BOULDER, Colo. — A Crew Dragon spacecraft returned four people from the International Space Station March 18, including two NASA astronauts whose extended stay became entangled in sensationalism and political controversy.
The Crew Dragon spacecraft Freedom undocked from the station at 1:05 a.m. Eastern on the final leg of the Crew-9 mission. The spacecraft splashed down off the Florida coast near Tallahassee at 5:57 p.m. Eastern.
The spacecraft returned with NASA astronaut Nick Hague, commander of Crew-9, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, the mission’s pilot. The two launched to the station on the spacecraft in September.
Also on board were NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore. The two arrived on the station in June on the Crew Flight Test mission of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner, originally for a stay intended to be as short as eight days. However, problems with the spacecraft’s thrusters led NASA in August to decide to bring Starliner back uncrewed. The agency removed two astronauts originally assigned to Crew-9, Zena Cardman and Stephanie Wilson, to free up seats for Wilmore and Williams to use for the trip back to Earth.
The spacecraft’s return appeared to be technically flawless. The spacecraft splashed down near the SpaceX recovery ship, which had the capsule on board within about a half-hour. The four people on board were taken off the capsule a short time later, appearing to be in good spirits.
Crew-9 departed the ISS barely 48 hours after their replacements arrived on another Crew Dragon spacecraft, Crew-10. NASA shortened an already condensed handover between the crews to take advantage of excellent weather conditions at the splashdown location given the possibility of less favorable weather later in the week.
However, NASA officials said at a post-splashdown briefing that shortened handovers won’t be the norm in the future. Bill Spetch, operations integration manager for the ISS program at NASA, said they immediately took care of critical briefings during the handover covering emergency procedures, but there was less time for the departing Crew-9 astronauts to discuss routine station operations and procedures, institutional knowledge that isn’t necessarily written down.
“A lot of the handover we do with the crews is more set up to be an efficiency gain, and that really helps them be more effective,” he said, particularly in the new crew’s first days and weeks on the station. “In general, we don’t look to reduce that because we want to be as efficient as possible.”
“That excited the system”
The return of Williams and Wilmore, who spent 286 days in space, brought an end to a saga about their extended mission. For months, the two were often characterized as “stranded” astronauts, something that NASA regularly pushed back against, including after splashdown.
“We always had a lifeboat, a way for them to come home,” Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said at the briefing. “And then it really became, when is the right time? When is the right time to bring them back?”
In late January, SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk said he had been asked by President Trump to bring Williams and Wilmore back as soon as possible, even though the astronauts’ return plans had been in place for months. Both Musk and Trump claimed that the astronauts had been “abandoned” on the station and that the Biden administration had rejected a SpaceX proposal to return them sooner. Musk, though, has not provided details to substantiate that claim, and current and former NASA officials say they were unaware of any proposal.
Trump, in a March 17 post on his Truth Social network, said he had spoken with Janet Petro, NASA’s acting administrator. He said Petro and other “geniuses” at NASA “agreed to let our Astronauts come home long prior to the two week period originally approved by NASA.” It was not clear what “two week period” he was referring to.
“Janet was great. She said, ‘Let’s bring them home NOW, Sir!’ — And I thanked her,” Trump wrote, repeating Musk’s claim that the Biden administration rejected a proposal for an earlier return.
A NASA spokesperson told SpaceNews March 18 that Petro had recently spoken with President Trump “and, like all of us, showed her enthusiasm for returning NASA’s SpaceX Crew-9 mission,” without providing any additional details of that conversation. “NASA has worked diligently under both the Trump Administration, and previously under the Biden Administration, to ensure our crew returns safely,” the agency added.
“Per President Trump’s direction, NASA and SpaceX worked diligently to pull the schedule a month earlier,” Petro said in a NASA press release after splashdown. “This international crew and our teams on the ground embraced the Trump Administration’s challenge of an updated, and somewhat unique, mission plan, to bring our crew home.”
However, at the briefing, Stich noted that the Crew-10 launch was delayed from mid-February to late March because of problems with a new Crew Dragon spacecraft originally assigned to that mission. NASA and SpaceX then agreed to swap Dragon spacecraft to avoid further delays in the Crew-10 launch, and thus Crew-9 return, allowing the launch to be moved up about two weeks, although still later than the original timeline.
He noted that there were no other options he was aware of to further accelerate the Crew-10 launch. “The earliest Dragon we had to go fly the mission was this capsule, 210,” he said, referring to the designation used for the spacecraft also known as Endurance. “We pivoted over to the vehicle that was going to be ready the soonest, which was capsule 210.”
NASA officials at the briefing danced around questions about Trump’s comments and claims that he helped accelerate the return of Williams and Wilmore. “That excited the system. It gave us some energy in the system,” Joel Montalbano, deputy associate administrator for NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, said of the Trump administration’s role, echoing comments made before the Crew-10 launch by his boss, Ken Bowersox.
Asked if anything would have been different with the return of Crew-9 had someone else been president, Montalbano noted NASA worked for the White House. “We had an input from that office. We took a look at it. Our job is to take all the inputs we get and operate as successful and as safely as we can,” he said. “That’s what we would do for this administration and that’s what we would do for any administration.”
