NASA astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are finally back on Earth in space.
On Tuesday night, March 18, a Space Dragon capsule containing Wilmore and Williams, along with NASA’s Nick Hague and Russia’s Aleksandr Gorbunov and NASA’s Aleksandr Gorbunov, fell off the coast of Florida.
Within an hour, the astronauts took off from the capsule, waved and smiled at the camera while being lying on a stretcher for routine medical examinations.
“The crew performed well,” NASA’s commercial staff program manager Steve Sticch said in a press conference.
It ended a mission that could have lasted for eight days.
“It’s great to have nine crew 9 houses and just a beautiful landing ground,” said Joel Montalbano, deputy deputy administrator of the board of directors of Space Operations Mission at NASA.
He thanked the astronauts for their resilience and flexibility, and he said SpaceX was a “great companion”.
“The biggest thing is seeing friends, family and people they expect to spend Christmas with,” said Helen Sharman, the first astronaut in the UK.
“All of these family celebrations, birthdays and other events they think are going to be part of – now, suddenly, they might be able to catch up with some lost time.”
The legend of Butch and Suni began in June 2024.
They participated in the first crew test flight of the Starliner spacecraft developed by the Boeing Aerospace Company. But the capsule encountered several technical problems during its journey to the space station, and it was considered too risky to take the astronauts home.
Starliner returned to Earth safely in early September, but the two needed a new journey to return. Therefore, NASA chose the next scheduled flight: SpaceX capsules that arrived at ISS in late September.
It flew with two astronauts instead of four, leaving two seats for Butch and Suni’s return.
The only gain was the six-month mission planned to be carried out to extend the astronauts to the present.
NASA pair embraces their deadline in space.
They conducted a series of experiments on the orbital lab and performed spacewalks, and Suni broke the record of a woman who spent the most time outside the space station. During Christmas, the team wore Santa’s hats and reindeer antlers – sending holiday messages for Christmas, they were originally planning to spend at home.
Now that the astronauts have returned home, they will soon be taken to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where medical experts will check them out.
