SPACEX CREW-9 BEGINS JOURNEY BACK TO EARTH – A long-awaited trip back to Earth
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams departed the International Space Station early on Tuesday (March 18) in a SpaceX capsule for a long-awaited trip back to Earth, nine months after their faulty Boeing BA.N Starliner craft upended what was to be a roughly week-long test mission.
Wilmore and Williams, two veteran NASA astronauts and retired U.S. 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 Tuesday evening.
Dressed in re-entry suits, boots and helmets, the astronauts were seen earlier on NASA’s live footage laughing, hugging and posing for photos with their colleagues from the station shortly before they were shut into the capsule for two hours of final pressure, communications and seal tests.
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. But 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.
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 U.S. 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.
