Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore safely home after long wait: Splashdown off the coast of Florida!

SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule carrying the four Crew-9 astronauts has successfully splashed down off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida.

The waters appear calm, with NASA’s Sandra Jones describing “breathtaking views of a calm, glass-like ocean” just before touchdown.

SpaceX’s recovery teams are now moving in, preparing to hoist the spacecraft onto a specialized rig known as the “Dragon’s nest.”

A Mission That Went Off Course

Wilmore and Williams originally launched in June 2024 aboard Boeing’s Starliner for what was meant to be a short test flight. But things didn’t go to plan. The spacecraft suffered propulsion failures and was deemed unsafe for the return journey, forcing NASA to send it back to Earth—empty.

With no immediate way home, the pair were reassigned to SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission. That mission, which arrived at the ISS in September, carried only two crew members instead of the usual four to make space for Wilmore and Williams. While the two became widely known as the «stranded astronauts,» NASA pushed back against the label. Officials insisted that, in an emergency, they could have been brought home earlier.

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Challenges ahead for NASA astronauts

Spending 286 days in space is far beyond the standard six-month ISS rotation. But while their stay was long, it wasn’t record-breaking. Frank Rubio holds the longest single-mission record for a U.S. astronaut at 371 days, while Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov spent an astonishing 437 days aboard the Mir space station.

Extended time in microgravity comes with well-documented health risks. «That makes it 'par for the course' in terms of health risks,» said Rihana Bokhari from the Center for Space Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. Astronauts face muscle