#expedition 53

[gusgrissom]

Happy Halloween from the crew of Expedition 53 aboard the International Space Station! (x)

[rjbailey]

Soyuz Carrying Expedition 53 Crew Lands in Kazakhstan by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center Via Flickr: The Soyuz MS-05 spacecraft is seen as it lands with Expedition 53 Commander Randy Bresnik of NASA and Flight Engineers Paolo Nespoli of ESA (European Space Agency) and Sergey Ryazanskiy of the Russian space agency Roscosmos near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan on Thursday, Dec. 14, 2017. Bresnik, Nespoli and Ryazanskiy returned to Earth after 138 days in space, where they served as members of the Expedition 52 and 53 crews onboard the International Space Station. Their Soyuz landed safely at 3:37 a.m. EST (2:37 p.m. Kazakhstan time). Image credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls Read more NASA Media Usage Guidelines

[gusgrissom]

“To live with you and to work with you, it will stay in my heart. I am sure for all of us, it will stay in our hearts for the rest of our life.” -Alexander Misurkin

“I look forward to the Expedition 53 reunion, in twenty years, on Mars.” -Randy Bresnik

The crew of Expedition 53 says goodbye as NASA’s Randy Bresnik, ESA’s Paolo Nespoli, and Roscosmos’ Sergey Ryazanskiy prepare to return to Earth after a five-month stay aboard the International Space Station.

Russian cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin and American astronauts Joe Acaba and Mark Vande Hei remain at the ISS as a part of Expedition 54. They’ll be joined by three more crew members later this week. (NASA)

[gusgrissom]

Expedition 53/54 crew members Alexander Misurkin, Joe Acaba, and Mark Vande Hei left Earth in their Soyuz MS-06 spacecraft and arrived at the International Space Station on September 12-13, 2017, ahead of a five-and-a-half month stay aboard the ISS.

[gusgrissom]

@AstroKomrade: Our Earth is but an island in the cosmos. Exp 53 crew is embracing the island lifestyle with our @Space_Station Hawaiians on #Aloha Friday!

[everybittexas]

Six people are about to leave the planet, and somebody needs to take their picture first. That's essentially what's happening in this NASA portrait shot at Johnson Space Center in Houston. The Expedition 53 crew — two Russians, three Americans, one European — lined up in front of a camera on June 20, 2017, doing the thing that humans have done before momentous departures since photography existed: holding still, looking serious, trying to look like they aren't thinking about everything that's about to happen. Randy Bresnik sits front and center as Commander, flanked by Russian cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin. Behind them stand Joe Acaba, Mark Vande Hei, Sergey Ryazanskiy, and Paolo Nespoli of the European Space Agency. Six people from three different space programs, representing nations that have had... let's say *complicated* relationships on the ground, about to share a tin can hurtling through low Earth orbit together. There's something worth sitting with in the sheer ordinariness of a crew portrait. The backdrop, the matched flight suits, the careful arrangement of bodies — it follows the same logic as a school photo or a company headshot. We take pictures of groups before they disperse because we know the configuration is temporary. These six people, in exactly this combination, will only exist as a unit for a specific window of time. The portrait is proof they happened. What strikes me about official crew portraits is the weight they carry that the subjects can't fully feel yet. The photo is taken on Earth. It will be *used* — in press releases, mission patches, Wikipedia articles — from space, or after. Bresnik and his crew are still in Houston when the shutter clicks. They are still *here*. The Johnson Space Center is still visible outside the door. Houston has been sending people off like this for decades. The city is so accustomed to being the last earthly address of astronauts that it barely registers as strange anymore. You can live here, eat at the same taco trucks as the people in this photo, drive past JSC on NASA Road 1, and the whole enterprise of human spaceflight becomes almost... local. Almost. Then you look at a photo like this — six people who came from different countries, trained for years, sat for their portrait in a building in Houston — and you remember that "local" is a matter of perspective. From where they were headed, Houston and Moscow and Rome are all more or less the same dot.

[124daisies]

[astronomia24italia]

Paolo Nespoli è tornato dalla Stazione Spaziale Internazionale http://www.diggita.it/v.php?id=1616108