Astronauts launched by Boeing are returning to Earth nine months later, in a Spacex ship

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are returning to Earth after nine months at the International Space Station. It is not an unusually long stay for an astronaut (the Russians They have come to spend three times longer in orbit), but Wilmore and Williams originally rose for a test mission just over a week. What followed was one of the most controversial decisions that NASA has taken in recent years.

Express rotation

Although How Elon Musk and Donald Trump tell himNASA’s two astronauts have not been really abandoned. The Boeing Starliner ship, with which they went up to the ISS in June, returned empty to Earth for a failure in the propulsion system that caused NASA managers to lose confidence in a safe return for their astronauts.

Wilmore and Williams were reassigned, first, to the CREW-8 mission of Spacex. If there had been an emergency in the ISS between August and September, they would have returned in that ship under the seats of the other four crew, without the right suit. In September, the CREW-9 mission reached the ISS with two empty seats and two costumes for both, which regularized its situation.

Since then, Wilmore and Williams have had a firm return plan: as soon as the four relay astronauts (the Spacex Crew-10 mission), they would return to Earth together with their two companions of the CREW-9 mission. There were some delays for technical issues (the Crew Dragon ship initially assigned to the CREW-10 mission was not ready and had to be replaced), but political tensions ended up accelerating things.

Crew-10 arrived at the ISS during the early hours of Monday. 24 hours later, in the early hours of Tuesday, the CREW-9 mission was decoupling to enter the atmosphere and return to the earth. Normally astronauts spend more time together to catch up on the details of the orbital station, but this time it has been an express rotation.

The return flight

Dressed in their Spacex costumes, very different from those of the Boeing Starliner ship with those who were thrown into space, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams said goodbye to their peers and entered the Crew Dragon ship with Nick Hague of NASA and Aleksandr Gorbunov of Roscosmos, the other two crew of the CREW-9 mission.

At 5:05 UTC, the Spacex ship decoupled from the ISS autonomously and quickly moved away from the laboratory in orbit using its propellants. The Crew Dragon has been maneuvering to reduce its altitude. It is expected that Amerize near the Coast of Florida at 9:57 p.m. UTC, 17 hours after its departure.

The most delicate maneuver will occur 12 minutes before shocking. The ship will detach from its trunk and turn on its engines to exorbitar. Then he will perform his atmospheric reentry, being surrounded by plasma by the speed at which he will cross the gases of the Earth’s atmosphere.

When it reaches 5,500 meters of altitude, the two pilot parachutes will open to stop the ship, followed by four main parachutes to 1,950 meters to cushion the shocking. The Dragon ship will play the Atlantic Ocean at a speed of 7.6 meters per second, detaching from its parachutes and bringing back to Butch and Suni after nine months of scientific work and maintenance aboard the ISS. The soap opera will have finished.

Images | POT

In Xataka | “Stranded” astronauts in space say goodbye to the ISS with a script turn: supporting Elon Musk’s version