Butch and Suni astronauts prepare for Tuesday homecoming after nine month mission

WASHINGTON - Nasa astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams departed the International Space Station early on March 18 morning in a SpaceX capsule for a long-awaited trip back to Earth, nine months after their faulty Boeing Starliner craft upended what was to be a roughly week-long test mission.

Captain Wilmore and Captain Williams, two veteran Nasa astronauts and retired US Navy test pilots, strapped inside their Crew Dragon spacecraft along with two other astronauts and undocked from the orbiting laboratory at 1.05am eastern time, embarking on a 17-hour trip to Earth.

The four-person crew, formally part of Nasa’s Crew-9 astronaut rotation mission, is scheduled for a splashdown off Florida’s coast later on March 18 at 5.57pm eastern time.

“Crew-9 is going home,” said Commander Nick Hague from inside the capsule as it slowly backed up and away from the station for what a Nasa official described on the live webcast of the event as “the trip downhill”.

Mr Hague said it was a privilege to “call the station home” as part of an international effort for the “benefit of humanity”.

The Nasa official said the weather conditions for the splashdown were expected to be “pristine”.

Dressed in re-entry suits, boots and helmets, the astronauts were seen earlier on Nasa’s live footage laughing, hugging and posing for photos with their colleagues from the station shortly before they were shut into the capsule for two hours of final pressure, communications and seal tests.

Capt Wilmore and Capt Williams’ homecoming caps an end to an unusual, drawn-out mission filled with uncertainty and technical troubles that have turned a rare case of Nasa’s contingency planning – as well as failures of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft – into a global and political spectacle.

The astronaut pair had launched into space as Starliner’s first crew in June