Two Nasa astronauts stranded on the International Space Station for nine months have returned to earth after being rescued by a SpaceX capsule, splashing down off the coast of Florida on Tuesday evening.
US astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore were scheduled to be in orbit for only eight days, but became trapped after a Boeing Starliner spacecraft was deemed unfit to travel because of thruster problems and helium leaks on the outward journey.
SpaceX’s Dragon capsule docked with the ISS on Sunday, delivering four new crew members from the US, Japan and Russia. Fellow astronauts Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov travelled back to earth with Williams and Wilmore.
The craft re-entered the atmosphere at 5:45pm ET (9.45pm GMT), deploying four parachutes and slowing from 17,000 miles per hour to 17 by the time it dropped into a calm ocean 50 miles off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida.
“What a ride, I see a capsule full of grins ear to ear,” said mission commander Hague. A pod of dolphins was seen breaching around the capsule as the rescue boats arrived.
The 286-day saga captured global attention and became symbolic of the travails of Boeing, which had hoped the mission would show it could compete with Elon Musk in commercial launches and space flight as well as help Nasa return humans to the moon. Instead, it served as a reminder of the difficulties of private sector space missions and underlined SpaceX’s dominance.
Williams and Wilmore’s mission also became politicised, with President Donald Trump accusing his predecessor Joe Biden of “abandoning” them for political reasons.
“PROMISE MADE, PROMISE KEPT,” the White House’s account posted on Musk’s social media platform X. “Today, they safely splashed down in the Gulf of America, thanks to Elon Musk, SpaceX and Nasa!”
During the election, the world’s richest man threw his wealth behind Trump, spending more than $250mn to help his campaign and winning a role as an adviser and head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
Led by president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX, a $350bn privately held company, has launched its Falcon 9 rockets successfully 460 times, including for the ISS rescue mission.
It has also achieved the technical feat of catching the reusable booster stage of its massive Starship rocket using giant mechanical arms.
However, the company has suffered setbacks in its quest to build a rocket capable of reaching Mars, with the upper-stage spacecraft malfunctioning and exploding on the past two attempts.