Arriving at the International Space Station on June 6, 2024, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were supposed to spend only a few days in orbit. Instead, they had to significantly extend their stay on the station due to several technical problems with the spacecraft that had brought them there.
On Tuesday, at 10:57 p.m. in Italy, the astronauts stuck on the International Space Station (ISS) for over nine months finally returned to Earth. They are the Americans Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore: they arrived there last June and were supposed to stay on the ISS for only eight days but, due to technical problems with the Starliner capsule that brought them there, their mission lasted more than nine months. Their return trip took place aboard a SpaceX capsule: they left this morning, at 6:05 a.m.: their journey lasted about 17 hours.
Together with Williams and Wilmore, Nick Hague, another NASA astronaut, and Aleksandr Gorbunov, a cosmonaut from the Russian space agency Roscosmos, also returned to Earth (cosmonauts and astronauts do the same job: since the Cold War, the term cosmonaut has been used to distinguish Soviet, now Russian, astronauts from Western astronauts). Four astronauts who arrived last weekend to relieve them remain on the International Space Station: Americans Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japanese Takuya Onishi and Russian Kirill Peskov, who will remain with part of the crew already on board, NASA astronaut Don Pettit and cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner.
The Starliner capsule with which Williams and Wilmore had arrived at the ISS in June, produced by Boeing, had problems with the maneuvering systems before reaching the station. NASA and Boeing subsequently assessed the safety of the capsule and the US space agency concluded that it was better to return it to Earth without anyone on board. This also gave rise to a political case, because then-presidential candidate Donald Trump and Elon Musk, his main supporter and owner of SpaceX, had even hinted that the two had been abandoned and forgotten in space by the Biden administration for political reasons.
