NASA's Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are world-renowned as the "stranded astronauts": Though they haven't endured the longest spaceflight, it would certainly seem that way based on news coverage.
Perhaps it was their association with Boeing, the beleaguered aerospace company that built the spaceship that made their story go viral. The veteran astronauts took Starliner to the International Space Station last summer. The pair was only supposed to be gone for eight days. Instead, the two have been laid over in space for nine months.
Starliner experienced propulsion problems during their arrival last June, so NASA made a gametime decision to send the ship back to Earth empty and arrange for a different capsule to bring them home. In the interim, Wilmore and Williams were integrated as members of Crew-9, the team staffing the space station. Starliner's uncrewed landing, for what it's worth, touched down without a hitch.
The day of the astronauts' return is now quickly approaching, with the U.S. space agency moving up the schedule a tad to avoid some inclement weather expected later in the week.
Currently, the plan is for Wilmore and Williams' SpaceX Dragon capsule to undock from the space station at 1:05 a.m. ET on Tuesday, March 18. A splashdown landing should follow at about 5:57 p.m. ET, also on March 18.
NASA plans to provide live coverage of both the undocking process and the ship's reentry into Earth's atmosphere through landing. People at home can watch the hatch closing with a broadcast that begins at 10:45 p.m. ET on March 17. Undocking will roll into the next day at 12:45 a.m. on March 18.
Then, following the Dragon capsule's deorbit burn, NASA will resume the broadcast at about 4:45 p.m. ET on March 18.
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Though nine months is indeed a long time to be away from the planet, it's not the longest time any astronaut has spent in orbit. Just prior to the Starliner saga, NASA astronaut Frank Rubio experienced his own delayed return in 2023. Due to a tiny but concerning leak in the Russian Soyuz capsule set to bring him home, the two space agencies decided to arrange a different ride for Rubio and two cosmonauts to be safe.
The change of plans led to Rubio spending over a year in space — 371 straight days to be exact — the longest single spaceflight for an American. The Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov still owns the record for most consecutive time in space, at almost 438 days, but Rubio's stay surpassed U.S. astronaut Mark Vande Hei's previous record of 355 days, set in 2022.
Despite continuous references to Wilmore and Williams as "stuck" and "stranded," even being dubbed as such by SpaceX's billionaire founder Elon Musk, the Dragon capsule intended to bring them and their crewmates home has been docked at the space station since September 2024. That means in the event of an emergency at the laboratory, orbiting 250 miles above Earth, the astronauts could have evacuated and returned home.
Still, rampant misinformation and politics have seemed to hijack that narrative. Musk, who has since become President Donald Trump's most visible kitchen cabinet adviser, claimed in late January that SpaceX wanted to move up the astronauts’ return but that former President Joe Biden's administration was to blame for the delay. Trump has echoed those remarks.
Wilmore and Williams have achieved an unexpectedly high level of name recognition, but they are not traveling alone on this journey. With them will be crewmates Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov.
Rather than deserted castaways, Wilmore and Williams' remained at the space station to ensure it was fully staffed before Crew-10 arrived to relieve them. Those replacements — Anne McClain, Nichole Ayers, Takuya Onishi, and Kirill Peskov — successfully reached the lab on Sunday, March 16.
