Stranded astronauts finally arrive back on Earth
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have returned to Earth in a SpaceX capsule with a soft splashdown off Florida’s coast, nine months after they left for what was to be a week-long stay on the International Space Station.
Their return caps a protracted space mission that was fraught with uncertainty and technical troubles and turned a rare instance of NASA’s contingency planning – and the latest failures of Boeing’s Starliner – into a global spectacle.
Wilmore and Williams, two veteran NASA astronauts and retired US Navy test pilots, had strapped inside their Crew Dragon spacecraft along with two other astronauts and undocked from the orbiting laboratory of the ISS for a 17-hour trip to Earth.
The four-person crew, formally part of NASA’s Crew-9 astronaut rotation mission, re-entered Earth’s atmosphere shortly before 9am on Wednesday (AEDT).
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Using Earth’s atmosphere and two sets of parachutes, the craft slowed its orbital speed of roughly 27,000km/h to a soft 27km/h at splashdown.
Dressed in re-entry suits, boots and helmets, Wilmore and Williams were seen earlier on NASA’s live footage laughing, hugging and posing for photos with their colleagues from the station shortly before they were shut into the capsule.
The astronaut pair had launched into space as Starliner’s first crew last June for what was expected to be an eight-day test mission.
But issues with Starliner’s propulsion system led to cascading delays to their return home. That culminated in a NASA decision last year to have them take a SpaceX craft back as part of the agency’s crew rotation schedule.
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The mission has captured the attention of US President Donald Trump, who upon taking office in January called for a quicker return of Wilmore and Williams. Without evidence, he alleged former president Joe Biden had “abandoned” them on the ISS for political reasons.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, a close adviser to Trump, echoed his call for an earlier return.
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon is the US’s only orbital-class crew spacecraft.
Boeing had hoped its Starliner would compete with the Crew Dragon before the mission with Wilmore and Williams threw its development future into uncertainty.
After the splashdown, the astronauts will be flown to their crew quarters at the space agency’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston for days of health checks, as is routine for astronaut returns. NASA flight surgeons will have to approve their eventual return home to their families.
Wilmore and Williams have logged 286 days in space on the mission – longer than the average six-month ISS mission length, but far short of US record holder Frank Rubio.
His continuous 371 days in space, ending in 2023, were the unexpected result of a coolant leak on a Russian spacecraft.
Williams, capping her third spaceflight, has tallied 608 cumulative days in space, the second most for any US astronaut after Peggy Whitson’s 675 days. Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko set the world record last year at 878 cumulative days.
NASA said earlier that Wilmore and Williams, who were caught in a routine astronaut rotation schedule, could not begin their return to Earth until their replacement crew arrived so that adequate US staffing levels were maintained.
Their replacements – four astronauts from NASA’s Crew-10 mission that briefly put the station’s headcount at 11 – arrived last Friday.
