The two astronauts, trapped for more than nine months in the International Space Station (ISS), will return to Earth on Tuesday, NASA announced this morning.
American astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Suni Williams, who traveled to the ISS on June 5, will return home with their compatriot Nic Hague, and with Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov in a Space X spacecraft.
William and Wilmore had arrived in June on an inaugural voyage of the Boeing Starliner spacecraft, which suffered propulsion problems. As a precaution, NASA decided that the pair should not return to Earth as scheduled and the empty spacecraft traveled autonomously after undocking from the ISS.
On March 15th, SpaceX’s Crew-10 mission successfully docked with the International Space Station (ISS) with the aim, among others, of relieving four astronauts, including Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore.
According to the space agency’s statement, “NASA and SpaceX met on Sunday to assess weather and splashdown conditions off the Florida coast for the return of the Agency’s Crew-9 mission from the ISS. Mission managers aim to bring the return of Crew-9 forward to the favorable conditions forecast for the night of Tuesday, March 18.”
The return mission of these two astronauts has been mired in controversy at the political level, after Elon Musk called for a rapid rescue mission and President Donald Trump accused his predecessor, Joe Biden, of abandoning the astronauts without offering evidence.
