Four astronauts, including NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, made a splash landing off the Florida coast Tuesday evening.

Sunita "Suni" Williams and Barry "Butch" Wilmore have returned to Earth after a nine-month stay on the International Space Station (ISS) -- a trip that

Their return caps a protracted space mission that was fraught with uncertainty and technical troubles and turned a rare instance of NASA's contingency planning - and the latest failures of Boeing's Starliner - into a global spectacle.