NASA’s Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore — who gained international attention as their planned short stay in space stretched into a more than nine-month, politically fraught mission — are finally home.
Williams and Wilmore, alongside NASA’s Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, safely splashed down off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida at 5:57 p.m. ET Tuesday.
The crew’s highly anticipated return came after the crew climbed aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule and departed the International Space Station at 1:05 a.m. ET Tuesday.
The quartet are part of the Crew-9 mission, a routine staff rotation jointly operated by NASA and SpaceX. The Crew-9 capsule launched to the space station in September with Hague and Gorbunov riding alongside two empty seats reserved for Williams and Wilmore, who had been on the orbiting laboratory since last June, when their original ride — a Boeing Starliner spacecraft — malfunctioned.
Safely reaching Earth concluded a trip that, for Williams and Wilmore, has garnered broad interest because of the unexpected nature of their extended stay in orbit and the dramatic turn of events that prevented them from returning home aboard the Boeing Starliner vehicle.
“Welcome home to the Crew-9 astronauts — NASA’s Nick Hague, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov. Your dedication and unwavering commitment to space exploration inspires us all,” Boeing Space shared on social platform X after the crew returned home.
Last summer, NASA decided flying the two astronauts home aboard their Boeing Starliner capsule would be too risky, and the space agency opted to fold Williams and Wilmore into the International Space Station’s regular crew rotation. That call is why the pair flew home with Hague and Gorbunov on SpaceX’s Crew-9 capsule.
But the length of the duo’s stay in space is not record-breaking. Williams and Wilmore’s extended mission concluded after 286 days, which is still significantly shorter than the world record of 437 days in orbit held by the late Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov.
Williams, Wilmore, Hague and Gorbunov spent Tuesday morning and afternoon in orbit in the roughly 13-foot-wide (4-meter-wide), gumdrop-shaped SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. Gradually descending, the capsule carried the astronauts from the space station, which orbits about 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth, toward the thick inner layer of our planet’s atmosphere.
Around 5 p.m. ET, the Crew Dragon capsule began firing its engines to begin the final phase of the journey: reentry. This leg of the journey is considered the most dangerous of any flight home from space. The jarring physics of hitting the atmosphere while traveling more than 22 times the speed of sound routinely heats the exterior of returning spacecraft to more than 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,926 degrees Celsius) and can trigger a communication blackout.
After plunging toward home, the Crew Dragon spacecraft deployed two sets of parachutes in quick succession to further slow its descent. The capsule decelerated from orbital speeds of more than 17,000 miles per hour (27,359 kilometers per hour) to less than 20 miles per hour (32 kilometers per hour) as the vehicle hit the ocean.