WATCH LIVE: Long overdue NASA astronauts back on Earth
An unexpectedly epic saga for veteran NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams ended just before 4 p.m. MDT Tuesday.
Following the SpaceX Crew 10 arrival at the International Space Station on Saturday, veteran Navy pilots Wilmore and Williams traveled home aboard the SpaceX Dragon capsule that's been docked at the space station since last fall.
The two, along with fellow NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, splashed down in the Atlantic off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida, at 3:57 MDT Tuesday. NASA moved the return flight up a day to bring the crew back ahead of an anticipated weather system headed for the Florida coast.
Recovery boats quickly responded after the capsule, slowed by four giant parachutes, entered the water traveling around 16 m.p.h., completing a flight that left about 17 hours earlier from the ISS. The astronauts will be released from the capsule after it's hoisted aboard a recovery vessel.
Wilmore and Williams rocketed into space last June for an expected one-week stay on the International Space Station. But a slew of technical issues with the Boeing Starliner spaceship that Wilmore and Williams flew to the station on the craft's debut crewed mission led to a decision to keep them in space as Starliner returned to Earth empty last September.
Later that month, a modified SpaceX Crew 9 mission arrived at the space station with two astronauts aboard and two empty seats to bring Wilmore and Williams home.
A decision to bring Wilmore and Williams home early aboard the Crew 9 ship ahead of Crew 10's arrival would have left NASA astronaut Don Pettit, who flew to the ISS with a Russian crew last September, as the only American aboard the station, a rare staffing imbalance that NASA has said complicates maintenance of the station's U.S. components.
'Sure, it could have taken us home, but that leaves only three people on the space station from the Soyuz crew, two Russians and one American,' Williams told CBS News in an in-flight interview. 'And, you know, the space station is big. It's a building, you know, it's the size of a football field. Things happen.'
'NASA and SpaceX met on Sunday to assess weather and splashdown conditions off Florida's coast for the return of the agency's Crew 9 mission from the International Space Station,' NASA wrote in a Sunday press release. 'Mission managers are targeting an earlier Crew 9 return opportunity based on favorable conditions forecasted for the evening of Tuesday, March 18.'
Problems with the flight of Boeing's Starliner capsule arose early on when five of 28 maneuvering thrusters failed to perform as expected during the ship's docking at the space station on June 6, 2024. Engineers also identified five small helium leaks, some of which were detected before the spacecraft launched. Helium is used in the capsule's thruster firing procedure.
Engineering teams spent months working to identify the underlying issues with the thrusters, critical for maneuvering and positioning the spacecraft, including reviewing massive amounts of data, conducting flight and ground testing, hosting independent reviews with agency propulsion experts and developing various return contingency plans, NASA reported last year.
But ultimately NASA decided that ongoing uncertainty and a lack of concurrence at the time among engineers and other experts about resolving the Starliner problems 'does not meet the agency's safety and performance requirements for human spaceflight, thus prompting NASA leadership to move the astronauts to the (SpaceX Dragon) Crew 9 mission.'
The Starliner capsule returned to Earth empty last Sept. 6 following a six-hour flight that did not encounter any issues.
Later that month, the SpaceX Crew 9 mission docked at the International Space Station, with only two astronauts aboard and plans to fill the remaining seats in the four-passenger capsule with Williams and Wilmore for a return flight scheduled, at the time, for February 2025.
On Dec. 17, NASA announced it was delaying the SpaceX Crew 10 mission launch and the expected crew handoff that would have marked the end of Williams' and Wilmore's time at the space station. NASA said the delay would push out the Crew 9-Crew 10 handoff to late March 2025.
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