Boeing Starliner astronauts to return home with SpaceX Crew-9 on Tuesday

Richard Tribou, Orlando Sentinel on Mar 17, 2025

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NASA bumped up the return flight home plans for the SpaceX Crew-9 mission that includes a pair of astronauts who were left behind on the International Space Station by Boeing’s Starliner.

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams arrived to the station on June 6, 2024 for what was supposed to have been as short as an eight-day stay, but have now been on board for 9 1/2 months.

They are now slated to fly home with Crew-9 commander and NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, who flew up to the station last September aboard the Crew Dragon Freedom. The four will climb aboard the spacecraft late Monday and undock from the space station at 1:05 a.m. Tuesday.

Splashdown is slated off the Florida coast about 17 hours later at 5:57 p.m.

The quartet’s departure will come about two full days after the arrival of Crew-10 to the station, which brought the orbiting science laboratory’s population up to 11 temporarily.

Wilmore and Williams flew up as part of Starliner’s Crew Flight Test, but Starliner suffered thruster failures and helium leaks on its propulsion system, which ultimately led NASA to send the spacecraft home without a crew last year.

Left behind, Williams and Wilmore were then assigned to remain on the station as part of Expedition 72, and officially become members of the Crew-9 crew for the flight home. During their stay Williams became commander of the space station, and both astronauts took part in spacewalks.

The duo are completing their third trip to space, having previously flown up on both space shuttles and Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Their flight home in a Crew Dragon along with their flight up in Starliner will mean they will have flown in four different spacecraft.

Orlando’s John Young is the only astronaut with a similar resume, having flown the first space shuttle flight on top of two Gemini and two Apollo missions. On Apollo 16, Young walked on the moon, so he flew in both the crew service module and the lunar module. He remains the only astronaut to launch and land in four different spacecraft.

“If you look at it mathematically by percentage of the original plan mission, this is the largest percentage extension,” said Ken Bowersox, associate administrator of NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate. “That’s probably how we engineers will think about it in the future is mathematically.”

He noted other astronauts have had their missions extended.

“But every astronaut that launches into space, we teach them: ‘Don’t think about when you’re coming home. Think about how well your mission is going, and if you’re lucky, you might get to stay longer.’ And it really is a gift when you get to stay longer in space,” he said.

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