And just like that, after more than nine months in space, Butch Wilmore, commander of Boeing Starliner’s first crewed test flight, and pilot Suni Williams are finally back on Earth.
The two-person astronaut crew, along with fellow astronaut Nick Hague and Cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, splashed down just off Florida’s Gulf Coast, at 4:57 p.m. CST on Tuesday.
This marks the end of a long and often embarrassing debacle that has seen Boeing officials face palming while NASA officials have striven to keep politics from seeping into the mix.
Of course, after all the problems Boeing and NASA had just getting Starliner onto the launchpad – the aviation giant’s commercial spaceflight vehicle for NASA was already years behind schedule and millions of dollars over budget – it probably shouldn’t have been much of a surprise when the crewed flight test that launched last June rapidly devolved into a headline-grabbing mess.
In the face of helium leaks and malfunctioning thrusters, the mission that had once been expected to last just over a week was extended while Boeing and NASA engineers worked to sort out where these problems were coming from, and, crucially, whether it would ultimately be safe for Williams and Wilmore to complete their mission aboard the spacecraft.
That last question was answered in September when the Starliner spacecraft, dubbed “Calypso” by its crew, departed the International Space Station sans crew.
Meanwhile, Williams and Wilmore were slated to come home aboard one of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon vehicles as soon as NASA officials could shift the schedules around to slot the pair into a couple of seats to bring them home.
Up until recent weeks, the fact that Williams and Wilmore were having to stay aboard the ISS months longer than they’d planned was an embarrassing but apolitical reality. Right until SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk – who is also heading up the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE – began claiming, alongside President Donald Trump, that the Starliner crew was “stranded” in space by the Biden administration. Musk has even claimed that the Biden administration turned down his offers to send a SpaceX vehicle up to bring Williams and Wilmore home.
Williams, Wilmore and the rest of NASA have repeatedly stated that they were not in fact “stranded” since, as astronauts, they were prepared for the chance that the Boeing Starliner test flight might not go according to plan.
Hours before splashdown on Tuesday, Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator during the Biden administration, joined the chorus contending that Musk and Trump have been mischaracterizing the situation. In an interview with The New York Times, Nelson stated that he never discussed Musk bringing the astronauts home earlier via a SpaceX flight. He also noted that no one from the White House ever weighed in on the federal space agency’s plan to bring Williams and Wilmore home in the spring.
Meanwhile, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule was continuing its descent back into the atmosphere, with the crew undergoing the usual communications blackout as it streaked through the air generating temperatures of more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. “Freedom is with you,” Nick Hague, the Crew-9 mission commander, said, marking the end of the blackout.
Minutes later the capsule splashed down into azure waters off the Florida coast. While they waited for a SpaceX recovery ship to haul the capsule out of the water, a pod of dolphins swam around it, investigating.
And then, finally, Williams and Wilmore were back.
Once they’ve undergone all of the required medical checks, the astronauts will fly home to undergo a quarantine at the Johnson Space Center here in Houston. From there, once they’ve been cleared by NASA’s doctors, they’ll finally be able to see the families they left last June for a short mission to space.
