Astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, after being stranded at the International Space Station (ISS) for more than nine months, have returned to Earth and splashed down off the coast of the American state of Florida early on Wednesday.
A SpaceX Crew Dragon spaceship carrying the two astronauts, alongside American Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, streaked through the atmosphere before deploying parachutes for a gentle splashdown off the Florida coast at 3:27 am IST.
The two astronauts flew to the orbital lab in June last year, on what was supposed to be a days-long roundtrip to test Boeing’s Starliner on its first crewed flight. The spaceship, however, developed propulsion problems and was deemed unfit to fly back and later returned empty.
President Donald Trump had accused the previous Joe Biden administration of leaving the astronauts stranded in space for “political reasons”, and had alleged that they were incapable of carrying out the mission. In January, President Trump asked Elon Musk to accelerate the astronauts’ return.
Sharing a video of the splashdown, Musk congratulated his SpaceX team and Nasa and also thanked President Trump for “prioritising this mission”.
Nasa acting Administrator Janet Petro, at a press briefing after the historic mission, said as per President Trump’s direction, the agency and SpaceX “worked diligently to pull the schedule a month earlier”.
“This international crew and our teams on the ground embraced the Trump Administration’s challenge of an updated, and somewhat unique, mission plan, to bring our crew home. Through preparation, ingenuity, and dedication, we achieve great things together for the benefit of humanity, pushing the boundaries of what is possible from low Earth orbit to the Moon and Mars,” he said.
