Curious dolphins welcomed NASA astronauts back to Earth after their 9-month saga stuck in space

• A pod of dolphins swam around SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spaceship after it splashed down Tuesday.
• Astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore were returning from nine months stuck in space.
• The dolphins made their splashdown extra special.

Shortly after a SpaceX capsule carrying four astronauts splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday, a pod of dolphins swarmed the spaceship.

Two of the astronauts on board the spaceship — Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore — were returning from an unexpected nine-month stint on the space station, which earned them an international reputation as “stranded” or “stuck” on the International Space Station.

The duo launched aboard Boeing’s new spaceship in June but could not return to Earth as planned after the vehicle had some engine malfunctions. What was meant to be a roughly weeklong mission for them turned into nine months as they waited for their opportunity to come home with a SpaceX crew.

When they climbed aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon spaceship on Tuesday, cruised through Earth orbit all day, and then plummeted back to Earth, they didn’t know an oceanic welcoming committee would meet them.

As their spaceship bobbed in the ocean like a toasted marshmallow, smooth, gray dorsal fins began to peek above the water around it.

“Here on your screen, we can see dolphins, actually, who want to come and play with Dragon,” Kate Tice, a webcast host and senior quality systems engineering manager at SpaceX, said in the livestream.

The dolphins danced around the capsule for several minutes as a SpaceX recovery crew checked the area for hazardous fumes and prepared the spaceship to get hauled onto a barge. There appeared to be at least six of them.

“That was really fun to see,” Sarah Walker, the director of SpaceX Dragon mission management, said in a press call after the splashdown.

SpaceX has previously had to contend with boats of human fans getting too close to its spaceship after the capsule’s first crewed flight in 2020.

The company and NASA wanted to avoid a repeat of that kerfuffle with this high-profile mission. The webcast hosts reiterated the importance of the Coast Guard-enforced safety zone around the landing area.

“We do want to stress to the public the need to respect this safety zone,” Sandra Jones, NASA’s webcast host, said in the livestream. “Recovering a spacecraft from the water is a hazardous task.”

The dolphins paid no mind to the safety zone, though. Luckily, they didn’t seem to interfere with SpaceX procedures.

It’s unclear if Williams, Wilmore, and their two crewmates — Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov — got to see the dolphins in person. The dolphins were no longer visible on the livestream by the time crews started pulling them out of the spaceship.