Stranded Astronaut Reunites with Her Canines After 9 Months in Area

There’s nothing like seeing your greatest pal — particularly after 9 months stranded in outer house!

NASA astronaut Sunita “Suni” Williams has been stranded on the Worldwide Area Station (ISS) since June 2024 for what was purported to be a 10-day keep. On March 18, she and the remainder of SpaceX Crew-9 lastly accomplished their long-delayed journey house to Earth, the place Williams, 59, was later greeted by her two canines.

In a heartwarming second that the astronaut captured and shared in a video on X, the visibly excited pups  — one tan and one chocolate brown — circle her exterior of her Houston house, their tails wagging quickly.

“Do you acknowledge me? Are you aware who I’m?” Williams asks the canines, petting them as they leap round.

The canines proceed to run across the entrance yard throughout the emotional — and chaotic — reunion as Williams pets them and calls the pups her “little fats boys.”

At one level, the candy clip additionally takes a hilarious flip as one of many canines, named Gunner, walks off-screen, and the astronaut asks, “Gunner, are you giving me the chilly shoulder? … Oh, you have to pee?”

“And also you too?” she then asks the tan canine. “You copycat. Are you copying your large brother?”

After extra cuddles and pacing from the darkish brown pup, the video cuts out. Even with the pups’ foolish antics, Williams declared it was the “greatest homecoming ever!”

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Earlier than her fur-filled homecoming, Williams and fellow astronaut Butch Wilmore had been caught on the ISS for 9 months. They initially anticipated to remain in house for not more than 10 days.

After many delays (and much an excessive amount of time away from canines!), the duo safely splashed down round 6 p.m. native day without work the coast of Florida on March 18. Becoming a member of them for the experience house had been fellow NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, who had additionally been in house for months.

Within the astronauts’ first interview after finishing their journey again to Earth, Williams advised Fox Information’ America’s Newsroom that, upon studying their keep in house can be longer than anticipated, her first thought was, “We simply gotta pivot, you understand? If this was the future, if our spacecraft was going to go house, based mostly on choices made right here, we had been going to be up there ’til February, I used to be like, ‘Okay, let’s make the very best of it.'”

“We deliberate, we skilled, that we might be there for some a part of a time,” the astronaut added, “so we had been prepared to only leap into it and tackle the duties that got to us.”