NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams returned to Earth in a SpaceX capsule early this morning with a soft splashdown off Florida’s coast, nine months after their faulty Boeing Starliner craft upended 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 at 1.05am ET (0505 GMT) to embark on 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 around 5.45pm ET. Using Earth’s atmosphere and two sets of parachutes, the craft slowed its orbital speed of roughly 27,400 kmph to a soft 27 kmph at splashdown.
Dressed in re-entry suits, boots and helmets, the astronauts 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 for two hours of final pressure, communications and seal tests.
The astronaut pair had launched into space as Starliner’s first crew in 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, culminating in a Nasa decision last year to have them take a SpaceX craft back this year as part of the agency’s crew rotation schedule.
After the splashdown, the astronauts were flown to their crew quarters at the space agency’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston for several days of health checks, per routine for astronaut returns, before Nasa flight surgeons approve they can go home to their families.
Living in space for months can affect the human body in multiple ways, from muscle atrophy to possible vision impairment.
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.
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