After returning home from a trip originally meant to last 10 days, Williams was welcomed by two furry friends!
There’s nothing like seeing your best friend — especially after nine months stranded in outer space!
Stranded in Space for 9 Months—Astronaut’s Emotional Reunion with Her Dogs Melts Hearts! 🚀🐶
In a heartwarming moment that the astronaut captured and shared in a video on X, the visibly excited pups — one tan and one chocolate brown — circle her outside of her Houston home, their tails wagging rapidly.
“Do you recognize me? Do you know who I am?” Williams asks the dogs, petting them as they jump around.
The dogs continue to run around the front yard during the emotional — and chaotic — reunion as Williams pets them and calls the pups her “little fat boys.”
At one point, the sweet clip also takes a hilarious turn as one of the dogs, named Gunner, walks off-screen, and the astronaut asks, “Gunner, are you giving me the cold shoulder? … Oh, you’ve got to pee?”
“And you too?” she then asks the tan dog. “You copycat. Are you copying your big brother?”
After more cuddles and pacing from the dark brown pup, the video cuts out. Even with the pups’ silly antics, Williams declared it was the “best homecoming ever!”
Before her fur-filled homecoming, Williams and fellow astronaut Butch Wilmore were stuck at the ISS for nine months. They initially expected to stay in space for no more than 10 days.
After many delays (and far too much time away from dogs!), the duo safely splashed down around 6 p.m. local time off the coast of Florida on March 18. Joining them for the ride home were fellow NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, who had also been in space for months.
In the astronauts’ first interview after completing their trip back to Earth, Williams told Fox News’ America’s Newsroom that, upon learning their stay in space would be longer than anticipated, her first thought was, “We just gotta pivot, you know? If this was the destiny, if our spacecraft was going to go home, based on decisions made here, we were going to be up there ’til February, I was like, ‘Okay, let’s make the best of it.'”
“We planned, we trained, that we would be there for some part of a time,” the astronaut added, “so we were ready to just jump into it and take on the tasks that were given to us.”
