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Sunita Williams' space ordeal ends, lands on Earth after 9 months
After a nine-month mission, NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore safely returned to Earth.
Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore returned to Earth after an unexpected nine-month stay in space. The NASA astronauts, along with fellow American Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov safely splashed down off the Florida coast at 5.57 pm ET on Tuesday (3.27 am IST, Wednesday).
Their SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, 'Freedom', glided through Earth’s atmosphere, enduring blistering temperatures of around 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1650 degrees Celsius), before parachuting into the Gulf of Mexico near Tallahassee.
A recovery vessel will retrieve the quartet and fly them to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The astronauts will undergo a 45-day rehabilitation program to readjust to gravity after their extended stint in microgravity.
An unexpected odyssey
Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams initially launched to the International Space Station (ISS) in June of last year aboard Boeing’s Starliner on what was meant to be a brief test flight - a 8 days-long mission to validate the spacecraft's safety for crewed operations. However, propulsion malfunctions forced the spacecraft to return empty, leaving the astronauts unexpectedly marooned in space.
Rather than rush a rescue mission, NASA reassigned the pair to SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission, which arrived at the ISS last September. The decision to reduce Crew-9’s manifest from four astronauts to two made room for Wilmore and Williams, who had by then earned the unofficial title of the “stranded” astronauts — a label NASA rejected, emphasizing that they could have been evacuated in an emergency.
Their plight captured the world’s attention, giving new meaning to the phrase “stuck at work" and turning “Butch and Suni” into household names. While other astronauts had logged longer spaceflights over the decades, none had to deal with so much uncertainty or see the length of their mission expand by so much.
On Sunday morning, Crew-9 bid a heartfelt farewell to their ISS colleagues after the arrival of their replacements, Crew-10, earlier in the day. As they prepared for their journey home, Hague’s parting words resonated: “Colleagues and dear friends who remain on the station... we’ll be waiting for you. Crew-9 is going home.”
