After a week-long trip to the International Space Station ballooned into a nine-month stay, two 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’s live coverage of the return journey kicked off 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.
The plight of the so-called “stranded” astronauts — a term widely used in media reports, although NASA and the two astronauts have not characterized their extended space visit this way — has captured audiences on Earth for months as the plan for their return continued to rack up delays and complications.
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, Crew-10, arrived last week for the regular rotation of ISS crew, and will be spending the next six months at the space station.
Left behind after test flight issues
The astronauts’ 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 Wilmore and Williams 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, Wilmore and Williams have been revolving around the Earth as fully incorporated crew members 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. Williams also served as commander of the orbiting laboratory since September.
NASA says astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams may not be able to return from space until 2025 after a number of issues were detected on the Boeing Starliner capsule. Andrew Chang explains why getting them home is becoming increasingly complicated.
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.”
Starliner being brought back without its test pilots was a major setback for Boeing, which has been hoping to join SpaceX as one of NASA’s designated taxi services to the ISS. Engineers are still investigating the thruster breakdown.
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.
As this latest mission officially draws to a close on Tuesday, Wilmore will have tallied a total of 404 days in space across his three spaceflights, while Williams will have tallied 608 cumulative days in space across hers, which is the second-most of any U.S. astronaut, after Peggy Whitson’s 675 days. Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko holds the world record, with more than 1,100 days in space.
A long-awaited return
Coming home to Earth after spending months living in space is always a bit of an ordeal for the body, according to Scott Parazynski, a former NASA astronaut and now CEO of Onward Air and Aerospace Company.
“It’ll feel like they are 100 years old,” he told CBC News Network. “They’ll be carrying the weight of gravity as well as their space suits on their back for the first time [in months].”
Astronauts use workout equipment on the ISS to stay in shape and prevent some of the loss of bone calcium and muscle integrity, but there is still a big adjustment process to recover balance and strength, Parazynski said.
However, while a nine-month stay on the ISS is about three months longer than the usual rotation, it’s far from the longest anyone has spent in space, so no special precautions are needed for Williams and Wilmore.
“There is ample precedent for this,” Parazynski said. “An American astronaut, Frank Rubio, doubled his stay aboard the ISS — actually now holds the U.S. record, 371 [consecutive] days in space — when a Soyuz capsule sprung a leak.”
Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev was on the space station Mir when the Soviet Union, which had sent him there, was dissolved in 1991, leaving him marooned for 311 days in space, twice the length of his original mission.
