The NASA astronauts who spent an unexpected nine months on the International Space Station (ISS) have finally begun their long-awaited journey home.
At 05:05 (UTC) on March 18, 2025, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, along with fellow NASA astronaut Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, undocked from ISS’s Harmony module for the start of a near 17-hour journey.
The ‘stranded’ astronauts Williams and Wilmore first arrived at the space station in June 2024 for a planned week-long mission. However, their Boeing Starliner capsule was beset by technical problems and it was decided that the spacecraft should return unmanned.
NASA’s Crew-9 boarded the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft following the arrival on March 16, 2025, of Crew-10, who are scheduled to stay on ISS for around six months.
The @SpaceX Dragon spacecraft carrying four #Crew9 members undocked from the station at 1:05am ET today and is headed for a splashdown off the coast of Florida in the Gulf of America at 5:57pm. More… https://t.co/eISgbf1ngL pic.twitter.com/kHSzIlrZhP
— International Space Station (@Space_Station) March 18, 2025
“We came up prepared to stay long, even though we planned to stay short. That’s what we do in human space flight – planning for unknown unexpected contingencies and we did that. That’s why we float right into Crew-9, and it was a somewhat of a seamless transition because we had planned ahead for it,” Wilmore recently said before the astronauts’ return.
Hague, Williams and Wilmore have completed more than 900 hours of research between more than 150 unique scientific experiments and technology demonstrations during their stay aboard the orbiting ISS laboratory.
They have carried out studies to design better reactors, build wooden satellites, and prepare for missions to the Moon and Mars.
The fate of the two astronauts has become politically charged with President Donald Trump saying that it was “terrible that the Biden administration left them there so long”.
On January 29, 2025, US President Donald Trump asked Elon Musk to “go get” the two “brave astronauts who have been virtually abandoned in space”.
Musk had previously said that his attempts to rescue the astronauts had been blocked by President Joe Biden, although a NASA top official contradicted this claim and said an offer to help “never came to headquarters”.
Dragon on-orbit shortly after undocking from the @Space_Station pic.twitter.com/lxmTIJuf99
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) March 18, 2025
Williams and Wilmore’s original launch on June 5, 2024, involved the first-ever crewed Boeing Starliner to ever venture into space.
NASA said that its reentry and splashdown coverage for the astronauts’ homecoming will begin at 21:45 (UTC).
