A NASA astronaut "sealed" 20 years of crewed operations on the International Space Station with his and his two crewmates' safe return to Earth.
Navy SEAL, left the space station and landed on the steppe of Kazakhstan with cosmonauts Anatoli Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner of the Russian federal space corporation Roscosmos on Wednesday (Oct. 21).
The trio's landing came just 10 days before the 20th anniversary of the launch of the first crew to take up residency aboard the International Space Station (ISS), an expedition that was also comprised by one American and two Russians.
Navy SEAL astronauts in space," Cassidy wrote on Twitter a day before his return to Earth.
Cassidy, Ivanishin and Vagner's departure from the space station marked the end of Expedition 63, with NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov of Roscosmos on board the ISS to start Expedition 64.
Launched in April, Cassidy, Ivanishin and Vagner initially joined the Expedition 62 crew of Oleg Skripochka of Roscosmos and NASA astronauts Drew Morgan and Jessica Meir before beginning Expedition 63.
In the middle, we had time as a five-person crew with Bob [Behnken] and Doug [Hurley], and we had the privilege of welcoming the SpaceX Demo mission on board the International Space Station.".
The SpaceX Dragon Demo-2 mission, on which Behnken and Hurley flew, marked the first commercially operated crewed flight to the space station and the first flight of NASA astronauts from a U.S.
From there, Cassidy will board a NASA plane for a flight back to Houston, while a Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center aircraft will return Ivanishin and Vagner to their homes in Star City, Russia!
Cassidy, 50, has now logged 378 days in space over the course of his three missions, including a 2009 space shuttle flight and a previous ISS stay in 2013!
He now ranks fifth among all NASA astronauts for total time in space.
Soyuz MS-16 was the 62nd Soyuz to launch for the International Space Station.
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