NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni 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 weeklong 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 Boeing's Starliner — into a global spectacle.
Wilmore and Williams, two veteran NASA astronauts and retired U.S. Navy test pilots, had strapped inside their Crew Dragon spacecraft along with two other astronauts and undocked from the orbiting laboratory of the ISS at 1.05 a.m. ET (0505 GMT) to embark on a 17-hour trip to Earth.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.