Sunita Williams, Butch Return To Planet Earth After 9 Months

Washington: Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore returned to planet Earth Tuesday evening ending an unplanned protracted stay on the International Space Station.

The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft carrying them and two other astronauts—Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov—splashed down into the waters off the coast of Florida state just minutes before 6 p.m., as NASA had announced.

The capsule was then carried to the recovery ship, where Hague became the first to exit the spacecraft nearly 50 minutes after splashdown. Williams emerged third. All three were assisted out of the capsule, smiling and waving.

Williams and Wilmore had left for the space station on June 6, 2024 with plans to stay for eight days and return by the same spacecraft that carried them, Boeing’s Starliner. But a malfunction in the spacecraft delayed the return until now, onboard a spacecraft belonging to Elon Musk's SpaceX. “Congratulations to the @SpaceX and @NASA teams for another safe astronaut return!” Musk wrote on X, reporting a video of the splashdown from SpaceX. “Thank you to @POTUS for prioritising this mission!

This was Indian-descent Indian-descent Williams’s third trip to the space station. She and Wilmore spent 287 days on the station.

The International Space Station orbits around the Earth at an altitude of 254 miles (406.4 km) at a speed of 4.76 miles/s.