They’re back.
After more than nine months in orbit, astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams returned to Earth on Tuesday evening, with a NASA livestream showing their vehicle splashing down in coastal Florida waters around 6 p.m. ET.
The return of Butch and Suni, as the duo are often called, caps an extended saga that thrust the agency into some of its most fraught debates about safe human space flight in years. During that time, Wilmore and Williams’s lives were disrupted, exposing them to risks in orbit and keeping them far from family to carry out a mission that was supposed to last about eight days.
Throughout it all, Wilmore and Williams, experienced astronauts and former Navy pilots, maintained an even keel. With Tuesday’s landing, they logged 285 days on the space station and orbited the Earth almost 4,600 times.
“Don’t remind me, this might be my last flight” to the ISS, Williams said during a recent briefing with reporters. “That’s a little sad.”
Williams, 59 years old, and Wilmore, 62, wound up celebrating Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Eve and both their birthdays on the space station.
After Wilmore, Williams and two other crew members are retrieved, the group will travel to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston for several days of medical checks by agency flight surgeons.
Wilmore and Williams arrived at the orbiting research laboratory on June 6. Their mission aimed to test the capabilities of a Boeing-developed spacecraft, called Starliner, designed to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS.
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