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 week-long stay on the International Space Station.

Their return caps a protracted space mission that was fraught with uncertainty and technical troubles, turning a rare instance of NASA’s contingency planning — and the latest failures of Starliner — into a global and political spectacle.

Wilmore and Williams, two veteran NASA astronauts and retired U.S. Navy test pilots, had launched into space as Starliner’s first crew in June for what was expected to be an eight-day test mission.

But issues with Starliner’s propulsion system led to cascading delays to their return home, culminating in a NASA decision to fold them into its crew rotation schedule and return them on a SpaceX craft this year.

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On Tuesday morning, Wilmore and Williams strapped inside their Crew Dragon spacecraft along with two other astronauts and undocked from the ISS at 1.05am ET (0505 GMT) to embark on a 17-hour trip to Earth.

The four-person crew, formally part of NASA’s Crew-9 astronaut rotation mission, plunged through Earth’s atmosphere, using its heatshield and two sets of parachutes to slow its orbital speed of 17,000 mph (27,359 kph) to a soft 17 mph at splashdown, which occurred at 5:57pm ET some 50 miles off Florida’s Gulf Coast under clear skies.

“What a ride,” NASA astronaut Nick Hague, the Crew-9 mission commander inside the Dragon capsule, told mission control moments after splashing down. “I see a capsule full of grins, ear to ear.”

The astronauts will be flown on a NASA plane to their crew quarters at the space agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston for a few days of routine health checks before NASA flight surgeons say they can go home to their families.

“They will get some well-deserved time off, well-deserved time with their families,” NASA’s Commercial Crew Program chief Steve Stich told reporters after the splashdown. “It’s been a long time for them.”

286 days in space

The ISS, about 254 miles in altitude, is a football field-sized research lab that has been housed continuously by international crews of astronauts for nearly 25 years, a key platform of science diplomacy managed primarily by the U.S. and Russia.

Swept up in NASA’s routine astronaut rotation schedule, Wilmore and Williams worked on roughly 150 science experiments aboard the station until their replacement crew launched last week.

The pair logged 286 days in space on the mission — longer than the average six-month ISS mission length, but far short of US record holder Frank Rubio, whose 371 days in space ending in 2023 were the unexpected result of a coolant leak on a Russian spacecraft.

Living in space for months can affect the human body in multiple ways, from muscle atrophy to possible vision impairment.

Williams, capping her third spaceflight, has tallied 608 cumulative days in space, the second most for any U.S. astronaut after Peggy Whitson’s 675 days. Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko set the world record last year at 878 cumulative days.

“We came prepared to stay long, even though we planned to stay short,” Wilmore told reporters from space earlier this month.

“That’s what your nation’s human spaceflight program’s all about,” he said. “Planning for unknown, unexpected contingencies. And we did that.”

NASA astronaut Suni Williams is helped out of a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft onboard the SpaceX recovery ship MEGAN after she, NASA astronaut Nick Hague, and Butch Wilmore, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov landed in the water off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida, on March 18, 2025. Reuters