They set off to spend eight days at the space station. The trip lasted nine months instead. On Tuesday, two Nasa astronauts who had been in orbit since June, Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, splashed down in calm, azure waters off the coast of the Florida Panhandle, concluding a saga that had captivated the world for several months.
It was a SpaceX capsule, the Crew Dragon, that brought them back from space Tuesday. The spacecraft detached from the space station just after 1 am Eastern time and then travelled back to Earth, slowing from more than 17,000 mph before deploying four large parachutes that gently plopped the spacecraft into the water just before 6 pm. Once the capsule had been hoisted onto a ship, the door was opened and the beaming astronauts were extracted from the spacecraft.
After months of weightlessness, their bodies still adjusting to the pull of gravity, they were lifted onto gurneys.
They all looked like they were feeling about normal for the landing and recovery phase, where their body is trying to re-adapt,” Steve Stich, the manager of Nasa’s commercial crew program, said.
Returning with the two astronauts were Nick Hague, the commander of this mission known as Crew-9, and Alexander Gorbunov, a Russian astronaut. The four astronauts were scheduled to fly back to Nasa’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where they were to remain briefly until doctors let them go home. “They’ll join their families in the next day or so,” Stich said. The mission both underlined the dominance of SpaceX in the growing field of private spaceflight and the comparative woes of Boeing. The astronauts’ return was also tinged with politics.
US President Donald Trump suggested in Jan that the Biden administration had stranded the astronauts, and Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, said this month that the Biden administration had rejected his offer to bring them home sooner. But Bill Nelson, who served as the administrator of Nasa during the Biden administration, said Nasa never heard about Musk’s offer. “On the basis that there was no contact with Nasa, there was no political consideration from Nasa’s point of view,” Nelson said. About a half-hour after the astronauts returned, the White House posted on social media, “PROMISE MADE, PROMISE KEPT: President Trump pledged to rescue the astronauts stranded in space for nine months.”
However, it has been Nasa’s plan since Aug for the Crew-9 mission to return with Williams and Wilmore around this time frame. An hour after the White House post, Musk offered celebratory congratulations on X to teams at SpaceX and NASA “for another safe astronaut return!” He also thanked Trump “for prioritising this mission!” But the astronauts also disputed the notion that they were stuck in space.
At the station, Williams and Wilmore had to adjust to unexpectedly long stay. From the start, they were short of clothes, because their suitcases had been left off the Starliner to make room for a replacement pump to fix the toilet. They relied on spare clothing in the space station. Nasa sent up their clothes and other personal items a couple of months later on a Northrop Grumman cargo ship.
According to a summary published by Nasa, astronauts at the space station carried out a variety of tasks on the station, including maintenance work and nearly 1,000 hours of scientific research. That included a spacewalk by Williams and Wilmore to swab the outside of the space station to see if Earth microbes could survive and maybe even thrive in space. By the end of their journey, Williams and Wilmore had traveled nearly 121,347,500 miles, having orbited the Earth 4,576 times. Wilmore has spent a total of 31 hours conducting spacewalks during his career and Williams 62 hours, a record for a female astronaut.