Highlights From Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore’s Return to Earth (2025)

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The astronauts are finally home on Earth.

Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore blasted off in June for the International Space Station on their test flight of Starliner, a Boeing spacecraft that was to provide NASA with another option, outside of SpaceX, to carry astronauts to and from orbit. But the Starliner experienced problems with its propulsion system, prompting NASA to send it back to Earth with no crew aboard.

It was a SpaceX capsule, the Crew Dragon, that brought them back from space on Tuesday. The spacecraft detached from the space station just after 1 a.m. Eastern time and then traveled back to Earth, slowing from more than 17,000 miles an hour before deploying four large parachutes that gently plopped the spacecraft into the water just before 6 p.m.

Minutes later, as recovery teams inspected the capsule, a pod of curious dolphins circled, a playful terrestrial welcoming party.

Once the capsule had been hoisted onto a ship, the door was opened and the beaming astronauts were extracted from the spacecraft. After months of weightlessness, their bodies still adjusting to the pull of gravity, they were lifted onto gurneys.

“They all looked very healthy,” Steve Stich, the manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, said during a news conference after the splashdown. “They all looked like they were feeling about normal for the landing and recovery phase, where their body is trying to re-adapt.”

Returning with the two astronauts were Nick Hague, the commander of this mission known as Crew-9, and Aleksandr Gorbunov, a Russian astronaut.

The four astronauts were scheduled to fly back to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where they were to remain briefly until doctors let them go home. “They’ll join their families in the next day or so,” Mr. Stich said.

The mission both underlined the dominance of SpaceX in the growing field of private spaceflight, and the comparative woes of Boeing. But as with so many things in the early stages of the Trump administration, the astronauts’ return was tinged with politics.

President Trump suggested in January that the Biden administration had stranded the astronauts, and Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, said this month that the Biden administration had rejected his offer to bring them home sooner.

But Bill Nelson, who served as the administrator of NASA during the Biden administration, said that NASA never heard about Mr. Musk’s offer, and that the agency’s decisions were based on what made the most sense for the operations of the space station.

“On the basis that there was no contact with NASA, there was no political consideration from NASA’s point of view,” Mr. Nelson said.

About a half-hour after the astronauts returned, the White House posted on social media, “PROMISE MADE, PROMISE KEPT: President Trump pledged to rescue the astronauts stranded in space for nine months.”

However, it has been NASA’s plan since August for the Crew-9 mission to return with Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore around this time frame.

An hour later after the White House post, Mr. Musk offered celebratory congratulations on X to teams at SpaceX and NASA “for another safe astronaut return!” He also thanked President Trump “for prioritizing this mission!”

But the astronauts also disputed the notion that they were stuck in space.

“It’s work. It’s fun. It’s been trying at times, no doubt,” Mr. Wilmore said in an interview from the space station last week with The New York Times. “But ‘stranded’? No. ‘Stuck’? No. ‘Abandoned’? No.”

At the station, Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore had to adjust to their unexpectedly long stay. From the start, they were short of clothes, because their suitcases had been left off the Starliner to make room for a replacement pump to fix the toilet. They relied on spare clothing in the space station.

NASA sent up their clothes and other personal items a couple of months later on a Northrop Grumman cargo ship. Such robotic cargo ships arrive periodically from Russia and the United States, bringing food, supplies and experiments.

According to a summary published by NASA, astronauts at the space station, which orbits about 250 miles above the Earth, carried out a variety of tasks on the station, including maintenance work and nearly a thousand hours of scientific research.

That included a spacewalk by Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore to swab the outside of the space station to see if Earth microbes could survive and maybe even thrive in space.

Ms. Williams also helped set up an experiment to study how microbes produced nutrients like vitamins, and also conducted research on how weightlessness affected microscopic organisms that could be used to make food and medicines, NASA said.

The astronauts were able to connect with friends, family and the public on the ground — they had access to email and video calls. They tried to put a positive spin on the whole experience.

“You get a little bit more time to enjoy the view out the window,” Ms. Williams said in the interview with The Times last week.

Not everything they saw was pleasing. From space, Mr. Wilmore saw Hurricane Beryl, which hit Houston last July. The storm damaged the roof of his home. The astronauts also saw the smoke from the Los Angeles fires in January.

Mr. Wilmore, who has a wife and two children, missed most of his younger daughter’s senior year of high school and his elder daughter’s sophomore year in college.

He said his younger daughter was “tough,” but she also told him, “I didn’t know how much I needed you until you were gone.”

Nine months is not an unusually long stay for astronauts in space — Frank Rubio holds the record for the longest stay in space by an American astronaut at 371 days — but Mr. Wilmore and Ms. Williams nonetheless had to ward against the damage that space could inflict on the body. Without gravity, bone mass tends to diminish, a space version of osteoporosis. The astronauts worked out on the modified gym equipment in the space station, which included a treadmill with a harness that keeps the runner from floating away.

