NASA astronauts 'Butch and Suni' return to Earth after drawn-out mission in space

 WASHINGTON (Reuters) -NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams returned to Earth in a SpaceX capsule on Tuesday with a soft splashdown off Florida's coast, nine months after their faulty Boeing Starliner craft upended what was to be a week-long stay on the International Space Station.

Their return caps a protracted space mission that was fraught with uncertainty and technical troubles and turned a rare instance of NASA's contingency planning - and the latest failures of Boeing's Starliner - into a global spectacle.

Wilmore and Williams, two veteran NASA astronauts and retired U.S. Navy test pilots, had strapped inside their Crew Dragon spacecraft along with two other astronauts and undocked from the orbiting laboratory of the ISS at 1.05 a.m. ET (0505 GMT) to embark on a 17-hour trip to Earth.

The four-person crew, formally part of NASA's Crew-9 astronaut rotation mission, re-entered Earth's atmosphere around 5:45 p.m. ET. Using Earth's atmosphere and two sets of parachutes, the craft slowed its orbital speed of roughly 17,000 miles per hour to a soft 17 miles per hour at splashdown

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.

The astronaut pair had launched into space as Starliner's first crew in June for what was expected to be an eight-day test mission. But issues with Starliner's propulsion system led to cascading delays to their return home, culminating in a NASA decision last year to have them take a SpaceX craft back this year as part of the agency's crew rotation schedule.

The mission has captured the attention of U.S. President Donald Trump, who upon taking office in January called for a quicker return of Wilmore and Williams and alleged without evidence that former President Joe Biden "abandoned" them on the ISS for political reasons.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, a close adviser to Trump, echoed his call for an earlier return. SpaceX's Crew Dragon is the United States' only orbital-class crew spacecraft, which Boeing had hoped its Starliner would compete with before the mission with Wilmore and Williams threw its development future into uncertainty.