Williams, Wilmore finally return home after nine months in orbit

NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, who were stranded at the International Space Station (ISS) for nine months after their Boeing Starliner craft developed a glitch, returned to Earth in a SpaceX capsule on Tuesday.

Wilmore and Williams strapped inside their Crew Dragon spacecraft, along with two other astronauts, and undocked from Earth’s orbiting laboratory at 1.05 am ET, Tuesday, beginning a 17-hour trip back to Earth.

As it entered Earth’s atmosphere, the SpaceX Dragon capsule slowed from 17,000mph (27,359 km/h), emerging into a clear blue Florida sky before coasting under four parachutes to a gentle splashdown at 5.57 pm ET (3.27am IST, Wednesday).

Williams and Wilmore had landed on the ISS on 6 June last year to evaluate Starliner’s docking and operational capabilities on its first crewed flight and return home about 10 days later.

A series of technical glitches and safety risks led NASA and Boeing to send the Starliner craft back to Earth empty in September.

Subsequently, the duo took the place of two other astronauts still on the ground who were reassigned to other missions.

The Dragon capsule, dubbed Freedom, that made a splashdown on Tuesday also included Nicholas Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov.

All four astronauts were seen on NASA’s live footage laughing and posing for photographs with colleagues at ISS before they were shut into the capsule for two hours of final pressure, communications and other tests.

Williams returned to Earth as the US astronaut with the second-longest combined time in space at 608 days across three visits to ISS, with the first being in 2006.

Peggy Whitson, a former chief of Nasa’s astronaut office, has spent more time in space, at 675 days across four space flights.

Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko set the world record last year at 878 cumulative days.

On splashing down, Wilmore and Williams logged 286 days in space-longer than the average six-month ISS mission length, but far short of US record holder Frank Rubio.

Rubio had spent a continuous 371 days in space ending in 2023, and was the unexpected result of a coolant leak on a Russian spacecraft.

The rescue was also mired in political wrangling with US President Donald Trump, who upon taking office in January, called for a quicker return of Wilmore and Williams and claimed, along with his close advisor Elon Musk, without evidence that former president Joe Biden “abandoned” them on the ISS for political reasons.

Trump even attempted to paint last week’s long-scheduled routine crew rotation flight as a “special rescue mission ordered by the White House.”

The astronauts will now be flown to their crew quarters at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston for several days of health checks before flight surgeons approve they can go home to their families.

Living in space for months affects the human body in multiple ways, from muscle atrophy to possible vision impairment.

At the ISS, Wilmore and Williams were doing scientific research and conducting routine maintenance with the other five astronauts.

Williams conducted two six-hour spacewalks for maintenance outside the ISS, including one with Wilmore.

The ISS, which is about 254 miles (409 km) in altitude, is a football field-sized research lab that housed international crews of astronauts for nearly 25 years, and is managed primarily by the US and Russia.

Williams told reporters earlier this month that she was looking forward to returning home to see her two dogs and family. “It’s been a roller coaster for them, probably a little bit more so than for us,” she said.

Meanwhile, people in Jhulasan, Williams’ native village in Gujarat, India, celebrated her return by offering prayers.

The celebrations began after the successful splashdown of the Dragon spacecraft.