NASA pull out stops for safe spacecraft landing

Two American astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut on the space station finished packing tonight and crammed into a tiny Soyuz capsule to return to Earth.

The astronauts were supposed to get a shuttle ride back to Florida, but the fleet’s grounding after the Columbia’s disintegration on February 1 means they will touch down in the steppes of Kazakhstan, becoming the first Nasa astronauts to land in a foreign spacecraft – and in a foreign land.