Two long-delayed Starliner astronauts, Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams, returned to Earth aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule Tuesday, finally closing out a repeatedly extended 286-day odyssey in space. They shared the ride home with two outgoing space station crewmates, Crew-9 commander Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov.
Seventeen hours after undocking from the International Space Station, the Crew Dragon settled to a gentle, on-target splashdown off Florida’s Gulf Coast near Tallahassee at 5:57 p.m. EDT.
“Splashdown! Good mains release,” Hague radioed SpaceX flight controllers in Hawthorne, California, after the four main parachutes were released from the Crew Dragon.
“Copy, splashdown,” a SpaceX engineer replied. “We see main chutes cut. Nick, Alex, Butch, Suni, on behalf of SpaceX, welcome home.”
“What a ride,” Hague said. “I see a capsule full of grins, ear to ear.”
A SpaceX recovery ship was stationed nearby to haul the spacecraft on board so the crew could be helped out of the Crew Dragon’s cabin and onto stretchers for initial medical checks. The side hatch was opened at 6:38 p.m. EDT and the crew began to emerge into the fresh air and sunshine about 10 minutes later. Williams and Wilmore were the last ones out.
For the two Starliner astronauts, it closed out a marathon mission that was originally supposed to last about eight days but stretched to nine-and-a-half months, covering 4,576 orbits and 121 million miles since launch last June 5 aboard a problem-plagued Boeing capsule. Their flight ranks sixth on the list of longest single NASA missions.
Hague and Gorbunov spent 171 days in orbit since their launch last September aboard the Crew 9 ferry ship.
All station astronauts spend two hours a day in orbit exercising to minimize bone and muscle loss in the weightlessness of space. Even so, Wilmore and Williams will face extensive rehabilitation over the next several weeks and months as their bodies re-adapt to the unfamiliar tug of gravity.
How did the astronauts return to Earth?
After bidding their ISS crewmates farewell, the returning astronauts floated into their Crew Dragon and undocked from the Harmony module’s space-facing port early Tuesday, at 1:05 a.m. EDT.
Starting at 5:11 p.m., the flight plan called for an automated seven-and-a-half-minute de-orbit thruster firing to slow the ship down for re-entry.
Twenty-seven minutes later, approaching the Florida Gulf Coast on a southwest-to-northeast trajectory, the Crew Dragon reached the discernible atmosphere, enduring heat shield temperatures of more than 2,500 degrees as the spacecraft rapidly slowed in the thickening air.
Nine minutes after entry, the Crew Dragon’s three main parachutes unfurled for the capsule’s final descent to splashdown in the Gulf.
From the recovery ship, all four Crew-9 fliers were to be flown to shore by helicopter, where a NASA jet was waiting to ferry them back to Houston and the Johnson Space Center for reunions with family members and more extensive medical checks.
“Butch and Suni, enjoyed their time on station, they got to do spacewalks and they got to do lots of cool science and things like that,” said Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program. “Their families, kudos to them for being resilient. … The families, a huge thank you to them. I’m sure the reunion is going to be wonderful with the families.”
Why were the astronauts stuck longer at the ISS?
Wilmore and Williams launched to the International Space Station last June 5 on the first piloted test flight of Boeing’s Starliner. The spacecraft suffered multiple propulsion system helium leaks and thruster problems during rendezvous with the space station, and NASA eventually decided to keep them on the station and to bring the Starliner down, without its crew, by remote control.
NASA launched the next crew rotation mission — Crew-9 — in September carrying just two crew members, Hague and Gorbunov, instead of four. Wilmore and Williams then joined the Crew-9 fliers aboard the ISS for a normal-duration six-month mission.
By keeping them in space as part of Crew-9, NASA was able to minimize the disruption to the ISS crew rotation sequence while maintaining a full slate of experiments and research.
NASA cleared the way for Crew-9’s return to Earth by launching four replacements — Crew-10 commander Anne McClain, pilot Nichole Ayers, cosmonaut Kirill Peskov and Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi — last Friday.
Normal practice calls for a five-day “handover” between crews so the new arrivals can be fully briefed on the ins and outs of station operations and maintenance. But in this case, handover was shortened to just one day to take advantage of predicted favorable splashdown weather in the Gulf.
The plight of the Starliner astronauts generated unprecedented interest during their extended stay in space, making headlines around the world and even prompting claims by President Trump that the crew had been “abandoned” in space by the Biden administration.
“This began when I asked Elon Musk to go up and get the abandoned astronauts, because the Biden administration was incapable of doing so,” he posted Monday on Truth Social. “They shamefully forgot about the astronauts, because they considered it to be a very embarrassing event for them.”
“Elon and I have taken on the project, sending up the SpaceX Dragon, which has successfully docked and, hopefully, while there is always danger involved in such a mission, they will soon be on their way home,” his post continued.
After splashdown, the White House tweeted: “Promise made, promise kept: President Trump pledged to rescue the astronauts stranded in space for nine months. Today, they safely splashed down in the Gulf of America, tanks to @ElonMusk, @SpaceX and @NASA!”
Mr. Trump did not mention that NASA originally planned to bring the crew home in February. But their mission was extended to March because SpaceX ran into problems with the Crew Dragon spacecraft being processed to carry the replacement Crew 10 into space.
NASA decided last month to swap out the original Crew-10 Dragon for one that was earmarked for a commercial flight later this spring.
That replacement spacecraft, the Crew Dragon “Freedom,” blasted off last Friday, carrying Crew 10 commander Anne McClain, pilot Nichole Ayers, cosmonaut Kirill Peskov and Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi to the space station early Sunday.
The Crew-10 flight is what cleared the way for Crew-9 and the Starliner astronauts to come home this week — about two weeks earlier than the original Crew Dragon could have managed.
For his part, Musk backed up the president’s claims about the Biden administration “abandoning” the crew. Without offering any evidence, he said NASA turned down an offer to send up a mission specifically to get Wilmore and Williams and bring them back to Earth. No one at NASA has yet confirmed any such offer.
NASA managers have gone out of their way to avoid contradicting the president. At a post-landing news conference, Joel Montalbano, deputy associate administrate for space operations, was repeatedly asked about the president’s comments. But he chose not address any specifics.
“NASA, as an agency, we work for the president,” he said. “Whoever’s there, we work for them. We had an input from that office, we took a look at it and, you know, our job is to take all the inputs we get and operate as safe and successfully as we can.
“And that’s what we did for this administration, and that’s what we would do for any administration.”
Was this the longest any U.S. astronaut has stayed in space?
While 286 days is a long flight by normal NASA standards, it’s well short of the U.S. record for a single flight — 371 days, set by astronaut Frank Rubio in 2022-23.
Ironically, Rubio’s record was the result of another extended mission, this one the result of a major coolant leak in the Russian Soyuz he launched aboard. The Russians decided not to bring the crew down aboard their original spacecraft and instead launched a replacement.
As a result, Rubio ended up spending a little more than a full year in space, twice as long as he originally expected.
Given Williams’ two previous stays aboard the space station, she will move up to No. 2 on the list of most experienced U.S. astronauts with 608 days in space overall. Only former astronaut Peggy Whitson has more time aloft, 675 days over four flights. Wilmore’s total across three flights will stand at 464 days aloft.
