Oldest serving US astronaut returns to Earth on 70th birthday

America’s oldest serving astronaut Dan Pettit has returned to Earth on his 70th birthday.

The Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft carrying Pettit and his Russian crewmates Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner made a parachute-assisted landing in Kazakhstan’s steppe at 06:20 local time (01:20 GMT) on Sunday.

They spent 220 days on board the International Space Station (ISS), orbiting the Earth 3,520 times, the US space agency Nasa said.

For Pettit – who has now spent a total of 590 days in space – it was his fourth mission.

Still, he is not the oldest person to fly in orbit – that record belongs to John Glenn, who aged 77 flew on a Nasa mission in 1998. He died in 2016.

Pettit and the two Russian cosmonauts will now spend some time readjusting to gravity.

After that, Pettit – who was born in Oregon on 20 April 1955 – will be flown to Houston in Texas, while Ovchinin and Vagner will go to Russia’s main space training base in Zvyozdniy Gorodok (Star City) near Moscow.

Before their departure from the ISS, the crew handed command of the spaceship to Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi.

Last month, two Nasa astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, finally returned to Earth after spending more than nine months on board the ISS – instead of the initially planned just eight days.

They flew to the ISS in June 2024 – but technical issues with the spacecraft they used to get to the space station meant they were only able to return to Earth on 18 March this year.