More than nine months later, stranded astronauts splash down in Florida
Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have successfully splashed down near Tallahassee, Florida about 17 hours after leaving the International Space Station.
They’re back.
After more than nine months in orbit, astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams returned to Earth on Tuesday evening, with a NASA livestream showing their vehicle splashing down in coastal Florida waters about 6pm ET (9am AEDT).
The return of Butch and Suni, as the duo are often called, caps an extended saga that thrust the agency into some of its most fraught debates about safe human space flight in years. During that time, Wilmore and Williams’s lives were disrupted, exposing them to risks in orbit and keeping them far from family to carry out a mission that was supposed to last about eight days.
Throughout it all, Wilmore and Williams, experienced astronauts and former Navy pilots, maintained an even keel. With Tuesday’s landing, they logged 285 days on the space station and orbited the Earth almost 4600 times.
“Don’t remind me, this might be my last flight” to the ISS, Williams said during a recent briefing with reporters. “That’s a little sad.”
Williams, 59 years old, and Wilmore, 62, wound up celebrating Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Eve and both their birthdays on the space station.
The two astronauts were part of a four-person crew that returned from space.
After the splash down, SpaceX teams quickly retrieved the spacecraft, and crew members soon began to emerge from the vehicle.
Williams came through a hatch waving and smiling, just under an hour after the landing.
Wilmore exited the spacecraft next, briefly stood with help and then sat on a cart to be wheeled away. He gave a double thumbs up, with a broad smile on his face.
All four will travel to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston for several days of medical checks by agency flight surgeons.
Wilmore and Williams arrived at the orbiting research laboratory on June 6. Their mission aimed to test the capabilities of a Boeing-developed spacecraft, called Starliner, designed to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS.
NASA’s plan for Starliner’s first crewed voyage called for the astronauts to remain aboard the ISS for a little over a week before piloting the craft back to Earth.
Problems with Starliner’s propulsion system prompted the agency to change course: Officials decided bringing the pair back on the Boeing craft was too risky, though the aerospace company said the vehicle was up to the task.
Last August, NASA leaders made the call on Wilmore and Williams’s return. They would stay on board the ISS, and be incorporated into the agency’s regular crew rotation. That meant that both would return to Earth in early 2025 after the arrival of another crew.
Starliner successfully flew back empty in early September. Later that month, a SpaceX vehicle brought NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov to join Wilmore and Williams as a unit aboard the ISS.
On Sunday, a separate SpaceX craft brought a new crew to the space station, clearing the way for Wilmore, Williams, Hague and Gorbunov to fly back with SpaceX.
President Trump and SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk have accused the Biden administration of leaving Wilmore and Williams in orbit for political reasons.
Leaders appointed to run the space agency by former President Joe Biden have said they made calls about the return based on safety, and that politics never came into play.
NASA officials have said the agency wanted to maintain its schedule of crew missions, and that slotting Wilmore and Williams into the rotation was part of that plan.
“We’re trying to lay out the rest of our manifest, you know, to make sure we have vehicles available for all the flights and it just didn’t make sense to go ahead and accelerate a flight,” to bring Wilmore and Williams back earlier, NASA program manager Steve Stich said during a briefing last August.
Musk has said on X that he made an offer to the Biden administration for SpaceX to bring Wilmore and Williams back sooner. He hasn’t detailed his proposal.
Pam Melroy, who served as NASA’s deputy administrator during Biden’s term in office, said in a recent interview that leaders at the agency’s headquarters didn’t receive any such pitch from Musk. A SpaceX vice president declined to address Musk’s comments during a briefing earlier this month, saying the company wanted to support NASA however the agency deemed best.
While aboard the ISS, Williams and Wilmore carried out research projects and conducted station maintenance, in between the usual daily exercise and occasional video calls with students. Both donned spacesuits and conducted a spacewalk together outside the facility earlier this year.
Longer-term stays on the ISS have happened before: NASA astronaut Frank Rubio spent more than a year aboard the facility because of an issue with a Russian spacecraft that transported him there. He finally returned in September 2023.
Sunday’s arrival of their relief crew meant Wilmore and Williams could finally leave.
NASA cut them loose a little early, given the iffy weather forecast later this week.
They checked out with NASA’s Nick Hague and Russia’s Alexander Gorbunov, who arrived in their own SpaceX capsule last fall with two empty seats reserved for the Starliner duo.
“We’ll miss you, but have a great journey home,” NASA’s Anne McClain called out from the space station as the capsule pulled away 260 miles (418 kilometres) above the Pacific.
Their plight captured the world’s attention, giving new meaning to the phrase “stuck at work.” While other astronauts had logged longer spaceflights over the decades, none had to deal with so much uncertainty or see the length of their mission expand by so much.
Wilmore and Williams quickly transitioned from guests to full-fledged station crew members, conducting experiments, fixing equipment and even spacewalking together.
With 62 hours over nine spacewalks, Williams set a new record: the most time spent spacewalking over a career among female astronauts.
Both had lived on the orbiting lab before and knew the ropes, and brushed up on their station training before rocketing away.
Williams became the station’s commander three months into their stay and held the post until earlier this month.
Their mission took an unexpected twist in late January when President Donald Trump asked SpaceX founder Elon Musk to accelerate the astronauts’ return and blamed the delay on the Biden administration.
The replacement crew’s new SpaceX capsule still wasn’t ready to fly, so SpaceX subbed it with a used one, hurrying things along by at least a few weeks.
Even in the middle of the political storm, Wilmore and Williams continued to maintain an even keel at public appearances from orbit, casting no blame and insisting they supported NASA’s decisions from the start.
NASA hired SpaceX and Boeing after the shuttle program ended, in order to have two competing US companies for transporting astronauts to and from the space station until it’s abandoned in 2030 and steered to a fiery re-entry.
By then, it will have been up there more than three decades; the plan is to replace it with privately run stations so NASA can focus on moon and Mars expeditions.
Both retired Navy captains, Wilmore and Williams stressed they didn’t mind spending more time in space – a prolonged deployment reminiscent of their military days.
But they acknowledged it was tough on their families.
Wilmore, 62, missed most of his younger daughter’s senior year of high school; his older daughter is in college.
Williams, 59, had to settle for internet calls from space to her mother.
They’ll have to wait until they’re off the SpaceX recovery ship and flown to Houston before the long-awaited reunion with their loved ones.
Wall Street Journal, AP
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