Nasa astronauts Wilmore and Williams return to Earth after drawn-out mission in space

Nasa astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams returned to Earth in a SpaceX capsule on Tuesday, with a soft splashdown off Florida's coast, nine months after their faulty Boeing Starliner craft upended what was to be a weeklong stay on the International Space Station (ISS).

Their return caps a protracted space mission fraught with uncertainty and technical troubles, turning a rare instance of Nasa's contingency planning, and the latest failures of Starliner, into a global and political spectacle.

Wilmore and Williams, two veteran Nasa astronauts and retired US navy test pilots, had launched into space as Starliner's first crew in June for what was expected to be an eight-day test mission. However, issues with Starliner's propulsion system led to cascading delays to their return home, culminating in a Nasa decision to fold them into its crew rotation schedule and return them on a SpaceX craft this year.

On Tuesday morning, Wilmore and Williams were strapped inside their Crew Dragon spacecraft with two other astronauts and undocked from the ISS at 1.05am to embark on a 17-hour trip to Earth.

The four-person crew, formally part of Nasa's Crew-9 astronaut rotation mission, plunged through Earth's atmosphere, using its heat shield and two sets of parachutes to slow its orbital speed of 27,359km/h to a soft 27.3km/h at splashdown, which occurred at 5.57pm 80km off Florida's Gulf Coast under clear skies.

“What a ride,” Nasa astronaut Nick Hague, the Crew-9 mission commander inside the Dragon capsule, told mission control moments after splashing down.

“I see a capsule full of grins ear to ear.”

The astronauts will be flown on a Nasa plane to their crew quarters at the space agency's Johnson Space Centre in Houston for a few days of routine health checks before Nasa flight surgeons say they can go home to their families.

“They will get  well-deserved time off and well-deserved time with their families,” Nasa's commercial crew programme chief Steve Stich told reporters after the splashdown.

“It's been a long time for them.”

The mission captured the attention of US President Donald Trump, who on taking office called for a quicker return of Wilmore and Williams and alleged, without evidence, that former president Joe Biden “abandoned” them on the ISS for political reasons.

Nasa acted on Trump's demand by moving up Crew-9's replacement mission sooner, the agency's ISS chief Joel Montalbano said on Tuesday. The agency had swapped a delayed SpaceX capsule for one that would be ready sooner and sped through its methodical safety review process to heed the president's call.

Trump told Fox News on Tuesday Wilmore and Williams will visit the Oval Office after they recover from their mission.

Wilmore earlier this month told reporters on a call from the ISS he did not believe Nasa's decision to keep them on the ISS until Crew-10s arrival had been affected by politics under the Biden administration.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk had echoed Trump's call for an earlier return, adding the Biden administration spurned a SpaceX offer to provide a dedicated Dragon rescue mission last year.

Nasa officials have said the two astronauts had to remain on the ISS to maintain adequate staffing levels and it did not have the budget or the operational need to send a dedicated rescue spacecraft. Crew Dragon flights cost between $100m and $150m (R1.8bn and R2.7bn).

Crew Dragon is the only US spacecraft capable of flying people in orbit. Boeing had hoped Starliner would compete with the SpaceX capsule before the mission with Wilmore and Williams threw its development future into uncertainty.

Stich said on Tuesday Starliner might need to fly another uncrewed flight, which would be its third such mission and fourth test overall, before it routinely carries US astronauts.

Boeing, which congratulated the astronauts' return on X, did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

The ISS, about 408.7km in altitude, is a football field-sized research lab that has been housed continuously by international crews of astronauts for nearly 25 years, a key platform of science diplomacy managed primarily by the US and Russia.

Swept up in Nasa's routine astronaut rotation schedule, Wilmore and Williams worked on about 150 science experiments aboard the station until their replacement crew launched last week.

The pair logged 286 days in space on the mission longer than the average six-month ISS mission length, but far short of US record holder Frank Rubio, whose 371 days in space ending in 2023 were the unexpected result of a coolant leak on a Russian spacecraft.

Living in space for months can affect the human body in many ways, from muscle atrophy to possible vision impairment.

Williams, capping her third space flight, has tallied 608 cumulative days in space, the second most for any US astronaut after Peggy Whitson's 675 days. Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko set the world record last year at 878 cumulative days.

“We came prepared to stay long even though we planned to stay short,” Wilmore told reporters from space earlier this month.

“That's what your nation's human space flight programme's all about,” he said.

“Planning for unknown, unexpected contingencies. And we did that.”

Reuters