After spending 286 days in space, the astronaut Suni Williams has safely returned to Earth, splashing down this morning into waters off the Gulf Coast south of Tallahassee, Florida with her NASA colleague Butch Wilmore and two other astronauts.
Williams, 59, and Wilmore, 62, launched into space last June, on a proposed 8-day mission. But a spacecraft malfunction with a Boeing vehicle led to an unexpectedly long stay on the International Space Station — a stay of over nine months. This morning, they joined astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov returning to Earth in a SpaceX capsule.
“And splashdown. Crew 9 back on Earth. Nick, Aleksandr, Butch and Suni, on behalf of SpaceX, welcome home,” a voice from mission control said.
“What a ride. I see a capsule full of grins, ear to ear,” Hague replied.
The four astronauts boarded the SpaceX capsule, Crew Dragon, late Monday (EST) for a voyage that lasted 17-hours. In orbit, the largely self-driving spacecraft was circling the Earth at over 17,000 miles per hour.
The astronauts will now undergo a series of initial medical checkups before being flown to shore on a helicopter from the recovery ship. They will then be transported by air to the Johnson Space Center in Houston to undergo further medical testing.
It will take them a while for their bodies to adjust to the Earth’s gravity after their extended stay in space, where they were floating all the time. Upon returning from space, astronauts commonly suffer from dizziness and nausea — symptoms which can last for days. Typically, NASA astronauts spend their first few days back on Earth in the facility’s astronaut quarters before flight surgeons give them the green light to return to their homes.
Asked by the New York Times how they managed to keep their spirits up over the past nine months, Williams credited the “huge support team on the ground,” including family.
“It’s been a little more difficult for [our families],” she said. “Hats off to my family for just marching through it.” She also highlighted the positive impact of the onboard gym, saying that both she and Wilmore are “big fans of working out.”
“That’s been one of those things, just even on the ground… going for a ground, going to the gym to lift weights always makes you feel better. That’s a thing we have to do here on a daily basis.”
Williams will be welcomed back into the arms of her husband Michael J. Williams, a retired federal marshal, and their two Labrador retrievers.
In a press conference last year, the mission specialist for SpaceX Crew-9 said she missed her two dogs, friends, and family, adding, “I know it’s tough for them too, being apart, but they understand, and everyone’s rooting for us to return.”
“On Earth, when I’m running or moving, there’s always a lot going on in your mind, but you’re still grounded,” she said. “I miss taking my dogs for early morning walks, hearing the birds, and experiencing the start of the day.”
The latest mission was Williams’ third visit to the International Space Station (ISS). On June 6, 2024, she and Wilmore arrived at the ISS on board Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. When technical problems were discovered, the pair became crew members on the ISS. In total, Williams logged 256 days in space on the mission, bringing her total number of days spent in space to 608 days – the second most time in space by a US astronaut.
The US astronaut who has clocked the most number of days in space is another female — former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson who has spent a total of 665 days in space.
During her latest mission, Williams conducted two space walks. Over the course of her career, she has completed nine space walks for a total of 62 hours, six minutes of spacewalk.
She ranks fourth on the list of cumulative time space walking by a female astronaut, and she has flown on four different spacecraft types, including the Spaceshuttle, Soyuz, Starliner, and Dragon.
She has served on expeditions in 2006, 2007 and 2012, and has been a NASA astronaut since 1998, when she participated in the Astronaut Candidate Training. She has since logged more than 3000 flight hours in over 30 different aircraft.
The retired US Navy captain is a graduate of the US Naval Academy. In 2007, she became the first astronaut to run a marathon in space, when she ran in conjunction with the Boston Marathon as an officially registered runner, using a special harness in the weightless conditions.
Born to parents of Indian and Slovenian heritage in 1965, Williams spent most of her childhood in Massachusetts. When she saw the first man walk on the moon, she recalled thinking “That would be cool — that’s what I want to do.”
In an interview with Fortune last year, she described the reasons for her interest in space.
“It’s just what the human body does—it explores, among other things. We all have curiosity; we’re born with it. Maybe some of that gets pushed down a little bit by society and things going on around us, but we’re all curious and we want to explore.”
“When you go out into space, and you actually see that this is just the little island that we all live on, it becomes more philosophical: What is our purpose here? What happened to our planet, and what is happening to our planet now?”
During a visit to India several years ago, Williams spoke to a group of school students, detailing the changes the body goes through while in space.
“Calluses on your feet disappear because you don’t walk, and I noticed my fingernails and hair grew faster,” she said. “Without gravity, some wrinkles on your face might temporarily smooth out due to fluid shifting upwards. Your spine also expands because there’s no pressure on the cartilage between your vertebrae, making you slightly taller in space. However, these changes reverse once you return to Earth, and gravity takes over again. You shrink back to your normal height, your back might ache a bit.”
During the SpaceX Crew 9 post-splashdown news conference this morning, director of the Dragon Mission, Sarah Walker, praised her team’s accomplishment, adding that they’d done it with “humility and awareness” and that they would “…continue to learn 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,” she said. “It’s always an honour for all of us at SpaceX to launch human spaceflight missions and safely return astronauts and cosmonauts as we continue to advance human space flight.”