WASHINGTON: NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni 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.
\nWilmore 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.
\nThe four-person crew, formally part of NASA\u2019s Crew-9 astronaut rotation mission, is scheduled for a splashdown off Florida\u2019s coast later on Tuesday at 5:57 p.m. ET.
\nWilmore and Williams\u2019 homecoming caps an end to an unusual, drawn-out mission filled with uncertainty and technical troubles that have turned a rare case of NASA\u2019s contingency planning \u2013 as well as failures of Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft \u2013 into a global and political spectacle.
\nThe astronaut pair had launched into space as Starliner\u2019s first crew in June for what was expected to be an eight-day test mission. But issues with Starliner\u2019s 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\u2019s crew rotation schedule.
\nThe 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 \u201cabandoned\u201d them on the ISS for political reasons.
\nSpaceX CEO Elon Musk, a close adviser to Trump, echoed his call for an earlier return. SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon is the United States\u2019 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.
\nThe astronauts will be flown to their crew quarters at the space agency\u2019s 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.
\nLiving in space for months can affect the human body in multiple ways, from muscle atrophy to possible vision impairment.
\nUpon splashing down, Wilmore and Williams will have logged 286 days in space \u2013 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.
\nWilliams, capping her third spaceflight, will have tallied 608 cumulative days in space, the second most for any US astronaut after Peggy Whitson\u2019s 675 days. Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko set the world record last year at 878 cumulative days.
\nReplacement crew
\nSwept up in NASA\u2019s routine astronaut rotation schedule, Wilmore and Williams could not begin their return to Earth until their replacement crew arrived, in order to maintain adequate US staffing levels, according to NASA.
\nTheir replacements arrived on Friday night \u2013 four astronauts as part of NASA\u2019s Crew-10 mission briefly put the station\u2019s headcount at 11.
\n\u201cWe came prepared to stay long, even though we planned to stay short,\u201d Wilmore told reporters from space earlier this month, adding that he did not believe NASA\u2019s decision to keep them on the ISS until Crew-10\u2019s arrival had been affected by politics.
\n\u201cThat\u2019s what your nation\u2019s human spaceflight program\u2019s all about,\u201d he said, \u201cplanning for unknown, unexpected contingencies. And we did that.\u201d
\nWilmore and Williams have been doing scientific research and conducting routine maintenance with the station\u2019s other five astronauts. Williams had performed two six-hour spacewalks for maintenance outside the ISS, including one with Wilmore.
\nThe ISS, about 409 kilometers 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.
\nWilliams told reporters earlier this month that she was looking forward to returning home to see her two dogs and family. \u201cIt\u2019s been a roller coaster for them, probably a little bit more so than for us,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON: NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni 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 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":78563,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78548"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78548\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78564,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78548\/revisions\/78564"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}