Home at Last! NASA Astronauts Return After 9-Month Mission
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams finally made their way back to Earth, having spent the last nine month in the arm of the outer space.
A SpaceX Dragon capsule, which carried Wilmore and Williams along with Nasa’s Nick Hague and Russia’s Aleksandr Gorbunov, splashed down off the coast of Florida after a 17-hour descent, on Tuesday evening, March 18.
An hour later, astronauts were out of the capsule waving and smiling to the cameras before being hustled away in reclining stretchers for routine medical checks.
“The crew’s doing great,” said Steve Stich, manager, Nasa’s Commercial Crew Program at a press conference. It ends what was going to be an eight-day mission.
“It’s awesome to have crew 9 home, just a beautiful landing,” said Joel Montalbano, deputy associate administrator, Nasa’s Space Operations Mission Directorate.
The astronauts were thanked for their resilience and flexibility, while SpaceX was characterized as “a great partner.”
All of that will be seeing friends and family and the people who were expected to spend Christmas with,” said Helen Sharman, Britain’s first astronaut.
All those family celebrations and birthdays and other events they thought they would be missing can now perhaps catch up on a little lost time.”
The saga of Butch and Suni really began in June 2024.
They were participating in the first crewed test flight of the Starliner spacecraft developed by aerospace giant Boeing. But technical problem during the capsule’s journey to the ISS ruled out a safe return trip for the astronauts within it.
Starliner eventually made a safe empty return to Earth at the start of September, with just two astronauts waiting for a new ride to go home. So NASA plugged the next scheduled flight: a SpaceX capsule that came by the ISS at the end of September.
It flew only with two astronauts instead of the regular four, filling only two seats for Butch and Suni’s return.
The only hitch was that this had a six-month mission as planned, which extended astronauts’ stay until now.
But they accepted this longer period in space.
They have carried out a multitude of experiments on board, besides lots of spacewalks, with Suni even setting the record for the longest female-holdout outside the ISS. And in Christmas, the team donned caps of Santa and antlers to send a merry message for a Christmas that was originally planned to be spent at home.
Now that they are back, the astronauts will soon be taken to the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas, where they will be checked by medical experts.
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