Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov has also emerged from the spacecraft, and is smiling and waving. Nasa astronaut Nick Hague, grinning, has emerged from the spacecraft and is being wheeled to a medical examination on board the recovery ship. As we wait for the emergence of Barry ‘Butch’ Wilmore and Suni Williams, two American astronauts who were stuck on the International Space Station much longer than expected, it’s worth considering all the reasons we’re watching a live stream of this return mission. Yes, it’s a compelling human story. But we’re also witnessing a very choreographed day of political messaging for SpaceX, and its CEO Elon Musk; for the Trump administration, and for Nasa itself, which is occupying a somewhat precarious political position as a government agency in the new Trump-Musk era. More from my colleague Michael Sainto on that: “Smiles all around” as we get the first footage of Crew-9 astronauts back on Earth. The side hatch of the spacecraft has just been opened. We’re still waiting for sight of the returned astronauts inside. When the astronauts exit shortly, it will be “the crew’s first breath of fresh air since boarding their ships at the start of their journeys last year”, SpaceX’s Kate Tice notes. We’re shortly going to see the four astronauts being escorted out of the spacecraft, and walk a short distance to where they’ll receive medical checks. Some additional live footage of the dolphins that were spotted swimming around the downed spacecraft as it floats off the coast of Florida … … just kidding: this is a dolphin illustration by the iconic 1980s/1990s American designer Lisa Frank. (It has been an eerily picture-perfect day, however.) The Dragon Freedom spacecraft has now been successfully lifted out of the water and placed into a “nest” on a recovery vessel, where it’s being repositioned slightly, and will also be rinsed off, to protect it from the corrosion of saltwater. It’s been about 30 minutes since the splashdown. Here’s the lifting in process: Here’s an image of a worker helping prepare the rigging on the just-landed capsule so it can be lifted out of the water: We’re expected to see the returned astronauts exit from the capsule shortly, Sandra Jones, a Nasa public affairs officer, notes as she narrates Nasa’s live feed. The capsule will be lifted onto a “nest” on the recovery vessel, and then the astronauts will be able to exit. To add to the picture-perfect footage coming from Nasa right now, dolphins are swimming around the floating capsule as the recovery team prepares it to be hoisted onto the recovery ship. “We’ve got a cute little pod of dolphins,” one live commenter adds. My colleague Richard Luscombe, who is covering the mission from Florida, has more of the first reaction we heard from the returned astronauts: “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,” Nicholas Hague, the third American on board, replied. We’ll have more from Richard soon. “Splashdown was nothing short of spectacular,” Nasa’s Jaden Jennings, a public affairs employees who is at the recovery site, tells viewers of Nasa’s live feed. “A new core memory was made today,” Jennings added. The Dragon capsule is now being prepared to be brought onto the recovery ship, where astronauts will finally exit and receive medical checks before taking helicopters back to land and departing for Houston, according to the Nasa-Space X live feed. Another view of the splashed-down spacecraft, Dragon Freedom, floating off the coast of Florida, having returned four astronauts to Earth from the International Space Station. This is what the capsule that just landed off the coast of Florida looks like. Recovery vessels are arriving to do safety checks and pick up the astronauts. Shortly after the splashdown, we heard a crackly reaction that sounded like it was coming from inside the just-landed capsule of astronauts: “ … amazing … what a ride!” Big cheers on the Nasa livestream as a commentator announces: “Crew 9 back on Earth!” A capsule carrying four astronauts just successfully “splashed down” off the Florida coast, bringing an end to the dramatically prolonged journey of Nasa astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Suni Williams, who were stuck for more than nine months on the International Space Station. Crew 9 is “just minutes away from splashing down off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida”, per Nasa’s live feed. Viewers are cheering the footage of parachute deployment. The International Space Station will be celebrating a big milestone this November, Nasa’s Sandra Jones reminded listeners: 25 years of continuous human presence in space. “If you’re younger than 25 years, you’ve never known a day when there hasn’t been a human living and working aboard the International Space Station, contributing to key science and research investigations that impact our lives here on Earth,” Jones said. We are really being given every detail of the astronauts’ return to Earth, including that they essentially just tightened their seatbelts for their return. We recently heard on the live feed “tablets are secured, restraints are tight and visors down”, which was further explained by Kate Tice as meaning that “per their instructions, Crew 9 has now put away everything that is necessary in order to begin their re-entry”, including tightening their safety harnesses. Following along on the live narration of the mission, and wondering who is on screen providing the commentary? On the left, it’s Kate Tice, quality systems engineering senior manager, SpaceX. On the right, it’s Sandra Jones, public affairs officer, Nasa. The deorbit burn is complete, Nasa says. The tone of Nasa’s live coverage today is really striking: it’s being narrated in a way that sounds a lot like the move-by-move commentary of a sports game, complete with detailed information on the various “stats” of the four astronauts returning home to Earth. The space-athletes commentary is mixed with a lot of highly technical information about what’s happening during every step of this return. Compared with what else is going on in the news, this is some pretty high-level Theater of Government Competence. If you’re following along on Nasa’s live feed, you’re likely hearing a lot about the major events expected in the next hour. The first is the “deorbit burn”, expected around 5.11pm EST, which “helps get Dragon set up in the right trajectory to splash down in the gulf” shortly before 6pm EST. Gravity may seem like a drag, but spending long periods of time without its grounding force can wreak havoc on your body. Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Suni Williams will have spent more than nine months in space – and while it is not the most time a human has spent as an extraterrestrial (Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov spent 437 continuous days aboard the Mir space station) – most long space missions are a maximum of six months. So what happens to a person’s body – and mind – back on Earth? My colleague Helen Sullivan has looked at just that, from gravity to the “overview effect”: The astronauts’ extended stay on the ISS became an opportunity for some political mischief, with Elon Musk, the SpaceX founder and Donald Trump acolyte, insisting without evidence they had been “abandoned” in space by the Biden administration. Trump, in turn, has attempted to paint last week’s long-scheduled routine crew-rotation flight, carrying replacements for Williams and Wilmore, as a special rescue mission ordered by the White House. Wilmore told reporters from space earlier this month that he believed Musk’s claim that Joe Biden had rebuffed an offer to bring them home last year was “absolutely factual”, while also admitting: “We have no information on … what was offered, what was not offered, who it was offered to, how that process went.” Yet, in February he told CNN: “We don’t feel abandoned, we don’t feel stuck, we don’t feel stranded. I understand why others may think that … if you’ll help us change the rhetoric, help us change the narrative, let’s change it to ‘prepared and committed’, that’s what we prefer.” Musk subsequently became embroiled in a public dispute with the Danish astronaut and space station veteran Andreas Mogensen, who accused him of lying, and pointed out that Tuesday’s return of Williams and Wilmore, alongside their ISS Crew 9 colleagues, had been scheduled as long ago as September. In response, Musk posted to the X platform he owns that Mogensen was “fully retarded”, drawing him deeper into conflict with retired astronauts and ISS veterans and brothers Scott and Mark Kelly, who defended their European colleague. The bad blood has continued, with Musk calling Mark Kelly, Democratic senator for Arizona, “a traitor” for visiting Ukraine and urging US military and humanitarian support for the country in its war against Russia; and the politician retorting that Musk is “not a serious guy”. The two US astronauts stuck on the ISS were meant to return home onboard a Boeing Starliner – but Nasa decided to move them on to a SpaceX-crewed flight instead due to “too much uncertainty” about the Starliner, which had problems after the capsule sprang small leaks and some of its thrusters failed. Williams and Wilmore, two veteran astronauts, arrived at the ISS on 6 June as part of a crucial test by Starliner before it could receive Nasa approval for routine flights. However, their planned eight-day mission turned into a months-long stay after technical issues emerged, including reaction-control thrusters that failed during Starliner’s first docking attempt. Four of the spacecraft’s five failed thrusters later reactivated in orbit, the Associated Press reported, adding that the thrusters are crucial for the spacecraft to back away from the ISS after undocking and for maintaining the capsule in proper position for the deorbit. On 2 August, Boeing said in a blog post that it had conducted “extensive testing of its propulsion system in space and on the ground”. The embattled manufacturer, which has struggled to compete with SpaceX and has taken in $1.6bn in losses on the Starliner program, added: “The testing has confirmed 27 of 28 RCS [reaction control system] thrusters are healthy and back to full operational capability. Starliner’s propulsion system also maintains redundancy and the helium levels remain stable.” Describing the decision to bring the Starliner back uncrewed in September, Steve Stich, program manager for Nasa’s commercial crew program, said: “The bottom line relative to bringing Starliner back is … there was just too much uncertainty in the prediction of the thrusters … it was just too much risk with the crew.” When Williams, Wilmore, Hague and Gorbunov left the ISS, they were replaced by a new crew, whose arrival led to emotional scenes on Sunday. A SpaceX capsule delivered four astronauts in a Nasa crew-swap mission that will allow Williams and Wilmore to return home after nine months on the orbiting lab. Williams said it was a wonderful day and “great to see our friends arrive”, speaking shortly after her colleagues emerged on to the orbital lab. In a live video, Nasa astronaut and team commander Anne McClain said: “Hi, everybody down there on Earth. Crew 10 has had a great journey up here, about 28 hours to get back up to the space station. And I cannot tell you the immense joy of our crew when we looked out the window and saw the space station for the first time.” She said: “You can hardly even put it into words … orbiting the Earth for the last couple of days, it has been absolutely incredible.” McClain’s team were welcomed by the station’s seven-member crew, which included Wilmore and Williams, veteran astronauts and retired Navy test pilots who have remained on the station after problems with Boeing’s Starliner capsule forced Nasa to bring it back empty. Hello, and welcome to our live coverage of two US astronauts – stuck for more than nine months on the International Space Station – returning to Earth today. Nasa said it expects the astronauts to splash down off the Florida coast at approximately 5.57pm ET Tuesday (21.57 GMT). Favourable weather meant their expected re-entry was moved forward from Wednesday. Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams are heading home with another American astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon craft, which arrived at the ISS early on Sunday. The duo had been on the ISS since June, after the Boeing Starliner spacecraft they were testing on its maiden crewed voyage suffered propulsion issues and was deemed unfit to fly them back to Earth. On Sunday, Nasa said: “The updated return target continues to allow the space station crew members time to complete handover duties while providing operational flexibility ahead of less favorable weather conditions expected for later in the week.” Nasa astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov are also returning on the Dragon capsule, which undocked from the space station at 1.05am ET on Monday. The final stages of their journey will be broadcast live on the new Nasa+ streaming service. We will have a live feed at the top of this live blog.
Author: Lois Beckett