NASA’s stranded astronauts have finally returned to Earth after spending nine grueling months on the International Space Station (ISS). 

Sunita Williams and Butch Willmore splashed down off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida at 5:57pm ET this evening.

They were accompanied by the Crew-9 astronauts, NASA’s Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov.

The process of recovering the capsule from the water involves multiple steps. Initially, smaller fast boats are dispatched to the site to inspect the capsule and recover its parachutes. These fast boats pave the way for the arrival of the main recovery ship, which typically takes around half an hour to reach the location.

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The four astronauts will be flown to their crew quarters at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston for several days of routine health checks.

If they are given the all-clear by NASA’s flight surgeons, they will be able to go home to their families, who have been missing them for the last 286 days. 

Although they have completed their 17-hour journey back to Earth, the astronauts now face a grueling road to recovery. 

Between low gravity and extreme levels of space radiation, living on the ISS takes a serious toll on the human body. Health experts told DailyMail.com that when Williams and Wilmore emerge from the spacecraft, they won’t even be able to walk.

Williams and Wilmore were initially scheduled to spend eight days on the ISS when they launched aboard Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft for the capsule’s first crewed test flight on June 5.

The two astronauts safely reached the space station, but only after five of Starliner’s 28 thrusters failed. The spacecraft had already suffered technical issues, including helium links and more thruster failures, before and during the launch. 

By June 18, it was clear that the Starliner would not be flying home on schedule. NASA pushed Williams and Wilmore’s return to later that month, giving its engineers and Boeing time to try and sort out the spacecraft’s malfunctions from the ground. 

But more issues kept cropping up, and a few extra weeks stretched into a months-long delay for the astronauts’ homecoming. 

In August, NASA officials decided to send Starliner home without its crew, explaining that it would be too risky to let Williams and Wilmore fly home inside the spacecraft. 

Instead, the pair would hitch a ride home on SpaceX’s Crew-9 Dragon capsule, which brought Hague and Gorbunov to the ISS later that month and was originally scheduled return to Earth in February 2025. 

This move extended the Starliner crew’s space mission to at least eight months. 

As the astronauts’ extended mission stretched on, health experts began raising concerns about their wellbeing. 

Living on the ISS takes a toll on the human body. Astronauts are subjected to low gravity, extreme levels of space radiation, the mental impacts of isolation and more.

In November, doctors told DailyMail.com that Williams appeared ‘gaunt’ in a photo that was taken in September and said that she looked like she had lost weight. 

Later that month, an unnamed NASA source told the  New York Post that the agency was scrambling to ‘stabilize the weight loss and hopefully reverse it.’

The unnamed employee who is ‘directly involved with the mission’ said that Williams has been ‘unable to keep up with the high-caloric diets that astronauts must consume’ while on the ISS. 

‘The pounds have melted off her and she’s now skin and bones. So it’s a priority to help her stabilize the weight loss and hopefully reverse it,’ the NASA source said.

Later that month, Williams hit back at the weight loss ‘rumors’ in a live video published by NASA, claiming that she has actually put on muscle. 

Just a day after Williams’ comments, an unnamed NASA employee told the New York Post that the agency was monitoring Wilmore’s weight loss too.

That source said that while his weight loss did not appear as pronounced as Williams’ ‘gaunt’ look, doctors were taking precautions to ensure he doesn’t reach a tipping point. 

In mid-December, NASA announced that the two astronauts would be staying on the ISS even longer, with a targeted return date of sometime in March 2025. 

That was because the Starliner and Crew-9 astronauts could not leave the space station until SpaceX’s Crew-10 mission brought a team of four astronauts to the ISS to replace them.

Crew-10 was supposed to launch in February, but the brand-new Dragon spacecraft SpaceX planned on using began suffering technical issues.

On December 17,  NASA announced that the Crew-10 launch would be pushed back to give SpaceX more time to work on the spacecraft, and therefore, the Starliner and Crew-9 astronauts’ return was also delayed. 

At that time, they were expected back in late March or early April. 

But in late January, the Starliner fiasco entered the political spotlight when President Donald Trump announced that he had asked SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk, the newly-minted head of his DOGE agency, to ‘go get’ Williams and Wilmore. 

Trump claimed they had been ‘virtually abandoned’ by the Biden administration, and Musk reiterated these claims in a post on X. 

A couple weeks later on February 11, NASA announced that the Starliner astronauts would be coming home slightly earlier than expected. It’s unclear whether this decision was related to Trump and Musk’s statements. 

The agency decided to use a different, ready-to-fly spacecraft to launch the Crew-10 mission, which meant Williams, Wilmore and the Crew-9 astronauts would be able to leave the ISS about two weeks earlier. 

The Crew-10 mission launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on March 14 and docked to the ISS 28 hours later. 

The Starliner and Crew-9 astronauts stuck around for a few days to get the new ISS crew up to speed on space station operations. 

But in the early hours of Tuesday morning, they boarded the Crew-9 Dragon capsule, undocked from the ISS and began the journey back to Earth. 

They are now back on Earth, bringing an end to this unexpectedly long and highly controversial saga.