Sunita “Suni” Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore have returned to Earth after a nine-month stay on the International Space Station — a trip that lasted far longer than originally planned thanks to leaks and thruster problems on the Boeing Starliner spacecraft they used to get there.
Williams and Wilmore splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico in a SpaceX Dragon capsule at 5:57 p.m. ET on Tuesday, after a 17-hour return journey from the ISS.
Their return marks the end of one of the stranger chapters in recent spaceflight history, thanks to the problems that Boeing’s Starliner experienced and the way that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has politicized the astronauts’ return.
Williams and Wilmore initially launched to the International Space Station (ISS) in June 2024 as part of a mission that was crucial to Boeing’s attempt to compete against SpaceX. The aviation behemoth won a contract alongside SpaceX in 2014 to send astronauts to the ISS for NASA with an eye on eventually carrying them even further out into the solar system.
SpaceX performed its first crewed flight with its Crew Dragon spacecraft in 2020 — during the early days of the covid pandemic. Boeing’s Starliner project, meanwhile, was dragged down by cost overruns and delays.
The flight in June 2024 was supposed to help Boeing look past all that. The goal was to send Williams and Wilmore to the ISS and then bring them back home after a short stay. But Starliner experienced problems before they even docked with the ISS. Once they finally got aboard, NASA and Boeing spent a few weeks performing tests before deciding to bring Starliner back without the astronauts.
NASA quickly started working with SpaceX on a plan to bring Willams and Wilmore back. After some back and forth, they decided to wait until early 2025 to bring the duo home so that the ISS wouldn’t be short-staffed.
In recent months, though, Musk has claimed (without providing any evidence) that he offered to bring the astronauts home earlier — and that former President Joe Biden declined the offer because it would help his political rival Donald Trump.
NASA’s former administrator and deputy administrator under Biden have both said the space agency was not aware of any offer. CNN reported on Tuesday that senior White House officials also claim they weren’t aware of any offer.