The Governor of the Zaporozhye Region, Evgeny Balitsky, presented the flight engineer of the ISS-73 expedition, Alexey Zubritsky, with the Order "For Services to the Zaporozhye Region" 1st Class. He announced this in his Telegram channel on Friday.
The ceremony took place at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City. Hero of Russia, cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko also took part in it.
Balitsky noted that Zubritsky, a native of the Zaporozhye region, continues the best traditions of Soviet and Russian cosmonautics. He expressed confidence that Zaporozhye would once again become a center of technical development and would participate in future space programs.
Alexey Zubritsky was born in 1992 in the village of Vladimirovskoye, Zaporozhye region. As part of the crew of the Soyuz MS-27 spacecraft, he arrived at the International Space Station on April 8, 2025. During the expedition, the cosmonaut participated in two spacewalks and served as a special TASS correspondent in orbit.
The Soyuz MS-27 crew returned to Earth on December 9, 2025. After completing the flight, Zubritsky underwent the first stage of rehabilitation at the Cosmonaut Training Center, and then proceeded to the second stage - in Russian sanatorium institutions.
ISS-73
ISS-73 is a long-term expedition to the International Space Station, which took place from April to December 2025.
The expedition began on April 19, 2025, after the undocking of the Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft and ended on December 9 of the same year with the return of the Soyuz MS-27 crew to Earth. The station commander was Sergei Ryzhikov, and the flight engineer was Alexey Zubritsky.
The crew included representatives from Russia, the United States, and Japan. During the mission, several spacewalks were carried out, including by Russian cosmonauts Ryzhikov and Zubritsky, who installed and replaced scientific equipment on the Nauka and Poisk modules.
The expedition included the reception and maintenance of the Progress, SpaceX CRS, Cygnus, and Japanese HTV-X1 cargo ships. All tasks set by the Russian and international programs were completed in full.
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