Following an unexpected nine additional months on board the International Space Station, Nasa astronauts Sunita “Suni” Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore finally splashed down off the coast of Florida on Tuesday evening.
The former navy captains returned home in a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft alongside Crew-9 mission members Nick Hague and Russian Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov.
The astronauts undocked from the orbiting laboratory at 1:05 a.m. EDT, and hit Gulf Coast waters by 5:57 p.m. They started their re-entry — which can be one of the most dangerous parts of space travel — at around 5:10 p.m.
Dolphins circled the capsule as divers readied it to be hoisted onto the recovery ship. When it was safely on board, the side hatch was opened and the astronauts were helped out one by one. Williams was second-last out, followed by Wilmore, who gave two gloved thumbs-up.
“It’s been a privilege to call the Space Station home, to play my part in its 25-year legacy of doing research for humanity, and to work with colleagues, now friends, from around the globe. My spaceflight career, like most, is full of the unexpected,” Hague wrote in a social media post on Monday.
While Hague and Gorbunov have only been living on the space station since September, the stays of Williams and Wilmore have been greatly extended following a mishap with their Boeing Starliner spacecraft last summer. The spacecraft returned to Earth empty in the fall.
The result has been months of waiting and delays — even after Hague and Gorbunov brought up their capsule with two empty seats. The weekend launch of Crew-10 astronauts paved the way for their return home.
But, while many have painted the duo as “stranded,” they have refuted that narrative, which has been continuously pushed by the Trump administration.
Williams and Wilmore have said that they never felt stuck, and that they knew things could go wrong on a test flight.
But president Donald Trump has placed the blame on the Biden administration, claiming Monday that they had been “incapable” of rescuing the “abandoned astronauts.”
“They shamefully forgot about the Astronauts, because they considered it to be a very embarrassing event for them — Another thing I inherited from that failed group of incompetents,” the president wrote on his social media platform Truth Social. “Safety always comes first, and maximum standards are being adhered to. But after eight long months for a mission that was supposed to be eight days, IT IS TIME.”
“That’s been the rhetoric. That’s been the narrative from day one: stranded, abandoned, stuck — and I get it. We both get it,” Wilmore previously told CNN. “But that is, again, not what our human spaceflight program is about. We don’t feel abandoned, we don’t feel stuck, we don’t feel stranded.”
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