Two NASA astronauts left “stranded” on the International Space Station for months are heading back to Earth on Tuesday on SpaceX’s Dragon capsule.
Four astronauts, including NASA’s Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams, entered the capsule early Tuesday morning, hoping for a safe splashdown this evening after a 17-hour descent.
American astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov are also onboard the SpaceX capsule.
Mission managers do not have a precise location for the landing site, but they expect the astronauts to touch down sometime after 6 p.m. EDT off the Florida coast. NASA said it expects weather conditions to be highly favorable for a landing.
“We’ll miss you, but have a great journey home,” NASA astronaut Anne McClain called out from the space station as the capsule pulled away more than 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean, The Associated Press reported.
Tuesday’s touchdown would end Mr. Wilmore and Ms. Williams’ extended stay on the ISS, a mission that was only supposed to last a few days. The astronauts arrived at the station in June last year intending only to stay a maximum of 10 days while they tested the Starliner’s docking capabilities.
However, a series of technical difficulties with the return craft led to NASA and Boeing repeatedly postponing the astronauts’ return. The Starliner returned to Earth empty in Sept. 2024, with the two astronauts intended to replace Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore reassigned.
In the months since their departure, the astronauts’ situation has become somewhat of a political flashpoint. Elon Musk, SpaceX founder and a close ally of President Trump, has claimed that President Biden’s White House “abandoned” the astronauts.
Mr. Musk asserted that he offered to bring the astronauts home last year with the help of SpaceX capsules, but the Biden administration rejected his efforts. Mr. Musk’s claims have been publicly challenged by Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen, who accused the SpaceX CEO of lying. Mr. Mogensen, a veteran of the ISS, said that the return of Mr. Wilmore and Ms. Williams had been planned since September.
Mr. Musk called the astronaut “fully retarded” in response and implied that the U.S. should shut down the space station altogether.
The two stranded astronauts have kept busy during their unexpected stay on the ISS. The AP reported that the two conducted experiments, dealt with balky equipment and even took spacewalks together. With 62 hours over nine spacewalks, Ms. Williams set a record for the most cumulative time spacewalking for a female astronaut.
