UPDATE (March 18, 2025, 5:58 p.m. ET): The capsule with the astronauts splashed down Tuesday off the Florida coast at 5:57 p.m. ET.

NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore finally began their journey back to Earth early Tuesday following a nine-month stint on the International Space Station that became political fodder for President Donald Trump’s attacks on his predecessor.

At 1:05 a.m. ET, Williams, 59, and Wilmore, 62, departed the space station, where they had been staying since June 2024, on a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule alongside NASA’s Nick Hague and Russia’s Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov. They are expected to splash down off Florida’s Gulf Coast near Tallahassee shortly before 6 p.m. ET on Tuesday.

Williams and Wilmore were initially expected to be on a weeklong mission after launching on Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft last year. However, the crew encountered issues with the capsule’s thrusters on its journey to the space station, and the Starliner’s return was delayed as engineers tried to troubleshoot its problems. NASA later decided to include the two astronauts in the station’s regular six-month crew rotation. NASA eventually sent the uncrewed Starliner back to Earth, with the craft successfully landing in New Mexico on Sept. 7.

Both astronauts have been good-natured about their extended stay. They have said they missed their families but were “prepared and committed” to the mission, and they denied feeling neglected by the Biden administration.

“That’s been the narrative from day one: stranded, abandoned, stuck — and I get it. We both get it,” Wilmore told CNN in an interview in February. “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.”

But Trump and billionaire Elon Musk — a top Trump ally and SpaceX’s founder and CEO — have nevertheless claimed that the Biden administration left Wilmore and Williams in space for political reasons.

Trump again echoed this narrative in a Truth Social post Monday. He falsely claimed that the Biden administration “shamefully forgot about the Astronauts, because they considered it to be a very embarrassing event for them,” and praised himself and Musk for bringing them home.