Al Root

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are on their way home with a little help from Elon Musk.

The pair, along with astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, boarded a reusable SpaceX Dragon capsule on Monday night, detaching from the International Space Station early Tuesday morning.

Splashdown off the coast of Florida is slated for about 6 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday evening.

Wilmore and Williams spent 286 days in space, according to NASA. They were supposed to be at the ISS for about a week, after arriving on the first crewed test flight of Boeing's Starliner spaceship. Technical problems with Starliner, however, prevented the pair from returning on that ship.

It also created quite a hassle. Rescheduling an overbooked spaceship is harder than getting fliers back to New York from Chicago.

Wilmore and Williams orbited the Earth almost 4,600 times while aboard ISS. Their stint, however, only ranks as the sixth-longest mission in space. Frank Rubio holds the record with 371 consecutive days.

Williams 608 days in space is good for second most for a female astronaut. Peggy Whitson has spent 675 days in space. Williams, however, has flown in four spacecraft: The Shuttle, a Russian Soyuz, Boeing's Starliner, and now a Dragon space capsule.

The return highlights just how hard it is to build space technology and how much progress SpaceX has made. Boeing and SpaceX were awarded contracts for crew transport in 2014. Boeing has failed to fully complete a crewed test.

SpaceX started flying crew in 2020 and has now taken 60 astronauts to the ISS.

Elon Musk's rocket company makes the rockets and the space ship. What's more, its pioneering use of reusable rockets have dramatically lowered the costs to reach space. Lower cost have also enabled SpaceX to build a huge space-based Wi-Fi business called Starlink. There are more than 7,000 Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit, and Starlink has amassed some 5 million subscribers.

Boeing makes Starliner, and it launches into space on a United Launch Alliance rocket. ULA is a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Its rockets aren't reusable.

Since late August, when NASA announced Boeing wouldn't bring Williams and Wilmore home, Boeing stock was down 9% through early trading Tuesday. The S&P 500 was flat over the same span.

The Starliner test was a disappointment, but investors pay more attention to the commercial-airplane business. Boeing is trying to ramp up production again after an emergency-door plug blew out of a 737 MAX-9 jet in January 2024. The incident led to slower production and falling estimates.

Boeing ended up delivering about 350 planes in 2024. At the start of 2024, Wall Street expected about 700 jets, according to FactSet. By August, estimates had fallen to about 490 planes.

Wall Street projects about 550 planes for 2025. Hitting those numbers will go a long way to boosting Boeing shares this year.

At current levels, Boeing stock is worth about $120 billion. SpaceX is valued at some $350 billion based on private market transactions. It's become the most valuable aerospace and defense company on -- or above -- Earth.

Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com

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March 18, 2025 11:21 ET (15:21 GMT)

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