Stuck in space no more, Nasa astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams returned to Earth on Tuesday, hitching a different ride home to end a saga that began with a bungled test flight more than nine months ago.
Advertisement
Their SpaceX capsule parachuted into the Gulf of Mexico in the early evening, just hours after departing the International Space Station. Splashdown took place off the coast of Tallahassee in the Florida Panhandle, bringing their unplanned odyssey to an end.
It all started with a flawed Boeing test flight last spring.
The two expected to be gone just a week or so after launching on Boeing’s new Starliner crew capsule on June 5. So many problems cropped up on the way to the space station that Nasa eventually sent Starliner back empty and transferred the test pilots to SpaceX, pushing their homecoming into February. Then SpaceX capsule issues added another month’s delay.
Sunday’s arrival of their relief crew meant Wilmore and Williams could finally leave. Nasa cut them loose a little early, given the adverse weather forecast later this week. They checked out with Nasa’s Nick Hague and Russia’s Alexander Gorbunov, who arrived in their own SpaceX capsule last autumn with two empty seats reserved for the Starliner duo.
Advertisement
Wilmore and Williams ended up spending 286 days in space – 278 days longer than anticipated when they launched. They circled Earth 4,576 times and travelled 195 million km (121 million miles) by the time of splashdown.