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NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams arrived back on Earth on Tuesday after living in space for a longer-than-expected nine months.
The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft carrying Wilmore, Williams, fellow NASA astronaut Nick Hauge and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov — known as Crew-9 — landed in the Gulf of America near Tallahassee, Florida, with SpaceX crew quickly recovering them and the capsule safe and sound.
A SpaceX Dragon spacecraft is seen as it lands with astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov aboard off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida, on Tuesday. (Keegan Barber/NASA via / Getty Images)
Crew-9’s homecoming had been ushered in by NASA and SpaceX sending a new four-person crew to replace them to the International Space Station (ISS) over the weekend.
Wilmore and Williams both notched 286 days in space, significantly longer than the roughly one week they were originally supposed to spend on the ISS when they arrived via Boeing’s Starliner in June of last year. Meanwhile, Hague and Gorbunov’s time in space amounted to 171 days.
NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on June 5, 2024. ( Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo/AFP via / Getty Images)
With Crew-9 back on Earth and new astronauts manning the ISS, questions about how much money NASA astronauts earn while onboard the orbiting research station have arisen — and whether Wilmore and Williams could have any extra pay coming their way, given their extended stint in space.
“When NASA astronauts are aboard the International Space Station, they receive regular, 40-hour work-week salaries. They do not receive overtime or holiday/weekend pay,” a NASA spokesperson told FOX Business.
NASA astronaut salaries were over $152,000 last year, a NASA webpage indicated.
The NASA spokesperson said transportation, lodging and meals are provided for NASA astronauts as they are “on official travel orders as federal employees” while in space.
“They are also on long-term TDY (Temporary Duty), and receive the incidentals amount for each day they are in space,” the spokesperson also told FOX Business. “Incidental expenses for travel to any location is currently $5 per day.”
That incidentals rate would presumably equate to $1,430 for Wilmore and Williams.
The pair’s lengthy stay at the ISS came after NASA and Boeing ended up deciding that the Starliner that brought the pair to space would make an unmanned return to Earth in early September so that they could “continue gathering testing data” on the spacecraft while it traveled back “while also not accepting…
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