Featured Image Credit: NASA / Handout / Getty
286 days after they first set out on their mission to the International Space Station, Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore are finally back on dry land.
First making a watery splashdown off the coast of Tallahassee and quickly being rushed away on stretchers, the pair were joined by SpaceX's Crew-9 astronauts, Nick Hague and Aleksandr Gorbunov.
Although Hague and Gorbunov have been with Williams and Wilmore since September 2024, all four had to wait for the Crew-10 relief team to arrive so they could fly back on the Dragon capsule.
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With conspiracy theories that the Biden administration 'abandoned' the NASA astronauts up there, President Donald Trump piled on the pressure and told Elon Musk to 'go get' them. The White House has since thanked the POTUS for his involvement, while there have been vocal cheers on social media for Musk.
When not busy slashing budgets as the head of the DOGE, he's also known as the CEO of SpaceX.
Elon Musk soon took to the microphone to discuss the rescue mission, telling Fox News how it could've played out very differently.
Following two missions being called off, Crew-10 finally docked with the ISS on March 16. There was a brief handover before Williams, Wilmore, Hague, and Gorbunov undertook the 17-hour journey back to Earth.
According to Musk, there was a real danger that the whole craft could 'disintegrate'. Walking us through the various issues through the different stages, Musk said: "On the ascent phase, there's a chance that the first or second stage will blow up."
Saying that it's 'remarkable' when you see a rocket, Musk admits he tends to think of all the things that could go wrong. He continued: "You could have a first stage failure, a second stage failure, a stage separation failure, the Dragon could fail to separate from the rocket, the trunk could fail to separate from Dragon, there could be an engine failure on the spacecraft itself."
The tech billionaire concluded: "When it's coming back, it's coming in so fast, it's a blazing meteor, and if anything happens to the heat shield, the whole craft is going to disintegrate."
Saying that it's amazing that humans can go into orbit and back, Musk went on to hype the innovation of the Starship rocket that will hopefully make multi-planetary living a real possibility.
With his focus previously on getting Williams and Wilmore back home safely, he can now turn his attention to going further afield.
As the recent spate of exploding SpaceX rockets has shown, Musk's musings on the 'remarkable' nature of getting crews up to the ISS and back really start to hit home.
While Williams and Wilmore are now thrust into a 'brutal' recovery regime, we're sure it's worth it not to be floating 250 miles above Earth for the foreseeable future.
