After 286 Days in Space, NASA Astronauts Return to Earth with a Splash

After 286 Days in Space, NASA Astronauts Return to Earth with a Splash

By Gayoung Lee edited by Lee Billings

Today NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams splashed down off the coast of Tallahassee, Fla., at 5:57 P.M. EDT, marking the end of their unexpectedly lengthy stay in space. The pair returns home after a momentous 286 days in space—an astronomical increase from the mere eight days that were initially planned for their mission.

“And—splashdown! Crew-9, back on Earth,” cheered Sandra Jones, a public affairs officer at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, during a live broadcast of the splashdown.

Wilmore and Williams’s ride up to the International Space Station (ISS) turned out to be a rather clunky trip: Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft continued to be plagued with hardware glitches that had already postponed its launch twice. Even last June 5, when Starliner finally launched, operators noticed a minor helium leak in its propulsion system. They determined the leak wasn’t serious enough to delay launch, but additional leaks developed during the astronauts’ flight to the ISS. Although Starliner managed to bring the astronauts safely to their destination, five of its reaction control system thrusters failed before it did so.

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Follow-up diagnostics were able to address some of that damage, but it was becoming evident that Wilmore and Williams’s stay in space would prove to be longer than expected. Although NASA officials ensured the astronauts were safe on the ISS, a strange uncertainty loomed over the mission as subsequent announcements became increasingly equivocal about the crew’s return date. At last, on August 24, 2024—nearly three months after Starliner’s departure from Earth—Bill Nelson, then NASA administrator, made an announcement at a press conference: “NASA has decided that Butch and Suni will return with Crew-9 next February,” he said, “and that Starliner will return uncrewed.”

According to the conference, the astronauts would return in SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, which had already completed multiple crewed missions in conjunction with NASA’s Commercial Crew Program (CCP). About two weeks later, on September 7, 2024, Starliner came back to Earth empty but with no significant issues in its landing procedures. In another conference that followed Starliner’s ceremoniously smooth arrival, however, mission operators maintained that, for the sake of safety, it was best that Wilmore and Williams were not on Starliner’s return flight.

“I think it’s always hard to have that retrospective look,” said Steve Stich, CCP manager at NASA, after confirming that, had the astronauts been on Starliner, they would have landed safely. “You know, we made the decision to have an uncrewed flight based on what we knew at the time and based on our knowledge of the thrusters…. I think we made the right decision to not have Butch and Suni onboard.”

Another three weeks passed, and NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov set off to join Wilmore and Williams. The four of them would now become Crew-9, SpaceX’s ninth human transportation mission through CCP. Compared with their soon-to-be crewmates, from the beginning, Hague and Gorbunov’s space stay was set to consist of five long months—plenty of time for the members of Crew-10, Crew-9’s successors, to ramp up their preparations not only to take their own flight to the ISS but also to make sure that this time, for sure, Wilmore and Williams could come home. If all went well, NASA announced on February 2025, Crew-9 would finally return to Earth around mid-March. Subsequently Crew-10 launched almost as planned—after trouble with a hydraulic lift pushed the launch date from March 12 to March 14—and successfully docked at the ISS on the earliest hours of March 16.

“Space travel is not safe,” says Ella Atkins, head of the aerospace department at Virginia Tech. “It is more usual for there to be anomalies, [so] then the question is: How do you deal with them?” With the recent turn of events, it might be easy to blame Boeing, she adds, but that would be a fallacious approach, given how much intrinsic risk there is with any crewed mission, especially fast-turnaround projects like those undertaken by SpaceX and Boeing for NASA’s CCP. “Well, nothing was done wrong,” Atkins says. “Starliner did have some anomalies, and ultimately [Boeing and NASA] decided that a more conservative approach was to not bring the astronauts back on Starliner.”

The involvement of the private industry in space travel may have risen to more prominence in the public sphere as of late. Since NASA’s inception, however, it has always been involved with private aeronautic corporations, Atkins explains. There’s no telling whether something like Wilmore and Williams’s extended stay in space won’t happen again, she says, “but the reality is: we left the astronauts up there [on the ISS] because we trusted the space station to keep them safe.” In that sense, NASA, as a government agency, plays a major role in these privately built missions as their primary investor, as well as by providing regulatory oversight informed by decades of spaceflight experience—which, again, was the product of a close partnership with the private sector.

Wilmore and Williams themselves always appeared to be in high spirits, regularly joining in on Q&A sessions from onboard the ISS. Williams in particular remained cheerful, joking about a celebratory cake during the change-of-command ceremony earlier this month, when she passed over control of the ISS to Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin.

“It’s just been … ridiculous to get all the folks that have been wishing us good luck and goodwill up here—Butch and I in particular…. But I also am excited that people are paying attention and understanding a little bit more about science and space and what we’re doing on the International Space Station,” Williams said during a media session last week, during which she assured viewers that she and Wilmore were well. “We’ve had the opportunity to be up here longer, doing science and space walks and other things. It’s really just a great place to live and work…. We’re up here a little bit longer than we had originally planned.”

“The mission of the space station, the scientific exploration, is something we deeply believe in,” said Hague during a predeparture conference held at the ISS earlier this month. “And it’s that belief that allows us to task those risks—you know, risk of putting yourself on top of a rocket and launching into space … and even the risk of developing a new spacecraft to get us to and from the space station.”

“Family and all the people on the ground who support us—it’s been a roller coaster for them, probably a little more so than for us,” Williams remarked at the same conference. “You know, we’re here; we have a mission. We’re just doing what we do every day.”