Washington : NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams departed the International Space Station early on Tuesday morning in a SpaceX capsule for a long-awaited trip back to Earth, nine months after their faulty Boeing Starliner craft upended what was to be a roughly week-long test mission.
Wilmore and Williams, two veteran NASA astronauts and retired U.S. Navy test pilots, strapped inside their Crew Dragon spacecraft and two other astronauts and undocked from the orbiting laboratory at 1.05 a.m. ET (0505 GMT), embarking on a 17-hour trip to Earth, according to Reuters.
The four-person crew, formally part of NASA’s Crew-9 astronaut rotation mission, is scheduled for a splashdown off Florida’s coast later on Tuesday at 5:57 p.m. ET.
