Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore are finally heading home after being stranded on the International Space Station for over nine months. NASA confirmed that Crew-9 undocked at 10:35 am (IST), sharing a video of the spacecraft separating from the station. Their return journey is expected to take around 17 hours.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched the Dragon spacecraft aboard a Falcon 9 rocket on Saturday to bring them back, following former President Donald Trump’s claim that the previous Biden administration had abandoned them.
Williams and Wilmore, both former Navy pilots, had traveled to the station on June 5 last year for an eight-day mission—the first crewed flight of Boeing’s Starliner. However, propulsion issues left them stranded, and the unfit capsule was returned uncrewed in September.
With uncertainty surrounding their return, NASA reassigned them to SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission. In September, a Dragon spacecraft was sent with only two crew members instead of four to accommodate the stranded astronauts.
After multiple delays, a Dragon spacecraft carrying a relief team docked at the space station on Sunday. Now, the undocking is complete, and the spacecraft is returning to Earth with four astronauts: Sunita Williams, Butch Wilmore, NASA’s Nick Hague, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov.
Before sealing the capsule on Tuesday, Hague left a message for those staying behind: “Colleagues and dear friends who remain on the station… we’ll be waiting for you. Crew-9 is going home.” Reports suggest the astronauts have been allowed to change into comfortable clothes from their space suits.
The capsule will deploy parachutes before landing in the ocean, with splashdown expected off the Florida coast around 3:27 am (IST) on Wednesday. A recovery team will then retrieve the astronauts.
Williams and Wilmore’s nine-month stay ranks as the sixth longest space mission by a U.S. astronaut. Frank Rubio holds the U.S. record with 371 days in space in 2023, while Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov holds the global record with 437 days aboard the Mir station.
Experts warn that prolonged space missions can impact health, causing muscle and bone loss along with fluid shifts. The extended stay drew global attention, with psychologists praising the astronauts’ “unbelievable resilience.”
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