Suni Williams et Butch Wilmore, astronautes bloqués à bord de la Station spatiale internationale depuis juin vont enfin revenir sur Terre

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2025-03-18

Pictures must credit: NASA Two astronauts stranded on the International Space Station since June are finally to return to Earth. NASA crew members Suni Williams ,59, and Butch Wilmore ,62, will be brought back to Earth by Tesla billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX mission which docked with the ISS on Sunday. US space agency NASA and SpaceX mission managers are targeting a return based on favourable conditions forecasted for the evening of Tuesday, March 18. This will allow the space station crew members time to complete handover duties while providing operational flexibility ahead of less helpful weather conditions expected for later in the week. Williams, and Wilmore will be returning with another NASA crew member, Nick Hague, 49, as well as Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, 32. Originally, Williams and Wilmore traveled to the ISS aboard Boeing's Starliner capsule in June 2024 for what was supposed to be a short-duration test flight. However, technical malfunctions, including helium leaks and thruster failures, delayed their return for months. The anticipated ocean splashdown off the Florida coast is timed for approximately 21:57 GMT on Tuesday due to the favourable conditions forecast. Wilmore and Williams have been stuck for nine months after what was meant to have been a days-long roundtrip. Their prolonged stay was significantly longer than the standard ISS rotation for astronauts of roughly six months. But it is much shorter than the US space record of 371 days set by NASA astronaut Frank Rubio aboard the ISS in 2023, or the world record held by Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov, who spent 437 continuous days aboard his country's Mir space station. Picture supplied by JLPPA

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