Blogs about astronaut activities
A little while ago, cosmonauts Sergey Kud‑Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev and astronaut Chris Williams returned to Earth on the Soyuz MS-28 spacecraft, which landed in Kazakhstan. They had reached the International Space Station on November 27, 2025, as part of a normal crew rotation. The capsule landed on its side, an event that can occur due to reentry conditions, but the crew members suffered no injuries.
A few hours ago, the Soyuz MS-29 spacecraft was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, and, after a little more than three hours, reached the International Space Station with three new crew members on board. It docked with the Station’s Prichal module. The ultra-fast track was used, which halves the journey duration and is used whenever the Station’s position makes it possible.
A few hours ago, the three Chinese taikonauts of the Shenzhou 22 mission returned to Earth after spending 210 days on the Tiangong space station, where they arrived on October 31, 2025, in the mission that started as Shenzhou 21. The three taikonauts, Zhang Lu, Wu Fei, and Zhang Hongzhang, had departed the station less than six hours earlier to land at a site called Dongfeng in China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.
A confirmation has arrived that three Chinese taikonauts from the Shenzhou 23 mission reached the Chinese space station Tiangong with an automated docking maneuver. They blasted off about 3.5 hours earlier atop a Long March-2F rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. Two of them will remain there for about six months, the standard duration for a mission, while the third taikonaut will conduct a one-year mission.
The three taikonauts, as the Chinese call their astronauts, on the Shenzhou 23 mission are Zhu Yangzhu, Zhang Zhiyuan, and Lai Ka-ying. The identities of the crew members are revealed only at the last minute, but Chinese authorities have recently started releasing more information than they did a few years ago.
It was afternoon in the USA when NASA’s Orion Integrity spacecraft concluded its Artemis II mission by splashing down off the coast of San Diego. It launched on April 2 atop NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS). Some support ships were in the area to recover Integrity and rescue astronauts Christina Koch, Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, and Jeremy Hansen. Everything salvageable was recovered, such as the splashdown system’s parachutes, to gather as much data as possible on the critical phase of the return to Earth.
