Earlier, some US media outlets doubted if Russia would take Mark Vande Hei back to Earth amid the barrage of sanctions over the Ukraine crisis
MOSNASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei, who has spent nearly a year on the ISS, has left the orbital outpost in Russia’s Soyuz MS-19 space capsule as planned, with the ongoing sanctions feud between Russia and the United States having no effect whatsoever on the original space mission schedule.
As follows from a livestream by Russia’s space corporation Roscosmos, Vande Hei left the ISS together with two Russian cosmonauts, Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov.
Before the hatches between the spacecraft and the ISS were shut, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Artemiev said jokingly that he had held roll call for all those boarding the departing capsule.
Earlier, some US media outlets doubted if Russia would take Vande Hei back to Earth amid the barrage of sanctions over the Ukraine crisis. Roscosmos CEO Dmitry Rogozin uploaded to his Telegram channel an extract from a Fox News broadcast claiming there was a risk Russia might leave the US astronaut in space.
Roscosmos then had to confirm the obvious and to remind everyone that it had never created the slightest pretext that it might let its partners doubt its reliability. The space corporation reassured that the US astronaut would travel back to the Earth as expected.
