NASA's oldest active astronaut has returned home to Houston after his latest stint in orbit.
Don Pettit arrived in Space City on Sunday (April 20), which happened to be his 70th birthday.
It was a day after Pettit and his two cosmonaut colleagues, Aleksey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner, touched down on the steppe of Kazakhstan inside a Russian Soyuz capsule, bringing their seven-month-long International Space Station (ISS) mission to an end. (It was Sunday in Kazakhstan when the trio landed, so touchdown technically occurred on Pettit's birthday.)
Pettit looked a bit unwell in a NASA broadcast as recovery team members hauled him out of the Soyuz. But that was nothing to worry about, NASA officials told us on landing day.
Pettit "is doing well and in the range of what is expected for him following return to Earth," the agency said via an update on X late Saturday.
In that same post, NASA officials noted that Pettit tends to have a rough time with landings. Or rather, they let Pettit make that point himself, quoting an interview the astronaut gave to an Oregon TV station from the ISS on April 16: "This is a physiological thing. It affects different people different ways. Some people can go out and eat pizza and dance. When I land, it takes me about 24 hours to feel like I'm a human being again."
Time seems to have done its usual healing trick, for Pettit now looks happy and healthy: NASA's X post about his Houston arrival features a photo of the astronaut smiling and waving as he exits the plane that flew him there.
Pettit has spent a total of 590 days off Earth across four different space missions. The astronaut is well known to space enthusiasts for his stunning orbital photography, which he frequently shares via social media.
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