Astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore of NASA returned to Earth early this morning aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon Spacecraft. Their SpaceX capsule parachuted into the Gulf of Mexico. A splashdown occurred off the coast of Tallahassee in the Florida Panhandle, ending the nine-month ordeal of the two astronauts. The astronauts concluded their trip with SpaceX’s Crew-9, a routine International Space Station, ISS staff rotation mission, alongside NASA’s Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov. Wilmore and Williams were on the International Space Station since June of last year, following the maiden crewed mission of the Boeing Starliner spacecraft, which encountered technical issues that rendered it unsuitable for their return journey. The two astronauts ended up spending 286 days in space – 278 days longer than anticipated.
