Two NASA astronauts are finally going home after having spent more than nine months on board the International Space Station (ISS) for what was meant to be a week-long mission.
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-9 mission will depart from the ISS on Tuesday around 1:05 a.m. ET. The crew includes NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who journeyed to the ISS on board Boeing’s Starliner CST-100 spacecraft on June 5, 2024. The troubled spacecraft was deemed unfit to return the pair to Earth, forcing Williams and Wilmore to travel back to Earth on board a SpaceX Dragon crew spacecraft months after their original return date.
Live coverage of the Dragon hatch closing will begin on Monday at 10:45 p.m. ET on NASA’s website and NASA+. A live stream of Dragon’s undocking procedure will begin on Tuesday at 12:45 a.m. ET, and splashdown of the crew vehicle is expected around 5:57 p.m. ET. NASA will resume live coverage of Dragon’s return at 4:45 p.m. ET, and a press conference will be held at 7:30 p.m. ET.
The Starliner saga has garnered a lot of attention over the past few months, with questions over whether or not the crew had been abandoned in space. Williams and Wilmore were assigned as the first crew to fly on board Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. Things did not go smoothly for the crewed test flight, five of the spacecraft’s thrusters failed on its way to the ISS, and Starliner returned home empty.
NASA had to come up with an elaborate plan to fly the crew back to Earth. On September 28, 2024, NASA launched its Crew-9 mission with two astronauts instead of four (the two being NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov), docking at the ISS on the following day. The two empty seats were reserved for Williams and Wilmore, who were set to return alongside the Crew-9 astronauts in February.
The plan did face some trouble, though, as technical issues delayed the launch of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-10 mission, postponing the crew handover. That meant that Crew-9, alongside Williams and Wilmore, would not be able to depart the ISS until Crew-10 is on the space station sometime in April. NASA ended up switching the SpaceX crew spacecraft, launching its Crew-10 mission on March 12 to bring the two Starliner astronauts back around two weeks earlier.
The decision may have been prompted by President Donald Trump’s ploy to use the plight of the two astronauts in his favor. Shortly after taking office, Trump claimed that he is working on a rescue mission for the two astronauts. Trump announced that he had asked SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk to “go get the 2 brave astronauts who have been virtually abandoned in space by the Biden Administration,” he wrote on Truth Social.
The astronauts, however, were not abandoned in space, nor were they ever in need of a rescue mission. Organizing crew schedules in space can get complicated, and expensive, which is why the Starliner crew had to wait a little longer before they could hop onto a spacecraft headed toward Earth. All that said, we’ll be glad to see the two astronauts back home after an unexpectedly long time in space.
