STORY: NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams finally returned to Earth in a SpaceX capsule on Tuesday.The crew enjoyed a soft splashdown off Florida's coast and were welcomed back by a pod of curious dolphins.

Starliner astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who were stranded at the International Space Station for nine months, are back on Earth after splashing down Tuesday off the coast of Florida.

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.