NASA schedules quick return of astronauts in SpaceX capsule

By Ali Watkins and Kenneth Chang

Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore — two NASA astronauts who have remained in space for months longer than planned — could be back on Earth on Tuesday evening.

That is earlier than NASA had said Friday when a replacement crew of astronauts launched to the International Space Station.

Typically, the two groups of astronauts — the new arrivals and the ones about to go home — overlap on the station for up to a week, but this time, the agency said it was looking at a quicker-than-usual return, as early as Wednesday.

On Sunday night, NASA said it was pushing the return date even earlier, to Tuesday, to take advantage of a good weather forecast along the Gulf Coast of Florida where the astronauts will splash down. The weather is expected to be less favorable later in the week.

NASA officials want to keep handover short to conserve supplies like food.

“We don’t want to lose any good opportunities that we might have in this case,” Dina Contella, deputy manager at NASA for the space station program, said during a news conference Friday. “We’re trying to stretch the consumables.”

Undocking is scheduled for a little after 1 a.m. Eastern time Tuesday.

Williams and Wilmore, along with Nick Hague of NASA and Aleksandr Gorbunov of the Russian space agency, will be in the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft — the one that Hague and Gorbunov took to space in September. The journey back will take about 17 hours.

The SpaceX Crew Dragon with the replacement crew — Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers of NASA, Takuya Onishi of Japanese space agency and Kirill Peskov of the Russian space agency — arrived at the space station at 12:04 a.m. Eastern time Sunday. After checks to ensure that the seal between spacecraft and space station was tight, the hatch opened 1 1/2 hours later and the crew of four received warm greetings from their colleagues.

For Williams and Wilmore, it has been a long journey. The two arrived at the space station in June on what was meant to be a brief, dayslong test flight of a new Boeing Starliner spacecraft. Instead, after malfunctions in the capsule, NASA officials opted to leave the astronauts at the space station and bring back the Starliner empty.

Williams and Wilmore have lived on the space station for nine months, awaiting new crew members to relieve them of their duties so that operations can run smoothly. The capsule’s trip was due to launch in February but was delayed until this month.

Nine months is not an unusually long stay in space — many astronauts on the space station live there for months, and some have even lived there for more than a year. Williams and Wilmore have used the time to conduct experiments, many exploring what the absence of gravity does to a body.

The pair’s unexpectedly long stay in orbit has intrigued space nerds, hobbyists and members of the public alike, fascinated by their fate. Williams and Wilmore have embraced their circumstances, broadcasting regularly from the station and speaking fondly about their layover in space.

“It makes you really want to enjoy every bit of your time that you have up here,” Williams told “The Daily” last week.