NASA astronaut Sunita Williams’ first look after returning home, she’s all smiles

NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, who were “stranded” in space for the past nine months, have finally come back home on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. Their extended stay in space became a matter of immense interest across the globe, with many raising concerns about their health.

Now, the Crew-9 has returned safely and NASA has provided the world with the first look of the four astronauts who landed on Earth early on Wednesday.

Soon after the splashdown, a larger recovery vessel hoisted the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, named Freedom, aboard. Teams opened the hatch, and one by one, the astronauts were helped onto mobility aids, waving and flashing thumbs-up signs.

Sunita Williams was all smiles as she came out of Freedom.

“After 286 days in space, @Astro_Suni is finally home,” the Official Rapid Response account of the Trump 47 White House 47 wrote while posting a video on X.

NASA livestreamed the Crew-9’s landing on Earth and their coming out of the Dragon spacecraft. “We’re getting our first look at #Crew9 since their return to Earth! Recovery teams will now help the crew out of Dragon, a standard process for all crew members after returning from long-duration missions,” NASA said.

The splashdown

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams returned to Earth in a SpaceX capsule on Tuesday with a soft splashdown off Florida’s coast, nine months after their faulty Boeing Starliner craft upended what was to be a week-long stay on the International Space Station.

Their return caps a protracted space mission that was fraught with uncertainty and technical troubles and turned a rare instance of NASA’s contingency planning – and the latest failures of Starliner – into a global spectacle.

Sunita William’s launch into space

Wilmore and Williams, two veteran NASA astronauts and retired US Navy test pilots, were launched into space as Starliner’s first crew in June for what was expected to be an eight-day test mission.

But issues with Starliner’s propulsion system led to cascading delays of their return home, culminating in a NASA decision to have them take a SpaceX craft back this year as part of the agency’s crew rotation schedule.

On Tuesday, March 18, Wilmore and Williams bid farewell to the station’s seven other astronauts as they undocked from the ISS at 1.05 a.m. ET (0505 GMT) to embark on a 17-hour trip to Earth.

The four-person crew, formally part of NASA’s Crew-9 astronaut rotation mission, re-entered Earth’s atmosphere around 5:45 p.m. ET.

‘What a ride’

“What a ride,” NASA astronaut Nick Hague, the Crew-9 mission commander inside the Dragon capsule, told mission control moments after splashing down.

“I see a capsule full of grins, ear to ear,” Hague was quoted by Reuters.

‘286 days in space’

Wilmore and Williams have logged 286 days in space on the mission, longer than the average six-month ISS mission’s span, but far short of US record holder Frank Rubio. His continuous 371 days in space, ending in 2023, were the unexpected result of a coolant leak on a Russian spacecraft.

Williams, capping her third spaceflight, has tallied 608 cumulative days in space, the second most for any US astronaut after Peggy Whitson’s 675 days. Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko set the world record last year at 878 cumulative days.