After a week-long trip to the International Space Station ballooned into a nine-month stay, two stranded NASA astronauts are finally heading home.
On Tuesday, if all goes to plan, a capsule will splash down off the Florida coast shortly before 6 p.m. ET, bringing Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Suni Williams back to the Earth’s surface for the first time since they launched into space last June.
NASA will be providing live coverage of the return journey starting at 4:45 p.m. ET.
The capsule is scheduled to begin its de-orbit burn — which is when it fires its thrusters to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere — at 5:11 p.m., with splashdown expected a little over 40 minutes later.
Wilmore, 62, and Williams, 59, will be returning to Earth with fellow NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov aboard SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, which undocked from the International Space Station (ISS) on Monday evening.
Hague and Gorbunov had arrived at the ISS in the Dragon spacecraft in September, with two empty seats for the return trip of Wilmore and Williams, but that trip couldn’t be set in motion until a full replacement crew arrived to fill their roles on the ISS.
That new crew of four astronauts arrived last week and will be spending the next six months at the space station.
Marooned in space
Williams and Wilmore’s space odyssey started last June, when they strapped in for what was intended to be a test flight of Boeing’s Starliner capsule. It was the first crewed flight of a Boeing spacecraft, and they were supposed to spend just over a week at the orbiting lab before returning home on June 14.
But although Starliner made it to the space station safely on June 6, last-minute malfunctioning of the thrusters almost derailed its docking. This, on top of a small helium leak, raised concerns that it might not be safe for Williams and Wilmore to return aboard it.
In August, NASA announced that it had decided to bring Boeing’s Starliner — which is fully autonomous, although it can be steered manually when needed — back to Earth without its crew.
Since then, Williams and Wilmore have been revolving around the Earth with the crew of Expedition 71/72 of the ISS, engaging in spacewalks, research and space station repairs as they waited to hear when they could come home.
They admitted in September that it was difficult to watch the spacecraft return home without them.
“That’s how it goes in this business,” Williams said at the time, adding that “you have to turn the page and look at the next opportunity.”
Both Williams and Wilmore started out in the U.S. Navy, and were selected as astronauts by NASA in 1998 and 2000 respectively. By the time they stepped on board Starliner last June, they were both familiar with the intricacies of space, having previously undergone two space missions each.
