NASA Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams returned to Earth in a Spacex capsule on Tuesday with a soft splash on the Florida coast, nine months after their failed Boeing Ba.n Starliner Craft overturned what would be a one -week stay at the International Space Station (ISS).
His return limits a prolonged space mission that was full of uncertainty and technical problems, turning a rare instance of NASA’s contingency planning, and the latest Starliner failures, in a global and political show.
Wilmore and Williams, two NASA astronaut veterans and pilots retired from the US Navy. But the problems with the Starliner propulsion system led to cascade delays upon home, culminating in a NASA decision to bend them at their crew rotation schedule and return them to a Spacex ship this year.
On Tuesday morning, Wilmore and Williams tied inside their crew dragon spacecraft along with two other astronauts and discredited from the ISS at 5:05 GMT (10:05 am, Pakistan time) to embark on a 17 -hour trip to the earth.
The crew of four people, formally part of NASA less than 50 miles) about 50 miles 50 miles from the golf coast.
“What A Ride,” NASA Astronaut Nasa Hague, the commander of the crew mission inside the dragon capsule, the moments of mission control after splashing. “I see a capsule full of smiles, ear to ear.”
Astronauts will be flown on a NASA plane to their crew rooms at the Johnson Space Center of the space agency in Houston for a few days of routine health controls before NASA’s flight surgeons say they can go home with their families.
“They will get a free time and a well -deserved time with their families,” said NASA’s commercial crew program, Steve Stich, journalists after Splashdown. “It has been a long time for them.”
Political show
The mission captured the attention of US President Donald Trump, who, when assuming the position in January, requested a faster return of Wilmore and Williams and alleged, without evidence, that former President Joe Biden “abandoned them” for the ISS for political reasons.
NASA acted with Trump’s demand to move the CREW-9 replacement mission before, the ISS chief of the agency, Joel Montalbano, said Tuesday. The agency had changed a Spacex capsule delayed by one that would be ready before and accelerated its methodical security review process to pay attention to the president’s call.
Trump told Fox News on Tuesday that Wilmore and Williams will visit the Oval office after they recover from their mission.
Wilmore earlier this month told journalists in a call from the ISS who did not believe that NASA’s decision to keep them in the ISS until the arrival of the crew-10 would have been affected by politics under the Biden administration.
The Spacex CEO, Elon Musk, a nearby Trump advisor, had echoed Trump’s call for a previous return, added that the Biden administration rejected a Spacex offer to provide a dedicated dragon rescue mission last year.
NASA officials have said that the two astronauts had to remain in the ISS to maintain adequate personnel and did not have the budget or the operational need to send a dedicated rescue spacecraft. Dragon crew flights cost $ 100 million to $ 150 million.
Crew Dragon is the only American spacecraft capable of flying to people in orbit. Boeing hoped that Starliner would compete with the Spacex capsule before the mission with Wilmore and Williams threw his future of development for uncertainty.
Stich said on Tuesday that Starliner may need to fly another blunt not introduced, that it would be his third mission and fourth test in general, before American astronauts leads.
Boeing, who congratulated the return of astronauts for X, did not respond immediately to a request for comments.
286 days in space
The ISS, of approximately 254 miles of altitude, is a research laboratory of the size of a football field that has been continuously lodged by international astronaut teams for almost 25 years, a key platform for scientific diplomacy administered mainly by the United States and Russia.
He swept the rotation schedule of NASA’s routine astronauts, Wilmore and Williams worked on approximately 150 scientific experiments aboard the station until his replacement team was launched last week.
The couple registered 286 days in the mission space, more time than the average duration of the six -month ISS mission, but very little by little of the US record holder. UU. Frank Rubio, whose 371 days in the space ending in 2023 were the unexpected result of a refrigerant leak in a Russian spacecraft.
Living in space for months can affect the human body in multiple ways, from muscular atrophy to the possible deterioration of vision.
Williams, with his third space flight, has counted 608 cumulative days in space, the second more for any American astronaut after the 675 days of Peggy Whitson. Russian Cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko established the world record last year in 878 cumulative days.
“We came prepared to stay a lot of time, although we planned to keep us short,” Wilmore told Space journalists earlier this month.
“That’s what the human space flight program is about,” he said. “Unknown and unexpected contingency planning.
