NASA astronauts 'Butch and Suni' return to Earth

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

Their return caps a protracted space mission that was 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. But 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 Wednesday morning, Wilmore and Williams strapped inside their Crew Dragon spacecraft along with two other astronauts and undocked from the ISS at 1.05 am ET (9.05 am UAE time) 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 heatshield and two sets of parachutes to slow its orbital speed of 17,000 mph to a soft 17 mph at splashdown, which occurred at 5:57 pm ET (1.57 am UAE time) 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 Center 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 some well-deserved time off, well-deserved time with their families," NASA's Commercial Crew Program chief Steve Stich told reporters after the splashdown. "It's been a long time for them."

POLITICAL SPECTACLE

The mission 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.

NASA acted on Trump's demand by moving Crew-9's replacement mission up sooner, the agency's ISS chief Joel Montalbano said 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 that 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 that he did not believe NASA's decision to keep them on the ISS until Crew-10's arrival had been affected by politics under the Biden administration.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, a close adviser to Trump, had echoed Trump's call for an earlier return.