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A pair of NASA astronauts, who were stranded in space for more than nine months, returned to Earth on Tuesday, landing in the Gulf of America off Tallahassee, Florida, bringing an end to an unforeseen odyssey.
Barry “Butch” Wilmore, 62, and Suni Williams, 59, returned home after a new crew replaced them and two other astronauts reached the International Space Station (ISS) over the weekend.
The four-person Crew-10 carried by a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft early on Sunday met up with the ISS, where Wilmore and Williams had been living since their planned roughly weeklong mission in June 2024 turned into a much longer one.
“On behalf of SpaceX, welcome home,” radioed SpaceX Mission Control in California.
“What a ride,” replied NASA astronaut Nick Hague, the capsule’s commander.
NASA said it aimed for Crew-9, also comprised of Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov in addition to Wilmore and Williams, to make its return to Earth on Tuesday evening.
The crew was “grinning ear to ear” upon their return, Hague said.
In a post-landing news conference with SpaceX and NASA officials on Tuesday, Deputy Associate Administrator, NASA Space Operations Mission Directorate Joel Montalbano was asked about President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s claims that the Biden administration didn’t want to bring the Starliner crew back for political reasons.
“Yeah, so I wasn’t involved in any conversations with the previous administration,” Montalbano said. “It was clear we had a request from the current administration, and the results you saw are what we saw today with the landing of Crew-9.”
That planned arrival gave “the space station crew members time to complete handover duties, while providing operational flexibility ahead of less favorable weather conditions expected for later in the week,” according to the U.S. space agency.
The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft has been at the ISS since it carried Hague and Gorbunov in late September.
Wilmore and Williams had expected to be gone for about a week after launching on Boeing’s new Starliner crew capsule on June 5.
So many problems cropped up on the way to the space station that NASA eventually sent Starliner back empty and transferred the test pilots to SpaceX, pushing their homecoming into February. Then SpaceX capsule issues added another month’s delay.
Sunday’s arrival of their relief crew meant Wilmore and Williams could finally leave.
SpaceX said it planned for the spacecraft to “conduct multiple orbit-lowering maneuvers, jettison the trunk, and re-enter Earth’s atmosphere for splashdown” near Florida on Tuesday evening after it undocks from the ISS and gets far enough away from the orbiting research station.
The ISS circles around Earth from some 250 miles up.
The Boeing Starliner spacecraft that brought Wilmore and Williams into space last summer and was originally slated to bring them back had “helium leaks” and “issues with the spacecraft reaction control thrusters” as it got close to the ISS at the time, NASA said.
The space agency and Boeing ended up deciding that the Starliner would make an unmanned return to Earth in early September so that they could “continue gathering testing data” on the spacecraft while it traveled back “while also not accepting more risk than necessary for its crew,” according to NASA. It also made Wilmore and Williams members of the then-upcoming Crew-9, scheduling them to return at the same time as Hague and Gorbunov.
Wilmore and Williams’ trip on the Boeing spacecraft was supposed to serve as a test flight to “test the Starliner spacecraft and its subsystems” as part of the certification process for it to participate in NASA’s commercial crew program, the space agency said in June 2024.
SpaceX, part of NASA’s commercial crew program, has conducted 10 operational human spaceflight missions, including the most-recent Crew-10 launch that is enabling Wilmore and Williams to come home by bringing new astronauts to staff the ISS.
Trump has used the pair of astronauts’ lengthy stint in space to criticize former President Joe Biden and his administration.
The journey to bring back Wilmore, Williams, Hague and Gorbunov was expected to take about 17 hours once the Dragon detached from the ISS, according to NASA and SpaceX.
