Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are heading back to Earth after an unexpectedly long and eventful space mission, and you can watch their homecoming live.
Wilmore, Williams, fellow NASA astronaut Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov departed the International Space Station (ISS) aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule "Freedom" early Tuesday morning (March 18), setting up their splashdown off the coast of Florida later the same day.
The undocking occurred at 1:05 a.m. EDT (0505 GMT) as the two vehicles were 261 statute miles (420 kilometers) above Earth off the coast of Guam in the Pacific Ocean.
"It was a privilege to call [the] station home, to live and work and be a part of a mission and team that spans the globe working together in cooperation for the benefit of humanity," said Hague, Freedom's commander. "Crew 9 is going home."
You can watch the splashdown action live via NASA. Space.com will carry the feed as well.
The NASA stream will pick up at 4:45 p.m. EDT (2045 GMT) on Tuesday for descent operations. Freedom will conduct a deorbit burn at 5:11 p.m. EDT (2111 GMT), then splash down off the coast of Florida in the Gulf of Mexico 46 minutes later. (President Donald Trump has signed an executive order renaming the body of water the Gulf of America.)
Related: International Space Station: Everything you need to know about the orbital laboratory
The precise splashdown location will be confirmed closer to the return time, NASA officials said.
Wilmore and Williams were supposed to be home already. They launched to the ISS last June, on the first-ever crewed mission of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft.
That flight was expected to last just 10 days or so, but Starliner experienced thruster problems, so NASA delayed the capsule's return to investigate the issue. The agency eventually decided to bring Starliner home uncrewed, which happened in early September, and fold Wilmore and Williams into the ISS' long-duration Expedition 72 mission.
This plan called for Wilmore and Williams to ride home on Freedom, which launched to the ISS in late September on SpaceX's Crew-9 mission. Freedom hauled up just Hague and Gorbunov — half of the usual Crew Dragon contingent — to save seats for the Starliner duo on the downward trip.
Wilmore and Williams' situation has gotten a lot of attention, especially in the past two months. Recently, both President Trump and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk have characterized the duo as "stranded" in orbit despite their Crew Dragon ride home, and Musk has claimed that the Biden administration left them up there longer than necessary "for political reasons."
"It’s been trying at times, no doubt," Wilmore said in an interview with Michael Barbaro, a host of The New York Times' "The Daily" podcast. "But 'stranded?’ No. 'Stuck?’ No. 'Abandoned?’ No."
Crew-9's return to Earth was set in motion by the arrival of SpaceX's Crew-10 mission, which docked with the ISS early Sunday morning (March 16).
