The 43-year-old astronaut spent some 200 days in orbit on his second space mission.

"It still looks a bit like a daydream," said on Twitter the man who, through his abundant social media posts, has given millions of people a taste of life in orbit.

The journey to Earth will be done in several stages:

The Dragon capsule is scheduled to detach from the International Space Station at 19:05 GMT.

Dragon will then begin a journey of several hours, the duration of which can vary greatly depending on the trajectory.

After re-entering the atmosphere, the vessel will make a dizzying descent before landing off Florida, a priori at 03:33 GMT on November 9, at dawn in France.

First water landing

The landing, which promises to be intense, is a first for the French astronaut.

During his previous mission in 2016-2017, he landed in the Kazakh steppes with a Russian Soyuz.

Once the capsule has "hit" the surface of the sea ("splashdown" in English), it will float, and the crew will be recovered as quickly as possible by ships positioned nearby.

A helicopter will bring the Crew-2s back to dry land, from where they will board a plane to the NASA Space Center in Houston, Texas.

Thomas Pesquet will undergo quick medical tests there before flying to Cologne, Germany, where the European Astronaut Center is located.

For three weeks, he will then be subjected to a battery of scientific tests, but which will not prevent him from seeing his relatives.

The Crew-3 mission to the AFP International Space Station

Crew-2 is the second regular mission provided by SpaceX, Elon Musk's company, on behalf of NASA.

It allowed NASA to resume flights from American soil, after the stopping of space shuttles in 2011.

Its crew returns to Earth before the arrival on board the ISS of their replacements, four astronauts from Crew-3, whose takeoff aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida has been several times delayed, especially because of the weather.

© 2021 AFP