NASA astronauts return to Earth for the first time in nine months
Following an unexpected nine additional months on board the International Space Station, NASA astronauts Sunita “Suni” Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore are slated to finally splash down off the coast of Florida Tuesday evening.
The former Navy captains are returning 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 were anticipated to hit Gulf Coast waters by 5:57 p.m. They are supposed to make their reentry around 5:10 p.m. – which can be some of the most dangerous moments of space travel.
“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 Monday social media post.
While Hague and Gorbunov have only been living on the space station since September, Williams and Wilmore’s stay has 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,” the pair have refuted that narrative: a narrative continuously pushed by the Trump White House.
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 were “incapable” of getting 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 said 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 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.”
