MOSCOW A Soyuz capsule carrying an astronaut and two cosmonauts touched down on Earth Wednesday after undocking from the International Space Station following 166 days in space.
Outgoing station commander Pavel Vinogradov, NASA's Christopher Cassidy and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin bid their crewmates good-bye and climbed aboard the Russian craft for the three-and-a-half hour flight back to Earth, leaving a skeleton crew to maintain the outpost until replacements arrive later this month.
They landed safely in Kazakhstan. They launched from there on March 29.
Live NASA footage showed the three men emerging from the capsule and onto the sunny Kazakh steppe, where they were first put into reclining chairs to help them readjust to Earth's gravity.
The Soyuz is the only means for international astronauts to reach aznd return from the orbiting laboratory since the decommissioning of the U.S. space shuttle fleet in 2011.
"The time has gone by so incredibly fast," Cassidy said during an in-flight interview last week. "It'll be really sad to leave. This is an incredible experience. ... But by the same token, I'm ready to go. It's time for some other people to come ... and I'm really excited to go back and see my friends and family."
Before leaving, Vinogradov, a veteran of three spaceflights, transferred command of the $100 billion station, a project of 15 nations, to fellow cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin, who remains aboard with Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano and NASA's Karen Nyberg.
"We had a great environment here, very friendly and very warm," Vinogradov said through a translator in a ceremony on NASA TV on Monday marking the change in command.
A replacement space station crew, headed by veteran cosmonaut Oleg Kotov and including rookies Sergey Ryazanskiy and Michael Hopkins, is due to launch Sept. 25.
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