How do astronauts come back to Earth?

Short answer

In a capsule. The spacecraft separates from the station, fires its engines against its direction of travel to lower its orbit, then plunges into the atmosphere heat shield first: aerodynamic braking dissipates the roughly 28,000 km/h of orbital speed. Parachutes follow, then a splashdown or a landing on the steppe.

Published: September 24, 2026 · Updated: October 29, 2026 · Edited by Above Ten Thousand · Editorial policy

Expedition 23 Landing

It all starts with braking

After the hatches close, the spacecraft slowly pulls away from the station, then waits for its window. The return hinges on a burn of just a few minutes, engines pointed backward: it removes just enough speed for the trajectory, until then closed on itself, to bite into the dense layers of the atmosphere. The ignition moment is calculated so the capsule falls on the planned recovery zone, a continent or an ocean away.

The atmosphere does the work

About a hundred kilometers lower, the air compressed ahead of the spacecraft heats up until it forms a sheath of plasma. It isn't friction but this compression that generates heat: the heat shield, facing forward, absorbs and sheds the energy as it gradually erodes. Communications can be jammed for a few minutes.

Deceleration is felt harshly. After months in free fall, an untrained crew endures several times their apparent weight, lying in a molded seat. On a Soyuz, only the descent module returns: the orbital and service compartments are jettisoned and burn up.

Parachutes, land or sea

A few kilometers up, a small drogue parachute stabilizes the capsule before the main canopy deploys, slowing the descent to the pace of a jump. The Soyuz ends its journey over the Kazakh steppe, where retrorockets fire just before touchdown to cushion the impact; a Crew Dragon splashes down and waits for a recovery ship.

In both cases, no one gets out alone: teams extract the crew, who regain their balance within a few hours and their bone density much later.