Record-breaking US astronaut returns to Earth

NASA’s Christina Koch returned to Earth safely yesterday having shattered the spaceflight record for female astronauts after almost a year aboard the International Space Station. Koch touched down at 0912 GMT on the Kazakh steppe after 328 days in space along with Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency and Alexander Skvortsov of the Russian space agency. Dmitry Rogozin, head of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, said the crew had returned safely.

“All is well on board, the crew are feeling well,” Rogozin wrote on Twitter. Koch, a 41-year-old Michigan-born engineer, beat the previous record for a single spaceflight by a woman -- 289 days, held by NASA veteran Peggy Whitson -- on December 28, 2019. She had already made history by that point as one half of the first-ever all-woman spacewalk along with NASA counterpart Jessica Meir in October. Koch told NBC on Tuesday that she would “miss microgravity” as she spoke to journalists ahead of the three-and-a-half hour journey back to Earth.