Astronauts from NASA Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams left the international space station early Tuesday morning in a SpaceX capsule for a long -awaited journey to return to earth, nine months after their defective Boeing Starliner craftsmanship has turned upside down which had to be an approximately one week’s test mission.
Wilmore and Williams, two veterans astronauts from NASA and withdrew test pilots from the American navy, attached themselves inside their crew dragon spacecraft as well as two other astronauts and not checked from the orbit laboratory at 1 h 05 HE, launching in a trip of 17 hours on the ground.
The crew of four people, which is officially part of the mission of rotation of the astronauts of the NASA crew, is planned for a splash off the Florida coast at 5:57 p.m. on Tuesday.
The return of Wilmore and Williams puts an end to an unusual and written mission filled with uncertainty and technical problems that have transformed a rare case of the planning of the contingency of NASA – as well as the failures of the Boeing Starliner spaceship – into a global and political spectacle.
Astronauts who have been stuck at the international space station for nine months are now preparing to return to Earth after a SpaceX capsule carrying a new crew to successfully replace them.
The pair of astronauts had embarked on space as the first crew of Starliner in June for what should be an eight -day test mission. But the problems with Starliner’s propulsion system led to cascading delays in their return home, culminating in a decision of NASA last year to have them resumed a SpaceX craft this year as part of the agency’s crew rotation calendar.
The mission drew the attention of American president Donald Trump, who took office in January, called for a faster return from Wilmore and Williams and allegedly alleged that former President Joe Biden “abandoned” them on the ISS for political reasons.
The CEO of SpaceX, Elon Musk, a close adviser to Trump, echoes his call for an earlier return. The Dragon of the SpaceX team is the only spaceship for crew in the orbital class in the United States, which Boeing had hoped that his Starliner would compete before the mission with Wilmore and Williams launched his future of development in uncertainty.
Astronauts will be put forward in their crew districts to the Johnson Space Center of the Space Agency in Houston for several days of health control, by routine for returns of astronauts, before NASA flight surgeons approve that they can go home.
Living in space for months can affect the human body in several ways, from muscular atrophy to a possible alteration of vision.
After splashes, Wilmore and Williams will have recorded 286 days in space – longer than the average length of the Six month ISS mission, but far from the holder of the American record Frank Rubio. Its 371 continuous days in the space ending in 2023 were the unexpected result of an coolant leak on a Russian spacecraft.
Williams, capping his third space flight, will have counted 608 cumulative days in space, the second plus for any American astronaut after the 675 days of Peggy Whitson. The Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko set the world record last year at 878 cumulative days.
NASA says astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams may not be able to return from space before 2025 after a number of problems on the Boeing Starliner capsule. Andrew Chang explains why bringing them home becomes more and more complicated.
Depending on the arrival of the rotation of NASA routine astronauts, Wilmore and Williams could not start their return to earth until the arrival of their replacement team, in order to maintain levels of adequate American staff, according to NASA.
Their replacements arrived on Friday evening – four astronauts as part of the NASA crew -10 mission -10 briefly put the station staff at 11.
“We are ready to stay for a long time, even if we had planned to stay short,” Wilmore said space journalists earlier this month, adding that he did not think that NASA’s decision to keep them on the ISS until the arrival of the crew-10 was affected by politics.
“This is what the human space flight program of your nation is everything,” he said, “planning unknown and unexpected contingencies. And we did.”
Wilmore and Williams have done scientific research and carried out a routine interview with the other five astronauts from the station. Williams had made two six -hour space balls for the interview outside the ISS, including one with Wilmore.
The ISS, approximately 409 kilometers above sea level, is a research laboratory for the size of a football field which has been continuously accommodated by international astronaut teams for almost 25 years-a key platform for scientific diplomacy managed mainly by the United States and Russia.
Williams told journalists earlier this month that she was looking forward to going home to see her two dogs and family.
“It was a roller coaster for them, probably a little more than for us,” she said.
