NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams 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.
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.
Mr Wilmore and Ms 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.
However, 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.
Yesterday morning, Mr Wilmore and Ms Williams strapped inside their Crew Dragon spacecraft along with two other astronauts and undocked from the ISS at 1.05am (5.05am Irish time) to embark on a 17-hour trip to Earth.
The four-person crew, formerly part of NASA's Crew-9 astronaut rotation mission, plunged through Earth's atmosphere, using its heat shield and two sets of parachutes to slow its orbital speed of 27,300kmh to a soft 27kmh at splashdown, which occurred at 5.57pm local time (9.57pm Irish time) some 80km off Florida's Gulf Coast under clear skies.
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"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 Programme 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 Mr Wilmore and Ms Williams and alleged, without evidence, that former President Joe Biden "abandoned" them on the ISS for political reasons.
NASA acted on Mr Trump's demand by moving Crew-9's replacement mission up sooner, the agency's ISS chief Joel Montalbano said. 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.
Mr Trump told Fox News that Mr Wilmore and Ms Williams will visit the Oval Office after they recover from their mission.
Mr 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 Mr Trump, had echoed Mr Trump's call for an earlier return, adding the Biden administration spurned a SpaceX offer to provide a dedicated Dragon rescue mission last year.
NASA officials have said the two astronauts had to remain on the ISS to maintain adequate staffing levels and it did not have the budget or the operational need to send a dedicated rescue spacecraft. Crew Dragon flights cost between $100 million to $150 million.
Crew Dragon is the only US spacecraft capable of flying people in orbit. Boeing had hoped Starliner would compete with the SpaceX capsule before the mission with Mr Wilmore and Ms Williams threw its development future into uncertainty.
Mr Stich said that Starliner might need to fly another uncrewed flight - which would be its third such mission and fourth test overall - before it routinely carries US astronauts.
Boeing, which congratulated the astronauts' return on X, did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
286 days in space
The ISS, about 400km in altitude, is a 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.
Swept up in NASA's routine astronaut rotation schedule, Mr Wilmore and Ms Williams worked on roughly 150 science experiments aboard the station until their replacement crew launched last week.
The pair logged 286 days in space on the mission - longer than the average six-month ISS mission length, but far short of US record holder Frank Rubio, whose 371 days in space ending in 2023 were the unexpected result of a coolant leak on a Russian spacecraft.
Living in space for months can affect the human body in multiple ways, from muscle atrophy to possible vision impairment.
Ms Williams, capping her third spaceflight, has tallied 608 cumulative days in space, the second most for any US astronaut after Peggy Whitson's 675 days.
Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenkoset set the world record last year at 878 cumulative days.
"We came prepared to stay long, even though we planned to stay short," Mr Wilmore told reporters from space earlier this month.
"That's what your nation's human spaceflight programme is all about," he said. "Planning for unknown, unexpected contingencies. And we did that."
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