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Astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams are finally on their way home.
The two astronauts went to the International Space Station for an eight-day trip in June that turned into a nine-month ordeal after problems with the Boeing Starliner that brought them to the stars arose. NASA deemed the ship unsafe for a return trip, leaving the pair with no way to get back down to Earth.
But after months of delays, Wilmore and Williams, along with astronauts Nick Hague and Aleksandr Gorbunov, boarded SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft “Freedom,” which undocked from the ISS on Tuesday just after 1 a.m. They are set to splashdown in Florida waters sometime after 5 p.m. E.T., beginning a de-orbit about an hour earlier, NASA said.
While both Wilmore and Williams didn’t plan to be in space that long, they tried to make the most of it. “It makes you really want to enjoy every bit of your time that you have up here,” Williams said.
Their return, though, recently found itself in the middle of a political battle after SpaceX Elon Musk claimed without evidence that the Biden administration abandoned the Wilmore and Williams in space rather than collaborate with him. Musk said the Biden administration did not want to make a supporter of now President Donald Trump look good.
When asked about this, Wilmore declined to address it directly. “We have no information on that ... what was offered, what was not offered, who it was offered to, how that processes went,” he said. “That’s information that we simply don’t have.”
Watch a livestream of the astronauts’ return to Earth below.