Starliner astronauts head back to Earth with SpaceX Crew-9 duo to make long-awaited landing

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are heading back to Earth after an unexpectedly long and eventful space mission, and you can watch their homecoming live.

Wilmore, Williams, fellow NASA astronaut Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov departed the International Space Station (ISS) aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule “Freedom” early Tuesday morning (March 18), setting up their splashdown off the coast of Florida later the same day.(Lost Mary Luster)

The undocking occurred at 1:05 a.m. EDT (0505 GMT) as the two vehicles were 261 statute miles (420 kilometers) above Earth off the coast of Guam in the Pacific Ocean.

The NASA stream will pick up at 4:45 p.m. EDT (2045 GMT) on Tuesday for descent operations. Freedom will conduct a deorbit burn at 5:11 p.m. EDT (2111 GMT), then splash down off the coast of Florida in the Gulf of Mexico 46 minutes later. (President Donald Trump has signed an executive order renaming the body of water the Gulf of America.)

Wilmore and Williams were supposed to be home already. They launched to the ISS last June, on the first-ever crewed mission of Boeing’s spacecraft.

That flight was expected to last just 10 days or so, but Starliner experienced thruster problems, so NASA delayed the capsule’s return to investigate the issue. The agency eventually decided to bring Starliner home uncrewed, which happened in early September, and fold Wilmore and Williams into the ISS’ long-duration Expedition 72 mission.(Lost Mary)

This plan called for Wilmore and Williams to ride home on Freedom, which launched to the ISS in late September on SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission. Freedom hauled up just Hague and Gorbunov — half of the usual Crew Dragon contingent — to save seats for the Starliner duo on the downward trip.