NASA's two struggled astronauts returned to Earth with Spacex on Tuesday to close a dramatic marathon mission that began with a Boeing Bungled test flight more than nine months ago.
Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams said goodbye to the International Space Station, their home from the last spring, leaving aboard a Spacex capsule along with two other astronauts. The capsule discredited shortly after 1 in the East morning and pointed to splashes on the Florida coast around 6 pm east, the weather allows.
The two expected to have left only a week or so after launching in the new capsule of the Boeing Starliner crew on June 5. So many problems arose on the way to the space station that NASA finally sent Starliner again and transferred the test pilots to Spacex, pushing their home to February. Then, the problems of the Spacex capsule added the delay of another month.
The Sunday arrival of his help team meant that Wilmore and Williams could finally leave. NASA released them a little early, given the forecast of doubtful time at the end of this week. They checked with Nasa Hague from NASA and Alexander Gorbunov from Russia, who reached their own Spacex capsule last fall with two empty seats reserved for the Starliner duo.
“We will miss you, but we will have a great trip home,” said Anne McClain of NASA from the space station when the capsule moved away 260 miles (418 kilometers) over the Pacific.
His difficult situation captured the attention of the world, giving new meaning to the phrase “stuck at work.” While other astronauts had registered longer spatial flights during the decades, none had to deal with such uncertainty or see the duration of their mission expand so much.
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Wilmore and Williams quickly made the transition from guests to members of the Plenary Station crew, carrying out experiments, fixing equipment and even walking spaces. With 62 hours on nine space walks, Williams established a record: the time spent in a race among female astronauts.
Both had lived in the laboratory in orbit before and knew the strings, and repressed themselves in the training of their station before moving away. Williams became the commander of the season three months in his stay and held the position until the beginning of this month.
His mission received an unexpected turn at the end of January when President Donald Trump asked the founder of Spacex, Elon Musk, to accelerate the return of the astronauts and blamed the delay to the Biden administration. The new Spacex capsule of the replacement equipment was not yet ready to fly, so Spacex uploaded it with one used, hurrying things for at least a few weeks.
Even in the middle of the political storm, Wilmore and Williams continued to maintain a cheese even in the public appearances of Orbit, without blaming and insisting that they supported NASA's decisions from the beginning.
NASA hired Spacex and Boeing after the transport program ended, to have two US companies in competition for transporting astronauts to and from the space station until it was abandoned in 2030 and went to a burning reentry. By then, more than three decades have been there; The plan is to replace it with private execution stations so that NASA can focus on the expeditions of Moon and Mars.
Both Navy captains, Wilmore and Williams emphasized that they didn't mind spending more time in space, a prolonged deployment reminiscent of their military days. But they acknowledged that it was difficult for their families.
Wilmore, 62, was lost most of the last year of high school of his youngest daughter; His eldest daughter is at university. Williams, 59, had to settle for Internet calls from space to his mother. They will have to wait until they are outside the Spacex recovery ship and fly to Houston before the long -awaited meeting with their loved ones.
& Copy 2025 the Canadian press