Coronavirus forces detour for homecoming astronauts – Reuters

ALMATY (Reuters) – NASA astronauts Andrew Morgan and Jessica Meir will utilize an abnormal – and additional laborious – route house after safely landing within the Kazakh steppe on Friday, a Russian healthcare legit acknowledged, thanks to lockdowns attributable to the serene coronavirus.

A tablet carrying Morgan, Meir and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka touched down southeast of the Kazakh city of Dzhezkazgan at 1117 local time, as scheduled, after 9 months on the Global Home Position.

But because all of Kazakhstan’s provinces are in coronavirus lockdown, search and rescue groups may possibly well no longer self-discipline up corrupt in Dzhezkazgan or provincial centre Karaganda, acknowledged Vyacheslav Rogozhnikov, deputy head of Russia’s Federal Medical Natural Company.

As a change, the Baikonur cosmodrome positioned in Kazakhstan and rented by Russia change into faded as a corrupt and the crew of the Soyuz MS-15 spacecraft will head there after being extracted from the tablet, Rogozhkin acknowledged in an interview broadcast on-line by Russian house company Roscosmos.

From Baikonur, U.S. astronauts will utilize a 300km (186 miles) power to the city of Kzylorda, where they’re going to board a NASA plane, he acknowledged, in conjunction with hours of laborious land gallop after 205 days in house, 3,280 orbits of Earth and a visit of 86.9 million miles.