They set out to spend eight days at the space station. The trip lasted nine months.
On Tuesday, two NASA astronauts, Sniwilliams and Butchwillmore, who had been in orbit since June, gently splattered, and Azure off the coast of the Azure Panhandle, concluded the saga that had been captivating the country since last summer.
Williams and Wilmore exploded for the International Space Station in June, and on a Starliner test flight. This is Starliner, a Boeing spacecraft that offers NASA another option other than SpaceX to allow astronauts to enter and exit orbit. However, Starliner experienced problems with the propulsion system, urging NASA to send it back to Earth without its crew.
It was SpaceX capsule, a crew dragon that brought them back from space on Tuesday. The spacecraft was detached from the space station just after 1am, then returned to Earth, slowing it down more than 17,000 mph before unfolding four large parachutes that quietly plunged into the water before 6pm.
A few minutes later, when the recovery team inspected the capsules, they were greeted with a curious dolphin pod, a playful ground welcome party.
As the capsule got caught in the ship, the door opened and the shining astronaut was extracted from the spacecraft. After months of zero gravity, their bodies still adapted to the pull of gravity, and they were lifted up to the Gurneys.
“They all looked very healthy,” Steve Stitch, manager of NASA's commercial crew program, said at a press conference after the splashdown. “They all seemed to feel about normalcy during the landing and recovery phases that their bodies were about to refit.”
Returning with the two astronauts were Nick Hague, commander of the mission known as Crew 9, and Russian astronaut Alexander Golbunov.
The four astronauts were scheduled to return to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. “They'll be with their families the next day or so,” Stitch said.
The mission highlighted both SpaceX's domination in the growing field of private space flights and Boeing's comparison issue. But like so many things in the early stages of the Trump administration, the return of astronauts was caught up in politics.
President Trump suggested in January that the Biden administration had stuck astronauts, and SpaceX founder Elon Musk said this month that the Biden administration rejected his offer to bring them home earlier.
But Bill Nelson, who served as NASA administrator for the Biden administration, said NASA had never heard of Musk's offer and that the agency's decision was based on what makes the most sense for the space station operation.
“There was no political consideration from a NASA perspective based on the lack of contact with NASA,” Nelson said.
About 30 minutes after the astronauts returned, the White House posted on social media.
However, regarding this time slot, a Crew 9 mission to return with Williams and Willmore has been a plan for NASA since August.
An hour after the White House post, Musk offered X a congratulations to SpaceX and NASA teams, saying “another safe astronaut is back.” He also thanked President Trump for “this mission was given priority!”
However, astronauts also challenged the notion that they were stuck in space.
“It's work. It's fun. I definitely tried it,” Wilmore said in an interview last week from the New York Times space station. “But “stuck”? no. “stack”? no.
At the station, Williams and Wilmore had to unexpectedly adapt to their long stay. From the start, their suitcases were removed from the starliner and lacked clothes to make room for a replacement pump to repair the toilet. They relied on spare clothing at the space station.
NASA sent clothes and other items to the Northrop Grumman freighter a few months later. Such robotic cargo ships arrive regularly from Russia and the US, bringing food, supplies and experiments.
According to a summary published by NASA, astronauts at the space station orbiting about 250 miles of Earth performed a variety of tasks at the station, including maintenance work and nearly 1,000 hours of scientific research.
That included a spacecraft by Williams and Wilmore, which wiped away the outside of the space station to see if Earth's microbes could survive and even thrive in space.
Williams also helped set up experiments to study how microorganisms produced nutrients like vitamins, and also conducted research into how zero gravity affected microscopic organisms that can be used to make food and medicine, NASA said.
Astronauts were able to connect with friends, family and the public on the ground. They had access to emails and video calls. They tried to put a positive spin on the entire experience.
“We have a little more time to enjoy the view from the window,” Williams said in an interview with the Times last week.
Not everything they see is happy. From space, Wilmore saw Hurricane Beryl that hit Houston last July. The storm damaged the roof of his house. The astronaut also saw smoke from the Los Angeles fire in January.
With his wife and two children, Mr. Wilmore missed most of his younger daughter's junior high school and sophomore year.
He said his young girl was “tough,” but she told him, “I didn't know how much I needed you until you were gone.”
Nine months is not an unusually long stay for space astronauts. Frank Rubio holds the record of the longest stay in space for American astronauts in 371 days, but even so, Wilmore and Williams had to go against the damage space could inflict on their bodies. Without gravity, bone masses tend to decrease, a cosmic version of osteoporosis. The astronauts worked on modified gym equipment on the space station. This included a treadmill with a harness to keep the runners from floating.
By the end of their journey, Mr. Williams and Mr. Wilmore had traveled nearly 121,347,500 miles and orbited the Earth 4,576 times. Wilmore spent a total of 31 hours doing spacecraft during his career, while Williams spent 62 hours, a record of female astronauts.
It was long in 286 days of space, including a trip in June and a descent on Tuesday. However, their mission was less dramatic than what was done by Soviet astronaut Sergei Krikalev, who exploded on May 18, 1991 for a stay at Mir, a space station in the Soviet Union.
While Krikalev orbited the Earth, the Soviet Union was dissolved and asked to extend his stay up to almost five months due to the collapse of his country in Moscow and the problems of money.
He eventually stayed in space for 313 days and returned to his home country, which no longer existed.
The report was contributed by Talijah Minsberg, Claire Moses, Michael Roston and John Yun.
