Nine-month ordeal of astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore ended

Astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore of NASA returned to Earth early yesterday morning aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon Spacecraft. Their SpaceX capsule parachuted into the Gulf of Mexico. A splashdown occurred off the coast of Tallahassee in the Florida Panhandle, bringing to an end the nine-month ordeal of the two astronauts. 

With this, the astronauts concluded their trip with SpaceX’s Crew-9, along with NASA’s Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov. Wilmore and Williams were on the International Space Station since June of last year, following the maiden crewed mission of the Boeing Starliner spacecraft, which encountered technical issues that rendered it unsuitable for their return journey. The two astronauts ended up



spending 286 days in space – 278 days longer than anticipated.

NASA’s Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov were sent to the ISS in September 2024 by a Dragon spacecraft. Now that the astronauts have arrived home, they have been taken to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where they will be checked over by medical experts. Long-duration missions in space take a toll on the body as astronauts lose bone density and suffer muscle loss. Blood circulation is also affected, and fluid shifts can impact eyesight. It can take a long time for the body to return to normal, so the pair will be given an extensive exercise regimen as their bodies re-adapt to living with gravity.