Four astronauts will soon launch to the space station — a flight that will kick off a series of events culminating in the long-awaited return of NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore.

The Crew-9 mission, consisting of NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, along with Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, is set to return to Earth after a brief handover period with the newly arrived Crew-10 expedition crew, pending weather conditions at the splashdown sites off the coast of Florida.

In a news briefing following the landing, Nasa spokesperson Steve Stich said: "From a human perspective, all of us feel happy about the successful landing, but then there's a piece of us - all of us - that wish it would have been the way we had planned it.