NASA Astronauts Stranded in Space for 9 Months Get Welcomed by Dolphins On Their Return

Millions of eyes became glued to the livestream running on their television screens on March 18, 2025, at around 11:19 pm, as the world witnessed the much-awaited return of NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore. After an enduring nine-month-long stay in space, the two astronauts finally came home, in SpaceX’s Dragon capsule.

At around 10:38 in the morning of March 18, the capsule was undocked from the International Space Station (ISS). Its trunk was jettisoned, deorbit burned, and nosecone closed, the Dragon hurtled towards Earth, carrying four lovely smiles from space, and probably tons of happy tears bubbling with the desire to smell of home’s kitchen and the cool soil flitting upwards with the breeze. And as soon as their craft descended into Florida’s waters, they were welcomed by some unlikely visitors: a pod of dolphins, as NASA Johnson (@NASA_Johnson) shared in a tweet.

Williams and Wilmore ventured on the Boeing Starliner spaceship for an eight-week mission but ended up getting stuck in space due to some technical issues in the spacecraft. It wasn’t until Elon Musk’s Dragon capsule flew to the International Space Station (ISS) to bring back these astronauts. The capsule, called Freedom, brought the two NASA astronauts along with Crew-9 mission members Nick Hague and Russian Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov back to Earth. They touched down at Johnson Space Center’s Ellington Field in Houston at 11:19 pm on March 18, reported The Guardian.

As Freedom plummeted down in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Tallahassee, it slowed from 17,000mph as it made re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. Four orange-and-white-striped parachutes burst open in the azure blue sky of Florida before gently splashing down in what a NASA commentator said was a “calm, glasslike ocean,” per The Guardian. “And splashdown. Crew-9 back on Earth. Nick, Aleksandr, Butch, and Suni, on behalf of SpaceX, welcome home,” a voice from mission control said, shortly before the pod of curious dolphins emerged from the surface, poking their heads towards the bobbing craft which was now being approached by a rescue vessel.

As the craft was pulled aboard the rescue ship, Williams and Wilmore emerged out of the opened hatch, with smiles on their faces, per BBC. They breathed in big gulps of fresh air, for the first time in nine months. “What a ride. I see a capsule full of grins, ear to ear,” Hague reported from inside the craft. While the defective Starliner spacecraft and NASA’s subsequent failure to bring them back home might sound like a big fallout, the two astronauts previously told CNN that they were not “stranded.” Rather, they were enjoying their time in space.

“That’s been the rhetoric. That’s been the narrative from day one: stranded, abandoned, stuck and I get it. We both get it. But that is, again, not what our human spaceflight program is about. We don’t feel abandoned, we don’t feel stuck, we don’t feel stranded. If you’ll help us change the rhetoric, help us change the narrative. Let’s change it to 'prepared and committed,'" Wilmore told CNN. Now that they're home, the astronauts will go through extensive medical checks and rehabilitation programs to recover from the aftereffects of spending hundreds of days in microgravity.