By the end of their journey, Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore had traveled nearly 121,347,500 miles, having orbited the earth 4,576 times. Mr. Wilmore has spent a total of 31 hours conducting spacewalks during his career and Ms. Williams 62 hours, a record for a woman astronaut.

Their 286 days in space, including the trip up in June and the descent on Tuesday, was long. But their mission was perhaps not as dramatic as the one carried out by Sergei Krikalev, a Soviet astronaut who blasted off on May 18, 1991, for a stay at the Soviet Union’s space station, Mir.

While Mr. Krikalev was orbiting the earth, the Soviet Union disbanded, and he was asked to extend his stay by almost five months, in part because of his country’s disintegration and money problems in Moscow.

He ended up staying in space for 313 days, returning to a home country that no longer existed.

Reporting was contributed by Talya Minsberg, Claire Moses, Michael Roston and John Yoon.

A pod of dolphins greeted the returned astronauts.

“Wow, we got a cute little pod of dolphins, it wasn’t just one or two,” said Kate Tice, an engineering manager at SpaceX who was commentating on the company’s video stream. As the dolphins’ dorsal fins bobbed, she said that the team working on retrieving the capsule was “getting quick assists from the honorary part of the recovery team, those dolphins.”

Dolphins are generally social and playful marine mammals and often travel in groups, or pods. The most common species near Florida’s Gulf Coast are bottle-nosed dolphins, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, although it was not clear which species was circling the SpaceX crews on Tuesday.

Todd Speakman, a field biologist with the National Marine Mammal Foundation, said while he couldn’t definitively identify the dolphin species, he said it was likely a stenella dolphin, which are often found near the Gulf Coast.

He said he wasn’t surprised that the pod approached the capsule shortly after splashdown.

“With there being that much activity, they’re just curious animals, so they’re going to come check it out,” Mr. Speakman said, adding that dolphins will often swim around their research ships.

It’s not the first time wildlife have visited astronauts just after they returned to Earth. In 2021, photographers captured a lone dolphin swimming near the recovery boats headed to pick up the Dragon spacecraft used for SpaceX’s Crew-1 mission. But an Orlando news station reported that the animal didn’t stick around for the capsule’s splashdown.

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In fact, the astronauts were originally scheduled by NASA to have returned last month, in February. But problems with the next launch of astronauts to the space station on a different SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule added another month to the time that Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore spent in space.

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I hope those dolphins are not performing “So Long & Thanks For All the Fish.”

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What happens to the astronauts right after they return to Earth.

Once out of the water, the capsule’s hatch will be opened, and the astronauts will be helped onto the vessel one by one.

Ms. Williams’s and Mr. Wilmore’s first steps may be wobbly at best, as it takes the human body time to adjust after an extended stay in space. After acclimating to floating, a person’s anatomy becomes confused by the return of gravity, which can make astronauts dizzy and nauseated. Some astronauts are helped to medical examinations immediately after landing, sometimes in devices that look like lounge chairs on wheels.

After their initial medical checks, the astronauts will be flown to shore on a helicopter from the recovery ship, and then they will be flown to the Johnson Space Center in Houston to undergo further medical testing. While they may reunite with loved ones as soon as they reach the center, NASA said it was typical for them to stay in the facility’s astronaut quarters for a number of days before flight surgeons clear them to return to their homes.

No word yet on when Ms. Williams will be able to reunite with her beloved dogs at the Space Center.

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The astronauts will return to Earth enveloped in hot plasma.

The blunt bottom of the spacecraft slams into air molecules, and the compression generates temperatures as hot as 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit, making it one of the most dangerous sequences in the mission.

A heat shield at the bottom is designed to absorb the heat and protect the inside of the spacecraft where the astronauts sit. The initially white surfaces of the top of the Crew Dragons are scorched, and they end up looking like well-toasted marshmallows after they are pulled out of the ocean.

The intense heat strips electrons off atoms and creates a state of charged matter known as a plasma. The plasma glows and blocks radio signals for several minutes, creating some suspense in mission control until astronauts are heard again.

Another SpaceX technology could make communications blackouts a thing of the past.

The company’s Starlink satellites orbit at an altitude higher than the re-entering spacecraft so there is less plasma to block the radio signals between the spacecraft and the satellites. Starlinks can also send data by laser light, which is not blocked by plasma.

SpaceX has demonstrated this ability to remain in contact through re-entry during flights of its new Starship vehicle, sending back real-time video of the eerie glow of plasma around the vehicle as it plunges toward Earth.