Watch: Astronauts Land After Being Stuck in Space and Orbiting Earth 6,000 Times

Frank Rubio is happy to be home. Photo: State Space Corporation Roscosmos

The third capsule was ready for flight only at the beginning of this month. This means the crew replacing the three men arrived just two weeks ago.

“No one deserves to go home to their families more than you,” new station commander Andreas Mogensen said earlier this week from Denmark. .

The crew was defying gravity more than four times as their capsule zipped through the atmosphere and landed on its side in the Kazakh steppes. Helicopters carrying rescue teams then arrived.

“It’s good to be home,” Rubio, 47, said after being pulled from the capsule.

Expedition 69 NASA astronaut Frank Rubio squeezed out of spacecraft Photo: State Space Corporation Roscosmos

It was the first space flight of a NASA astronaut and Mr. Petelin, 40, an engineer. Prokopyev, 48, an engineer and pilot, has already been at the station twice.

The three men have covered 157 million miles since launching from Kazakhstan last September and circled the globe nearly 6,000 times.

Mr. Rubio, an Army doctor and helicopter pilot, said last week that he would never have agreed to a full year in space if he had been asked in the first place.

The astronaut said that He ended up missing family milestones, including one of his four children heading to West Point Military Academy.

He spent 16 days longer in space than Mark Vande Hei, who set the previous NASA record for endurance in one space flight. Russia holds the world record of 437 days, set in the mid-1990s.