NASA's oldest active astronaut lands with space station crewmates on his 70th birthday

By Robert Z. Pearlman
published 5 hours ago

Don Pettit's birthday "party" brought together Russian recovery teams in Kazakhstan, where it was April 20 (his birthdate).



NASA's oldest active astronaut has redefined traveling "home" for your birthday, landing from the International Space Station on the same day that he turned 70.

Don Pettit touched down on Saturday (April 19) with his Soyuz MS-26 crewmates, Aleksey Ovchinin, 53, and Ivan Vagner, 39. The U.S. astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts reached the ground in Kazakhstan at 9:20 p.m. EDT (0120 GMT or 6:20 a.m. local time April 20), seven months after they left Earth aboard the same spacecraft.

Pettit was born on April 20, 1955, in Silverton, Oregon, but said that the feeling of being home is relative to where you have been.

"After having been on [the] space station for seven months, we will be returning on our Soyuz spacecraft landing on the steppes of Kazakhstan. When our capsule goes thump on those desert flats, I will be literally on the opposite side of Earth, nearly 12,000 miles from home. Yet I will be home," Pettit wrote while he was still in space on Friday (April 18).

More:
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/international-space-station/nasas-oldest-active-astronaut-lands-with-space-station-crewmates-on-his-70th-birthday