Two astronauts stranded in space for nine months have finally returned to Earth.

Astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore – who last June began an eight-day mission that was the first Crew Flight Test of Boeing’s BA.N Starliner – were stranded after technical issues led the Starliner to return to Earth without them last September.

The pair worked alongside SpaceX Crew-9, joining the International Space Station (ISS) astronauts as Boeing worked to fix issues with the problem-plagued Starliner, and SpaceX organised their return for the six-monthly crew rotation that would bring Crew-10 to the ISS this year.

The trip finished this week after 286 days in orbit, as the pair boarded the SpaceX Crew Dragon ship and, 17 hours later, splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico before retrieval – and, to avoid problems, being whisked away on stretchers alongside two Crew-9 colleagues.

“It’s amazing to think that SpaceX has now safely flown 62 crew members from 14 countries to space,” Sarah Walker, SpaceX director for Dragon mission management, said during a press conference once the astronauts were safely under the care of terrestrial doctors.

“That’s enough flights that we can be really proud of what the team has built together and what we’ve accomplished,” she continued, “but always with the humility and awareness that we will continue to learn from every single mission.”

“The stakes of getting this right are and always will be high… we must always stay hungry and vigilant to scour the data before, during and after every operation we perform.”

99 million bottles of beer on the wall…

It was a textbook finish to a mission that saw the astronauts complete 4,576 Earth orbits, during which they travelled a total of 195 million km, completed four spacewalks – giving Williams the female spacewalking record – and undertook over 150 scientific experiments.

Those experiments – which involved over 900 hours’ research – included testing the new E4D exercise device, new reactor designs, 3D printing of body implants, wooden satellites, lighting systems for circadian rhythms, and collecting microbes from the ISS’s outside.

The astronauts also underwent hearing tests, blood samples, bone density and other testing to help future astronauts by examining how blood clots in space, how immune systems respond to long periods in orbit, and the genetic effects of prolonged radiation exposure.

Support teams work around a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft shortly after it landed with NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams, Butch Wilmore, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov aboard in the water off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida, Tuesday, March 18,2025. Hague, Gorbunov, Williams, and Wilmore are returning from a long-duration science expedition aboard the International Space Station. Photo: NASA/Keegan Barber

Throughout the stay, the pair also remained engaged with social media followers, with Williams providing guided ISS tours while parrying allegations of dangerous weight loss and US President Donald Trump’s jibes about her untied, greying “wild hair”.

“Butch and Suni enjoyed their time on station,” NASA Commercial Crew Program (CCP) manager Steve Stich said, adding that they “got to do space walks and got to do lots of cool science” even as he lauded the astronauts’ “adaptability” and their “resilient” families.

“We’ll keep learning as we go,” he added, “and keep being adaptable in the future.”

Another win for SpaceX

The astronauts’ successful return is a massive PR win for SpaceX, the Elon Musk-led space flight venture and key CCP partner that has enjoyed prominence as NASA continues to refine ways of transporting astronauts to and from the ISS – and beyond.

“SpaceX has been an incredible, huge, great partner for us,” Joel Montalbano, deputy associate administrator for NASA's Space Operations Mission Directorate said, “and it shows the benefits of the commercial, public, private partnership that we have.”

SpaceX has enjoyed dramatic successes and spectacular failures in recent months, with its next-generation reusable Starship blamed for putting Qantas flights in jeopardy after it exploded eight minutes into a January test flight.

Boeing will join the CCP once it sorts out the issues with Starliner, but in the meantime SpaceX is carrying the program while working to refine its space launch vehicles through a ‘fail fast’ approach whose failures have rained debris across the world.

For all its innovation, SpaceX has become mired in vicious US politics, with Trump suggesting former president Joe Biden “abandoned” the astronauts in space and Musk – who leads the contentious Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) – blaming “political reasons.”

Those claims, which have been repeated by Trump even in the wake of the astronauts’ return, have been roundly debunked – with Wilmore saying in a recent press conference that the astronauts “came up prepared to stay long, even though [they] plan to stay short.”