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Following a week-long trip to the International Space Station that unexpectedly turned into months, two NASA astronauts are finally set to come back down to Earth this week.
Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams are slated to depart from their home of the last nine months in a SpaceX Dragon capsule shortly after 1 a.m. EDT Tuesday, and splash down near the Florida coast by just before 6 p.m.
They’ll be joined by Crew-9 mission members Nick Hague and Russian Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, who launched to the orbiting laboratory last September with two empty seats for Wilmore and Williams. That craft has been attached to the station since then.
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The space agency will host live coverage of the event starting at 10:45 p.m. Monday.
Their departure comes after four Crew-10 members successfully launched from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center over the weekend, docking to the space station early Sunday.
They include NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos’ Kirill Peskov. They’ll stay on the station for roughly six months.
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Otherwise a routine crew rotation flight, the Crew-10 mission was a long-awaited step to bring Wilmore and Williams back home after problems their Boeing spacecraft. The Starliner capsule returned to Earth without the former Navy captains shortly before Hague and Gorbunov’s launch.
That plan was set by NASA last year, but has been given greater urgency by President Donald Trump since he took office in January.
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Trump and SpaceX founder Elon Musk have continually spread the narrative that Williams and Wilmore were left high and dry by the Biden administration and that the pair were stuck.
That’s also a narrative Williams and Wilmore have repeatedly refuted during interviews from the space station.
“That’s been the rhetoric. That’s been the narrative from day one: stranded, abandoned, stuck — and I get it. We both get it,” Wilmore told CNN. “But that is, again, not what our human spaceflight program is about. We don’t feel abandoned, we don’t feel stuck, we don’t feel stranded.”
