STRANDED astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams have finally splashed back on Earth – after being stuck in space for a gruelling nine months.
The pair returned to their home planet in a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft alongside two rescue mission astronauts on Tuesday night when the capsule landed off the Florida coast.
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The capsule, named Freedom, dramatically splashed down in the sea near Florida and Tallahassee, ending an unexpectedly long mission which started in June 2024.
Tense footage showed the capsule flying down at incredibly high speeds before a parachute was suddenly deployed, slowing the speed of the craft.
As the capsule landed, it dramatically slowed down from more than 17,000mph to completely stationary in just minutes.
When it did land, the astronauts were greeted from the control centre: “Nick, Alec, Butch, Suni – on behalf of SpaceX, welcome home.”
The centre added: “I see a capsule full of grins, ear to ear.”
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The astronauts were not controlling or steering the capsule, as it was flying autonomously and only being monitored by the crew.
After the successful landing, recovery teams arrived in “fast boats” to complete safety checks and retrieve the parachutes.
The SpaceX recovery vessel will make its way to the craft, pick it up and open the spaceship to allow the crew out for their first breath of fresh air.
In a tense moment just before the landing, the capsule lost all communications with the command center for several minutes.
This phenomenon is usual, as during the capsule’s re-entry into the atmosphere plasma builds up around the shield and it gets extremely hot.
Communications returned several minutes later as usual once the capsule had entered the atmosphere.
The two accompanying rescue members, American Nick Hague and Russian Aleksandr Gorbunov, had been living at the International Space Station with them since last September.
Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Sunni” Williams had initially been sent on a days-long mission to test out Boeing’s Starliner on its first crewed flight.
But after the spaceship developed propulsion problems, they stayed in space the ISS whilst their craft flew back empty.
Wilmore and Williams’ 286-day stay exceeds the usual six-month ISS rotation but ranks only sixth among US records for single-mission duration.
Frank Rubio holds the top spot at 371 days in 2023, while the world record remains with Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov, who spent a whopping 437 consecutive days aboard the Mir station.
NASA has rejected the wording “stranded”, emphasizing that the pair could have been evacuated in an emergency if necessary.
The situation attracted Elon Musk when in an interview with Fox News, he claimed the astronauts were left in space for political reasons.
Musk said on X that SpaceX could have brought Butch and Suni back sooner, and that the Biden Administration turned his offer down.
But NASA officials hit back saying their decisions were based on scheduling for flights at the International Space Station’s needs.
This was astronaut Aleksandr Gorbunov’s first trip to space, while U.S. man Nick Hague previously spent 203 days on the space station in 2019.
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