The Crew Dragon Freedom carrying NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore has undocked from the ISS International Space Station and begun its 17-hour journey to Earth aboard the Dragon spacecraft of SpaceX–Elon Musk’s aerospace company. Along with them are two other astronauts, American Nicholas Hague and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency. They are scheduled to splash down off the coast of Florida today Tuesday, March 18 around 6:00 pm.
Astronauts who had arrived on the ISS in June 2024 in Boeing’s Starliner were stranded for 9 months due to technical problems found on the capsule, forcing the Starliner to return unmanned to Earth. Because of this, Williams and Wilmore, who were supposed to stay in the ISS orbiting laboratory for only a week, instead stayed there much longer. The return of the two astronauts, which has been postponed three times, had already taken on a political dimension in the United States when President Donald Trump falsely accused his predecessor Joe Biden of “abandoning” the astronauts on the ISS. However, this was not accurate, as during the Biden administration NASA had already developed and organized plans to bring them home in December 2024, proposing the use of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft.
The astronauts’ return was further delayed because SpaceX needed more time to complete the capsule needed to bring their replacements to the ISS. Originally scheduled for February 2025, the re-entry was postponed to March 2025 to allow SpaceX to complete the construction of the capsule to bring them home.
Taking over for the four astronauts who will return to Earth is SpaceX’s Crew 10, which successfully docked to the International Space Station on Sunday, March 16, and consists of astronauts Kirill Peskov of Roscosmos; Nichole Ayers and Anne McClain of NASA; and Takuya Onishi of Japan’s Jaxa space agency.
