astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams who had been stuck in for more than nine months are set to return to Earth on Tuesday.
The duo, whose weeklong mission was prolonged due to a fault in their Boeing Starliner craft, departed from the International Space Station (ISS) on Tuesday morning .
Willmore and Williams with two more astronauts — American Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov — embarked on a 17-hour trip to Earth at 1.05 a.m. ET (0505 GMT).
The capsule carrying the astronauts is set for a splashdown off Florida’s coast later on Tuesday at 5:57 p.m. ET.
NASA astronauts finally leave space station
Live footage showed the astronauts laughing, hugging and posing for photos with their colleagues from the station before they left the ISS.
They were then sealed inside the capsule, wearing their re-entry suits, boots and helmets, for two hours while final pressure, communications and seal tests were carried out.
The four-person crew is formally a part of NASA’s Crew-9 astronaut rotation mission.
“Crew-9 is going home,” said commander Nick Hague from inside the capsule.
Hague said it was a privilege to “call the station home” as part of an international effort for the “benefit of humanity.”
Having spent a , upon their return to Earth, the astronauts will spend several days of health checks at NASA’s Space Center in Houston.
Prolonged mission turned into political spectacle
The two veteran NASA astronauts and retired US Navy test pilots were sent into space as Starliner’s first crew in June and their mission was initially supposed to last just a few days.
However, problems with the Starliner’s propulsion system led to multiple delays in their return home which led in a SpaceX craft.
Willmore and Williams’s stay in space exceeded the standard six-monthlong ISS rotation.
The delay in the mission spotlighted NASA’s contingency planning as well as the failures of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft.
The mission even gained political attention with calling for a quicker return of the astronauts and alleging that former President Joe Biden “abandoned” them on the ISS for political reasons.
Edited by: Alex Berry
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