While most people mark milestone birthdays with quiet reflection, NASA’s oldest serving astronaut Don Pettit celebrated his 70th birthday by returning to Earth after seven months aboard the International Space Station.
Pettit landed near Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, on April 20, the day he turned 70 — alongside Russian crewmates Alexei Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner.
Their spacecraft, Soyuz MS-26, undocked from the station just over three hours earlier and descended under parachute as the morning sun rose over the Kazakh steppe.
“Today at 4:20 Moscow time (1:20 GMT), the Soyuz MS-26 landing craft with Alexei Ovchinin, Ivan Vagner, and Donald (Don) Pettit aboard landed near the Kazakh town of Zhezkazgan,” Russia’s space agency Roscosmos stated.
During their time in orbit, the crew circled the planet 3,520 times and logged more than 93 million miles, conducting research ranging from fire behavior in microgravity to plant growth and water purification technologies.
This was the fourth space mission, bringing his total time spent in orbit to over 18 months across his nearly 30-year NASA career.
Despite the physical toll of long-duration spaceflight, NASA reported that Pettit was in good condition following the landing and would soon travel from Kazakhstan to the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Visuals showed Pettit and his crewmates giving a thumbs-up as recovery teams assisted them from the capsule to a nearby medical tent.
