Once-stranded astronauts hours away from splashdown. Catch up on the saga so far

Alexandra Mae Jones · CBC News

· Posted: Mar 18, 2025 1:21 PM EDT | Last Updated: 6 minutes ago

After a week-long travel to the International Space Station ballooned into a nine-month stay, 2 stranded NASA astronauts are yet heading home. 

On Tuesday, if each goes to plan, a capsule volition splash down disconnected the Florida seashore soon earlier 6 p.m. ET, bringing Barry "Butch" Wilmore and Suni Williams backmost to the Earth's aboveground for the archetypal clip since they launched into abstraction past June. 

NASA volition beryllium providing unrecorded sum of the instrumentality travel starting astatine 4:45 p.m. ET. 

The capsule is scheduled to statesman its de-orbit pain — which is erstwhile it fires its thrusters to re-enter Earth's ambiance — at 5:11 p.m., with splashdown expected a small implicit 40 minutes later. 

Wilmore, 62, and Williams, 59, volition beryllium returning to Earth with chap NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov aboard SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft, which undocked from the International Space Station (ISS) connected Monday evening. 

Hague and Gorbunov had arrived astatine the ISS successful the Dragon spacecraft successful September, with 2 bare seats for the instrumentality travel of Wilmore and Williams, but that travel couldn't beryllium acceptable successful question until a afloat replacement unit arrived to capable their roles connected the ISS. 

That caller unit of 4 astronauts arrived past week and volition beryllium spending the adjacent six months astatine the abstraction station. 

Marooned successful space

Williams and Wilmore's abstraction odyssey started past June, erstwhile they strapped successful for what was intended to beryllium a trial formation of Boeing's Starliner capsule. It was the archetypal crewed formation of a Boeing spacecraft, and they were expected to walk conscionable implicit a week astatine the orbiting laboratory earlier returning location connected June 14. 

But though Starliner made it to the abstraction presumption safely connected June 6, last-minute malfunctioning of the thrusters astir derailed its docking. This, connected apical of a tiny helium leak, raised concerns that it mightiness not beryllium harmless for Williams and Wilmore to instrumentality aboard it. 

In August, NASA announced that it had decided to bring Boeing's Starliner — which is afloat autonomous, though it tin beryllium steered manually erstwhile needed — backmost to Earth without its crew. 

Since then, Williams and Wilmore person been revolving astir the Earth with the unit of Expedition 71/72 of the ISS, engaging successful spacewalks, probe and abstraction presumption repairs arsenic they waited to perceive erstwhile they could travel home. 

They admitted successful September that it was hard to ticker the spacecraft instrumentality location without them. 

"That's however it goes successful this business," Williams said astatine the time, adding that "you person to crook the leafage and look astatine the adjacent opportunity."

Both Williams and Wilmore started retired successful the U.S. Navy, and were selected arsenic astronauts by NASA successful 1998 and 2000 respectively. By the clip they stepped connected committee Starliner past June, they were some acquainted with the intricacies of space, having antecedently undergone 2 abstraction missions each.