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Sunita Williams return to Earth: Video shows moment crew Dragon undocked from Space Station
Wilmore and Williams, seated inside a Crew Dragon capsule with two other crew members, undocked from the ISS at 1:05 a.m. New York time on Tuesday.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, who have been stranded on the International Space Station (ISS) for more than nine months, have begun their journey back to Earth aboard a SpaceX capsule, with the first leg of the trip - the undocking from ISS - taking place on Tuesday.
Follow Sunita Williams' return to Earth LIVE here.
Wilmore and Williams, seated inside a Crew Dragon capsule with two other crew members, Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov and NASA astronaut Nick Hague, undocked from the ISS at 1:05 am New York time on Tuesday.
NASA shared the video of the spacecraft’s undocking from the space station as the 17-hour-long journey started.
The capsule is expected to travel through space, plunge through the atmosphere, and ultimately fall to Earth under parachutes before splashing down off the Florida coast at 5:57 pm local time.
Before leaving the station, Williams and Wilmore posed for a final photograph in space, which has been their home since June last year.
After undergoing standard medical checks at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, both will board a flight to Houston, where they will be reunited with their families.
NASA scheduled a post-return press conference at 7:30 p.m. New York time on March 18 with agency and SpaceX officials to discuss the mission.
For NASA astronauts, there’s always the risk that a routine mission will last longer than planned. The agency has extended the stays of astronauts on the space station for months at a time to accommodate changes in traffic schedules or technical issues.
“We came up prepared to stay long, even though we planned to stay short. That’s what we do in human spaceflight,” Wilmore said during a press conference from space, Bloomberg reported.
Why did it take 9 months for Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore to leave the space station?
Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore arrived at the ISS last June on a Boeing Starliner spacecraft with plans to spend eight days in space. But it turned into more than nine months when NASA decided in August the pair would come home on a rival SpaceX capsule instead, due to a snag in the propulsion system of the spacecraft.
The Starliner returned to Earth in September, without the crew on board.
Their saga became an international sensation, with some media outlets dubbing them the “stranded” astronauts — a nod to NASA’s reluctance to have them fly home in their original spacecraft. The ordeal put an embarrassing spotlight on Boeing’s struggling space business after the company was rocked by a series of crises that forced a change in senior leadership.
In parallel, their story has highlighted how dependent NASA has become on SpaceX to keep the agency’s major human spaceflight programs up and running.
