- By Ajeet Kumar
- Tue, 18 Mar 2025 11:56 AM (IST)
- Source:JND
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams departed the International Space Station early on Tuesday morning in a SpaceX capsule for a long-awaited trip back to Earth, nine months after their faulty Boeing Starliner craft upended what was to be a roughly week-long test mission. Wilmore and Williams, two veteran NASA astronauts and retired US. Navy test pilots, strapped inside their Crew Dragon spacecraft along with two other astronauts and undocked from the orbiting laboratory at 1.05 a.m. ET (0505 GMT), embarking on a 17-hour trip to Earth.
The four-person crew, formally part of NASA's Crew-9 astronaut rotation mission is scheduled for a splashdown off Florida's coast later on Tuesday at 5:57 p.m. ET. Wilmore and Williams' homecoming caps an end to an unusual, drawn-out mission filled with uncertainty and technical troubles that have turned a rare case of NASA's contingency planning - as well as failures of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft- into a global and political spectacle.
WATCH: Sunita Williams leaves for Earth
They're on their way! #Crew9 undocked from the @Space_Station at 1:05am ET (0505 UTC). Reentry and splashdown coverage begins on X, YouTube, and NASA+ at 4:45pm ET (2145 UTC) this evening. pic.twitter.com/W3jcoEdjDG
— NASA (@NASA) March 18, 2025
Why did the return delayed?
The astronaut pair 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 in their return home, culminating in a NASA decision last year to have them take a SpaceX craft back this year as part of the agency's crew rotation schedule.
The mission has captured the attention of US President Donald Trump, who upon taking office in January 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.
SpaceX's Crew Dragon
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, a close adviser to Trump, echoed his call for an earlier return. SpaceX's Crew Dragon is the United States' only orbital-class crew spacecraft, which Boeing had hoped its Starliner would compete with before the mission with Wilmore and Williams threw its development future into uncertainty. The astronauts will be flown to their crew quarters at the
space agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston for several days of health checks, per routine for astronaut returns, before NASA flight surgeons approve they can go home to their families.
Impact on human body
Living in space for months can affect the human body in multiple ways, from muscle atrophy to possible vision impairment. Upon splashing down, Wilmore and Williams will have logged 286 days in space - longer than the average six-month ISS mission length, but far short of US record holder Frank Rubio.
His continuous 371 days in space ending in 2023 was the unexpected result of a coolant leak on a Russian spacecraft. Williams, capping her third spaceflight, will have 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.
