(19 Mar 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY: MUST CREDIT NASA
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NASA – MUST CREDIT NASA
Houston – 18 March 2025
1. SOUNDBITE (English) Joel Montalbanom, Deputy Associate Administrator, NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate:
"It is awesome to have Crew-9 home. Just a beautiful landing. I think many of you heard that back in January, the president asked SpaceX what it would take to bring this crew home. And I will tell you that at the time that, that question was asked, we are already looking at options of what to do with the crew ten, crew nine situation and how we’re going to set that up."
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2. SOUNDBITE (English) Steve Stich, manager, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program:
"Today the sequence went perfectly. Jettison the trunk. Executed the deorbit burn. Close the nosecone and did the entry. You could hear Nick call down when we finally got the vehicle back through the blackout. 4.6 G’s and you could tell they were doing well and then braced for the parachute, deploy the drogues and then the mains and then having splashdown – so."
3. SOUNDBITE (English) Steve Stich, manager, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program:
"You know, in many ways, if I step back to last year, this has been nine months in the making, and I couldn’t be prouder of our team’s versatility, our team’s ability to adapt and and really build for the future of human spaceflight and looking at different ways to do business. Taking advantage of one vehicle to launch a crew and then bring back the crew in a different vehicle."
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STORYLINE:
Stuck in space no more, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams returned to Earth on Tuesday, hitching a different ride home to close out a saga that began with a bungled test flight more than nine months ago.
Their SpaceX capsule parachuted into the Gulf of Mexico in the early evening, just hours after departing the International Space Station. Splashdown occurred off the coast of Tallahassee in the Florida Panhandle, bringing their unplanned odyssey to an end.
Wilmore and Williams’ plight captured the world’s attention, giving new meaning to the phrase “stuck at work" and turning “Butch and Suni” into household names. While other astronauts had logged longer spaceflights over the decades, none had to deal with so much uncertainty or see the length of their mission expand by so much.
Their mission took an unexpected twist in late January when President Donald Trump asked SpaceX founder Elon Musk to accelerate the astronauts’ return and blamed the delay on the Biden administration. The replacement crew’s brand new SpaceX capsule still wasn’t ready to fly, so SpaceX subbed it with a used one, hurrying things along by at least a few weeks.
NASA hired SpaceX and Boeing after the shuttle program ended, in order to have two competing U.S. companies for transporting astronauts to and from the space station until it’s abandoned in 2030 and steered to a fiery reentry.
“This has been nine months in the making, and I couldn’t be prouder of our team’s versatility, our team’s ability to adapt and really build for the future of human spaceflight,” NASA’s commercial crew program manager Steve Stich said.
With Starliner still under engineering investigation, SpaceX will launch the next crew for NASA as soon as July. Stich said NASA will have until summer to decide whether the crew after that one will be flown by SpaceX or Boeing — or whether Boeing will have to prove itself by flying cargo before people again.
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