Soyuz Departs Space Station As Crew Heads Toward Terra Firma

A Russian cosmonaut and an American astronaut are on their way back to terra firma today after a high-flying departure from the International Space Station.

Strapped in to a bug-shaped Soyuz spacecraft, outgoing flight engineer Max Suraev and Expedition 22 commander Jeffrey Williams backed away from the outpost at 4:03 a.m. EDT as the two craft soared 220 miles above the Russian-Mongolian border. The two now are headed to a point about 12 miles away from the station.

Then, at about 6:33 a.m., Suraev will fire Soyuz thrusters for four-minutes and 16 seconds, a retrograde burn that will slow the craft just enough to drop it out of orbit and onto a 50-minute ride back to a landing site in the north-central steppes of Kazakhstan.

You can watch the action live here in The Flame Trench. Click the NASA TV box on the right side of the page to launch our NASA TV viewer and live coverage beginning at 6:15 a.m. EDT. Landing outside the remote town of Arkalyk is scheduled at about 7:23 a.m. EDT.

Suraev and Williams climbed aboard the Soyuz about 12:45 a.m. and then hatches between the spacecraft and the station were sealed. They left behind a crew of three -- Expedition 23 commander Oleg Kotov and flight engineers Soichi Noguchi of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and U.S. astronaut Timothy Creamer.

The crews could be heard saying farewell to each other as the Soyuz backed away from the station. Creamer rung a bell in the U.S. segment of the station as the spacecraft pulled away. The bell-ringing is a tradition that dates back to the first expedition crew of the station -- U.S. astronaut Bill Shepard and Russian cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko -- who opened the station for business in November 2000.