NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore are finally coming home.
The astronauts, who had planned to visit the International Space Station for just a week but have been there more than nine months, departed early Tuesday.
Their journey back to Earth will close out an unusual and closely watched chapter in spaceflight history. Williams and Wilmore became household names after launching on the first crewed test flight of Boeing’s Starliner capsule in June. But they encountered problems with the vehicle’s thrusters while docking to the space station, which eventually led NASA to bring the Starliner back to Earth without anyone on board.
That forced Williams and Wilmore to remain in orbit for far more time than planned. But at long last, they departed the space station on Tuesday at 1:05 a.m. ET aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule.
The astronauts should then splash down off the coast of Florida at 5:57 p.m. ET.
Alongside them will be NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, who are wrapping up a roughly six-month mission at the space station.
The particular timing of the group’s return flight on Tuesday was decided “based on favorable conditions forecasted for the evening of Tuesday, March 18,” NASA said in a statement. (The agency previously targeted Wednesday for the journey.)
The SpaceX vehicle that the four will share arrived at the space station in September, carrying Hague and Gorbunov, along with two empty seats to accommodate their colleagues. Williams and Wilmore then stuck around so that Hague and Gorbunov could complete their mission.
That is now ending as a new set of astronauts takes over. On Sunday, Williams, Wilmore, Hague and Gorbunov welcomed the incoming crew — NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Russian cosmonaut Kirill Peskov — to the orbiting outpost.
In that sense, despite the attention their extraordinary circumstances have garnered, Williams and Wilmore…
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