Nasa's Crew-9 finally splash down after nine-month wait

Nasa astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams returned to Earth in a SpaceX capsule yesterday 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.

- JOEY ROULETTE

Their return caps a protracted space mission fraught with uncertainty and technical troubles and turned a rare instance of Nasa’s contingency planning – and the latest failures of Starliner – into a global spectacle.

Wilmore and Williams, two veteran Nasa astronauts and retired US 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 have them take a SpaceX craft back this year as part of the agency’s crew rotation schedule.

Yesterday morning, Wilmore and Williams strapped inside their Crew Dragon spacecraft along with two other astronauts and undocked from the ISS at 1.05am ET (5.05am GMT) to embark on a 17-hour trip to Earth, bidding farewell to the station’s seven other astronauts.

The four-person crew, formally part of Nasa’s Crew-9 astronaut rotation mission, re-entered Earth’s atmosphere around 5.45pm ET (9.45pm GMT). Using Earth’s atmosphere and two sets of parachutes, the craft slowed its orbital speed of roughly 17,000mph to a soft 17mph at splashdown, which occurred some 50 miles off Florida’s Gulf Coast 10 minutes later under clear skies.