SpaceX's mission was a success: The astronauts who had been in space for almost a year returned safely to Earth

NASA astronauts, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who were the members of the Boeing company's Starliner spacecraft, returned to Earth after splashing down off Florida's Gulf Coast on Tuesday after traveling back from the International Space Station (ISS) in a SpaceX company capsule at more than 17,000 miles per hour. The astronauts spent 10 months off the planet after being stranded in space following a Starliner spacecraft failure, which forced them to remain on the station. Although their return home was planned for a couple of weeks after arriving at the station, they had to remain on the station due to a lack of personnel, considering that the only members of the station's Crew-9 mission were Nick Hague and Aleksandr Gorbunov, who also returned in the SpaceX capsule.

When they were just a few meters above the waters of the gulf, the capsule deployed huge parachutes that facilitated the landing. Once the aircraft was hoisted aboard a SpaceX, the four astronauts opened the hatch and were helped while smiling, as members of South African tycoon Elon Musk's space company provided a pair of reclining chairs with wheels, which are part of standard safety procedures to allow astronauts to quickly readjust to Earth's gravity.

After the appropriate medical checkups, the four astronauts were transferred to Houston, Texas, where the NASA center where all manned spaceflight activities are coordinated is located. At this site they will spend some time in which NASA scientists will perform certain tests to determine if they are ready to return to their families and begin to lead a normal life after almost a year in space.

SpaceX moved up the timeline

The case of the two astronauts of the Starliner spacecraft became a real controversy at the national level, after many people expressed their concern about the way in which, every week, their return to Earth was delayed more and more, with no definite return date. While the plan was, once they arrived at the space station, to stay a couple of days there and then return to Earth, NASA asked them to be part of the Crew-9 mission, which at that time was at the station and was finding it difficult to materialize its mission after having only Hague and Gorbunov.

Although NASA had announced in December 2024 that conditions would probably be in place by the last days of March or the first week of April to send a replacement team and bring back the four astronauts, the agency eventually moved up the dates after several media outlets reported that SpaceX had prepared the Dragon capsule, through which they would take the astronauts on their new Crew-10 mission to replace those on the station, with the latter using this same capsule for their return trip.