Welcome back! NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore are home at last. They spent nine months orbiting Earth on the International Space Station. Long-term ISS missions aren’t unusual, except these particular astronauts weren’t planning on an extended stay. 

Williams and Wilmore rode to the station on a crewed Boeing Starliner test mission in June. The crew capsule encountered technical issues and was sent back to Earth without the astronauts. Their eight-day stay became a months-long stay. The pair hitched a ride back on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. The capsule made a picture-perfect splashdown off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida on Tuesday afternoon.

Crew-9 makes successful splashdown

Crew-9’s SpaceX Dragon spacecraft is named Freedom. Dragon’s parachutes gently lowered the capsule into the calm water after a fiery reentry process where temperatures reached up to 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit. A SpaceX recovery ship is tasked with bringing the capsule on board. The crew will catch a helicopter back to land.

NASA’s live coverage of the return started at 4:45 p.m. ET, with splashdown occurring at about 5:57 p.m. NASA scheduled a return-to-Earth media conference for 7:30 p.m. Watch on the NASA app, on streaming service NASA Plus or on YouTube.

Crew-9 to the rescue

Crew-9 launched in late September with NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov on board. NASA reserved two empty seats for Williams and Wilmore to come home. 

Both Williams and Wilmore have insisted they didn’t feel stranded, though that term has been widely applied to them in news stories and social media.

“Butch and Suni each have previously completed two long-duration stays aboard the station,” NASA said in an explainer. “NASA astronauts embark on missions fully aware of the various scenarios that may become reality.” 

The astronauts integrated with the existing crew, kept busy with research and even went on a spacewalk together in January.

Crew-10 handover

Crew-10 had a bit more riding on it than a typical crew rotation mission. The Crew-10 handover cleared Crew-9 for its long-awaited return to Earth. 

The three astronauts and one cosmonaut of the SpaceX Crew-10 mission docked with the International Space Station just after midnight ET Sunday, and at 1:35 a.m., opened the hatches between the Space Dragon spacecraft and the ISS, meeting up with the crew already there.

NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov were welcomed by the Expedition 72 crew, including Williams, Wilmore and Hague, NASA astronaut Don Petitt, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Gorbunov, Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner. That made for a crowded house on the space station until Crew-9 left.

Crew-9’s return will mark the end of a space saga that has fascinated the public. It’s a complex story involving Boeing’s Starliner woes, SpaceX’s dominance in human spaceflight and the seeming plight of two space travelers who couldn’t come home. 

Williams and Wilmore put in years of training to spend time in space on this mission. It just ended up being a lot more time than they expected.