Three human beings — one American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts — are preparing to leave the International Space Station after 241 days aloft, their Soyuz capsule carrying them home across the final arc of a journey spanning 103 million miles. Their return to the Kazakh steppe on July 26 is not merely a landing, but a quiet punctuation mark in humanity's unbroken quarter-century of presence beyond Earth's surface. What they have learned in microgravity — about endurance, cooperation, and the body's resilience — will quietly shape the voyages that follow, toward the Moon and eventually M