After a planned eight day mission to the ISS that launched in June 2024, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams splashed down near Florida over nine months later on March 18, 2025.
The two astronauts missed family events, birthdays, and Christmas while engineers tried to determine whether Boeing’s Starliner capsule would be safe to return with the crew of two or, as they later decided, to integrate Butch and Suni into the Crew-9 mission and return back on a SpaceX Crew Dragon.
Many in the media used the term “stranded” to describe the pair while they lived and worked on the ISS as part of Expedition 72. However, Butch and Suni were not the only astronauts to be coined with that term.