their mission, the trio traveled about 104 million miles and completed 3,920 orbits of Earth. Kim focused on research and maintenance tasks in the U.S. segment of the station, while Ryzhikov and Zubritsky performed two spacewalks.
Kim, the son of South Korean immigrants and a father of three, brings an unusually varied background to NASA: he is a former Navy SEAL and combat veteran who later earned a medical degree from Harvard Medical School. In pre-launch interviews he described difficult moments in combat that left him burned out and motivated him to pursue medicine as another way to serve. He has said he downplayed his SEAL past in clinical settings so colleagues and patients would judge him by his work rather than by his military background.