Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will head back to Earth on Tuesday (March 18) after an unexpectedly long and eventful space mission, and you can watch their homecoming live.
Wilmore, Williams, fellow NASA astronaut Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov will depart the International Space Station (ISS) in the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule “Freedom” early Tuesday morning and splash down off the coast of Florida that evening, if all goes according to plan.
You can watch the action live via NASA. Space.com will carry the feed as well, if the agency makes it available.
The NASA stream will start Monday (March 17) at 10:45 p.m. EDT (0245 GMT on March 18) to cover the closing of the hatches between Freedom and the ISS. It will resume two hours later for undocking, which is expected at 1:05 a.m. EDT (0505 GMT).
Related: International Space Station: Everything you need to know about the orbital laboratory
The webcast will pick up again at 4:45 p.m. EDT (2045 GMT) on March 18 for descent operations. Freedom will conduct a deorbit burn at 5:11 p.m. EDT (2111 GMT), then splash down 46 minutes later.
This plan is not set in stone, however.
“Mission managers will continue monitoring weather conditions in the area, as Dragon’s undocking depends on various factors, including spacecraft readiness, recovery team readiness, weather, sea states and other factors,” NASA officials wrote in an update on Sunday (March 16).
The precise splashdown location will be confirmed closer to the return time, they added.
Wilmore and Williams were supposed to be home already. They launched to the ISS last June, on the first-ever crewed mission of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft.
That flight was expected to last just 10 days or so, but Starliner experienced thruster problems, so NASA delayed the capsule’s return to investigate the issue. The agency eventually decided to bring Starliner home uncrewed, which happened in early September, and fold Wilmore and Williams into the ISS’ long-duration Expedition 72 mission.
This plan calls for Wilmore and Williams to ride home on Freedom, which launched to the ISS in late September on SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission. Freedom hauled up just Hague and Gorbunov — half of the usual Crew Dragon contingent, to save seats for the Starliner duo on the downward trip.
Wilmore and Williams’ situation has gotten a lot of attention, especially in the past two months. Recently, both President Trump and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk have characterized the duo as “stranded” in orbit despite their Crew Dragon ride home, and Musk has claimed that the Biden administration left them up there longer than necessary “for political reasons.”
Crew-9’s return to Earth was set in motion by the arrival of SpaceX’s Crew-10 mission, which docked with the ISS early Sunday morning (March 16).
