NASA astronauts leave space station on overdue trip to Earth

By Kenneth Chang

When NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore arrived at the International Space Station in June, they expected to stay for maybe a few weeks.

Instead, they’ve been up there for nine months. At 1:05 a.m. Eastern time Tuesday, they began their voyage home.

Williams, Wilmore and two other astronauts boarded a SpaceX capsule late Monday night, then undocked two hours later for a journey back to Earth that was to last 17 hours.

During their months in space, people have described Williams and Wilmore as stranded, while NASA has called that characterization incorrect. Elon Musk and President Donald Trump have even suggested that the pair were abandoned and forgotten in space by the Biden administration for political reasons.

The astronauts themselves dispute that notion.

“It’s work. It’s fun. It’s been trying at times, no doubt,” Wilmore said in an interview with Michael Barbaro, a host of “The Daily.” “But ‘stranded?’ No. ‘Stuck?’ No. ‘Abandoned?’ No.”

Here’s what else to know about the flight and how it will proceed.

— Boarding: The hatch on the astronauts’ SpaceX Crew Dragon vehicle was sealed at 11:05 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday. Over the next 40 minutes, the astronauts donned their flight suits, took their seats and completed leak checks, setting up for their departure.

— Departure: The vehicle autonomously undocked from the station on schedule.

— Splashdown: At approximately 5:57 p.m. Tuesday, the Crew Dragon will splash down off Florida’s Gulf Coast. Crews will recover the vehicle and help the astronauts exit onto a ship. Soon after, the four will be flown to Houston, the home of the Johnson Space Center, which is the hub of NASA’s human spaceflight operations.

— The crew: Also in the Crew Dragon will be Nick Hague of NASA and Aleksandr Gorbunov of Roscosmos, the Russian space agency. Hague is the commander of the flight. The mission is called Crew-9 because it is the ninth such mission SpaceX has flown taking astronauts for extended stays on the space station.

— The mission: Williams and Wilmore went to space to test Starliner, a Boeing spacecraft that was to provide NASA with a second American option to get astronauts to and from orbit. After the spacecraft experienced problems with its propulsion system, NASA sent it back to Earth in September with no crew aboard. Williams and Wilmore then became full crew members of the space station, conducting science experiments and performing upkeep. The station has been continuously occupied by astronauts for almost 25 years.