Nasa-SpaceX mission live: splashdown expected soon as stranded US astronauts head back to Earth after nine months | Nasa


Nasa astronauts expected to splash down just before 6pm Florida time

Hello and welcome to our live coverage of two US astronauts – stuck for more than nine months on the International Space Station – returning to Earth today.

Nasa said it expects the astronauts to splash down off the Florida coast at approximately 5.57pm ET Tuesday (21.57 GMT). Favourable weather meant their expected re-entry was moved forward from Wednesday.

Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams are heading home with another American astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon craft, which arrived at the ISS early on Sunday.

The stranded duo have been on the ISS since June, after the Boeing Starliner spacecraft they were testing on its maiden crewed voyage suffered propulsion issues and was deemed unfit to fly them back to Earth.

On Sunday, Nasa said: “The updated return target continues to allow the space station crew members time to complete handover duties while providing operational flexibility ahead of less favorable weather conditions expected for later in the week.”

Nasa astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov are also returning on the Dragon capsule, which undocked from the space station at 1.05am ET on Monday.

The final stages of their journey will be broadcast live on the new Nasa+ streaming service. And we will have a live feed at the top of this live blog.

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The tone of NASA’s live coverage today is really striking: it’s being narrated in a way that sounds a lot like the move-by-move commentary of a sports game, complete with detailed information on the various “stats” of the four astronauts returning home to earth.

That space-athletes commentary is mixed with a lot of highly technical information about what’s happening during every step of this return.

Compared with what else is going on in the news, this is some pretty high-level Theater of Government Competence.

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