NASA astronauts’ nine-month orbital odyssey ends in a splashdown

In an image provided by NASA, A SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule carrying the astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, as well as two others, set down in the waters off the Gulf Coast of Florida near Tallahassee just before 6 p.m. Eastern time. Two NASA astronauts splashed down off Florida’s Gulf Coast on Tuesday, returning to Earth after a stay on the International Space Station that lasted some nine months longer than they had originally planned. (NASA via The New York Times)

By Kenneth Chang and Thomas Fuller

They set off to spend eight days at the space station. The trip lasted nine months.

On Tuesday, two NASA astronauts who had been in orbit since June, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, splashed down in calm, azure waters off the coast of the Florida Panhandle, concluding a saga that had captivated the country since the summer.

Williams and Wilmore blasted off in June for the International Space Station on their test flight of Starliner, a Boeing spacecraft that was to provide NASA with another option, outside of SpaceX, to carry astronauts to and from orbit. But the Starliner experienced problems with its propulsion system, prompting NASA to send it back to Earth with no crew aboard.

It was a SpaceX capsule, the Crew Dragon, that brought them back from space Tuesday. The spacecraft detached from the space station just after 1 a.m. Eastern time and then traveled back to Earth, slowing from more than 17,000 mph before deploying four large parachutes that gently plopped the spacecraft into the water just before 6 p.m.

Minutes later, as recovery teams inspected the capsule, a pod of curious dolphins circled, a playful terrestrial welcoming party.

Once the capsule had been hoisted onto a ship, the door was opened, and the beaming astronauts were extracted from the spacecraft. After months of weightlessness, their bodies still adjusting to the pull of gravity, they were lifted onto gurneys.

“They all looked very healthy,” Steve Stich, the manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, said during a news conference after the splashdown. “They all looked like they were feeling about normal for the landing and recovery phase, where their body is trying to re-adapt.”

Returning with the two astronauts were Nick Hague, the commander of this mission known as Crew-9, and Alexander Gorbunov, a Russian astronaut.

The four astronauts were scheduled to fly back to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where they were to remain briefly until doctors let them go home. “They’ll join their families in the next day or so,” Stich said.

The mission both underlined the dominance of SpaceX in the growing field of private spaceflight and the comparative woes of Boeing. But as with so many things in the early stages of the Trump administration, the astronauts’ return was tinged with politics.

President Donald Trump suggested in January that the Biden administration had stranded the astronauts, and Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, said this month that the Biden administration had rejected his offer to bring them home sooner.

But Bill Nelson, who served as the administrator of NASA during the Biden administration, said that NASA never heard about Musk’s offer and that the agency’s decisions were based on what made the most sense for the operations of the space station.

“On the basis that there was no contact with NASA, there was no political consideration from NASA’s point of view,” Nelson said.

About a half-hour after the astronauts returned, the White House posted on social media, “PROMISE MADE, PROMISE KEPT: President Trump pledged to rescue the astronauts stranded in space for nine months.”

However, it has been NASA’s plan since August for the Crew-9 mission to return with Williams and Wilmore around this time frame.

An hour after the White House post, Musk offered celebratory congratulations on X to teams at SpaceX and NASA “for another safe astronaut return!” He also thanked Trump “for prioritizing this mission!”

But the astronauts also disputed the notion that they were stuck in space.

“It’s work. It’s fun. It’s been trying at times, no doubt,” Wilmore said in an interview from the space station last week with The New York Times. “But ‘stranded’? No. ‘Stuck’? No. ‘Abandoned’? No.”

At the station, Williams and Wilmore had to adjust to their unexpectedly long stay. From the start, they were short of clothes, because their suitcases had been left off the Starliner to make room for a replacement pump to fix the toilet. They relied on spare clothing in the space station.

NASA sent up their clothes and other personal items a couple of months later on a Northrop Grumman cargo ship. Such robotic cargo ships arrive periodically from Russia and the United States, bringing food, supplies and experiments.

According to a summary published by NASA, astronauts at the space station, which orbits about 250 miles above the Earth, carried out a variety of tasks on the station, including maintenance work and nearly 1,000 hours of scientific research.

That included a spacewalk by Williams and Wilmore to swab the outside of the space station to see if Earth microbes could survive and maybe even thrive in space.

Williams also helped set up an experiment to study how microbes produced nutrients like vitamins, and also conducted research on how weightlessness affected microscopic organisms that could be used to make food and medicines, NASA said.

The astronauts were able to connect with friends, family and the public on the ground — they had access to email and video calls. They tried to put a positive spin on the whole experience.

“You get a little bit more time to enjoy the view out the window,” Williams said in the interview with the Times last week.

Not everything they saw was pleasing. From space, Wilmore saw Hurricane Beryl, which hit Houston in July. The storm damaged the roof of his home. The astronauts also saw the smoke from the Los Angeles wildfires in January.

Wilmore, who has a wife and two children, missed most of his younger daughter’s senior year of high school and his elder daughter’s sophomore year in college. He said his younger daughter was “tough,” but she also told him, “I didn’t know how much I needed you until you were gone.”

Nine months is not an unusually long stay for astronauts in space — Frank Rubio holds the record for the longest stay in space by an American astronaut at 371 days — but Wilmore and Williams nonetheless had to ward against the damage that space could inflict on the body. Without gravity, bone mass tends to diminish, a space version of osteoporosis. The astronauts worked out on the modified gym equipment in the space station, which included a treadmill with a harness that keeps the runner from floating away.

By the end of their journey, Williams and Wilmore had traveled nearly 121,347,500 miles, having orbited the Earth 4,576 times. Wilmore has spent a total of 31 hours conducting spacewalks during his career and Williams 62 hours, a record for a female astronaut.

Their 286 days in space, including the trip up in June and the descent Tuesday, was long. But their mission was perhaps not as dramatic as the one carried out by Sergei Krikalev, a Soviet astronaut who blasted off May 18, 1991, for a stay at the Soviet Union’s space station, Mir.

While Krikalev was orbiting the Earth, the Soviet Union disbanded, and he was asked to extend his stay by almost five months, in part because of his country’s disintegration and money problems in Moscow.

He ended up staying in space for 313 days, returning to a home country that no longer existed.