‘Bulls-eye’ landing by space crew after 193-day mission

About a dozen recovery helicopters flew into the vast uncultivated land mass, where American Nasa astronaut Donald Pettit, Russia’s Oleg Kononenko and Dutchman Andre Kuipers landed in the Russian-made capsule.

Russian space officials quickly surrounded the craft, which performed a textbook upright landing, and erected ladders to begin the process of pulling out the astronauts.

The voyage from the space station started three and a half hours earlier when it undocked and began a slow, gentle drift away. It made a perfect landing in the still and summery weather at 2.14 pm local time, right on schedule.

Commenting on the landing, Nasa TV reporter Rob Navias described it as “a bulls-eye”.

Kononenko was the first to be extracted from the descent module. He looked pale and tired, but medical staff announced him healthy. Pettit, second out of the module, was heard to say: “It’s good to be home.”

The three men were hoisted into recliners and posed for photos before being carried into a tent for further checks.

Writing on his Nasa blog on the eve of his departure from the space station, Pettit wrote: “I only hope that my small efforts here, perhaps adding one grain of sand to the beach of knowledge, will help enable a generation of people in the future to call space ‘home.’”

Pettit and his colleagues were part of the team that handled the arrival to the space station last month of the privately owned SpaceX Dragon capsule. That became the first private delivery to the International Space Station.