Elon Musk's Space X safely brought stranded NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams back down to earth on Tuesday, marking a triumphant conclusion to an eight-day voyage that overran some nine months. The reaction was jubilant. The astronauts were taken back to Houston for health checks, and NASA confirmed they were 'doing great'. Photographs from Tallahassee showed their pair smiling in stretchers as crews helped them back to dry land. Wilmore and Williams spent 286 days stranded in space after propulsion issues with their Boeing Starliner craft upended what was supposed to be a week-long stay on the International Space Station. In a viral clip shared by Elon Musk, the pair took the time to thank the SpaceX boss and President Donald Trump for organising the rescue mission. 'All of us have the utmost respect for Mr Musk and obviously respect and admiration for [the] President of the United States, Donald Trump,' Wilmore said. 'We appreciate them, we appreciate all that they do for us, for human spaceflight, for our nation. And we are thankful that they are in the positions that they are in.' The story has become a political lightning rod, with President Trump and his close advisor, Elon Musk - who leads SpaceX - repeatedly suggesting former president Joe Biden abandoned the astronauts and refused an earlier rescue plan. But amid mounting backlash against Trump's cost-cutting tsar over his role in American politics, praise for SpaceX's rescue mission remains muted. Wilmore and Williams, two veteran NASA astronauts and retired U.S. Navy test pilots, had launched into space as Starliner's first crew in June for what was expected to be an eight-day test mission. But issues with Starliner's propulsion system led to cascading delays to their return home, culminating in a NASA decision to fold them into its crew rotation schedule and return them on a SpaceX craft this year. On Tuesday morning, the pair strapped inside their Crew Dragon spacecraft along with two other astronauts and undocked from the ISS at 1.05 a.m. ET (0505 GMT) to embark on a 17-hour trip to Earth. The four-person crew, formally part of NASA's Crew-9 astronaut rotation mission, plunged through Earth's atmosphere, using its heatshield and two sets of parachutes to slow its orbital speed of 17,000 mph to a soft 17 mph at splashdown, which occurred at 5:57 p.m. ET some 50 miles off Florida's Gulf Coast under clear skies. 'What a ride,' NASA astronaut Nick Hague, the Crew-9 mission commander inside the Dragon capsule, told mission control moments after splashing down. 'I see a capsule full of grins, ear to ear.' Wilmore and Williams logged 286 days in space on the mission. The long-awaited return adopted a political bent after capturing the attention of President Trump, who upon taking office in January called for a quicker return of the astronauts and alleged, without evidence, that former President Joe Biden 'abandoned' them on the ISS for political reasons. NASA officials have said the two astronauts had to remain on the ISS to maintain adequate staffing levels and it did not have the budget or the operational need to send a dedicated rescue spacecraft. Crew Dragon flights cost between $100 million to $150 million. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, now a close advisor to Trump, had echoed the President's call for an earlier return, adding the Biden administration spurned a SpaceX offer to provide a dedicated Dragon rescue mission last year. NASA acted on Trump's demand by moving Crew-9's replacement mission up sooner, the agency's ISS chief Joel Montalbano said Tuesday. The agency had swapped a delayed SpaceX capsule for one that would be ready sooner and sped through its methodical safety review process to heed the president's call. The Crew Dragon spacecraft used in the rescue is the only U.S. spacecraft capable of flying people in orbit. Boeing had hoped Starliner would compete with the SpaceX capsule before the mission with Wilmore and Williams threw its development future into uncertainty. The success of SpaceX's mission was inevitably championed by Elon Musk, who took to his own platform, X, to sing its praises. 'Congratulations to the SpaceX and NASA teams for another safe astronaut return! 'Thank you to POTUS for prioritizing this mission!' The post had been seen 54 million times at the time of writing, shared 57,000 times and liked by 375,000. Users noted that NASA had decided to bring the crew home with the SpaceX Crew-9 mission early this year, announced in an August press release published when Biden was president. 'Wilmore and Williams will continue their work formally as part of the Expedition 71/72 crew through February 2025,' the release said 'They will fly home aboard a Dragon spacecraft with two other crew members assigned to the agency's SpaceX Crew-9 mission.' Starliner, unfit to carry them home, would depart without them and make a controlled re-entry and landing in September 2024. It was not clear how much faster they returned as a result of the Trump administration's demands to NASA. While Trump heralded Musk's 'genius' in the recovery, there was muted praise for Elon Musk in the media. The New York Times went so far as to lead with an opinion piece entitled, 'So What if Elon Musk Rescued the Astronauts?' Clive Irving wrote in the article that Musk's Tesla had become a 'poisoned brand' amid his 'turn to the hard right', noting the collapse in share price. 'Using his own flippant term, Mr. Musk’s wunderkind status could be experiencing a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.”' While SpaceX 'eclipsed' Boeing in aerospace, he assessed that Musk's 'innovative willpower can become, in the public eye, as much a liability as an asset'. Musk finds himself embroiled in a growing firestorm surrounding his involvement in U.S. politics, having taken a role heading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) since Trump came to power. The world's richest man was widely criticised after he made a gesture interpreted as a Nazi salute at Trump's indoor inauguration parade in Washington D.C. in January. Musk rattled off a series of off-colour puns on his X account in response, and some conservative politicians in the U.S. and Israel stepped up to defend him. DOGE has also been the subject of much controversy. A federal judge ruled Tuesday that the dismantling of USAID likely violated the constitution, indefinitely blocking the department from making further cuts to the agency. Within weeks, entire government agencies were dismantled and tens of thousands of workers fired. Critics, including a growing number of U.S. lawmakers, have voiced concerns about potential conflicts of interest between DOGE's decisions and Musk's business interests as CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and X. The DOGE team is small, about 40 people, many of them young software engineers who are current and former employees in Musk companies. They have little to no experience inside the U.S. government. According to its website, the only official window into its operations, DOGE says it had saved U.S. taxpayers $105 billion as of March 2 through a series of actions, including workforce reductions, asset sales, and contract cancellations. Yet its savings total is unverifiable and its calculations have been riddled with errors and corrections. In the 'receipts' section of its website, DOGE has repeatedly deleted some of its biggest claims to taxpayer savings. For instance, it reported one $8 billion contract that turned out to be worth only $8 million. Amid growing outrage, acts of protest have emerged across the world. On a beach in Wales this week, a silhouette of Musk's controversial gesture appeared in the sand with the words 'Don't buy a Tesla' British political campaign group Led By Donkeys staged the protest on Black Rock Sands - Traeth y Greigddu - near Porthmadog, Wales. It was made by attaching a huge rake to the back of a Tesla Model 3, which was driven around the beach to create the 250m x 150m message. Musk-hating hackers also doxxed Tesla owners in the United States, releasing an interactive map showing their names, addresses, phone numbers and emails. Musk recently went on FOX, claiming there was a conspiracy to assassinate him and destroy the car company. He told Sean Hannity on Tuesday that his attempts to cut government waste and fraud is the reason why certain characters 'want to kill me.' 'It turns out when you take away people's, you know, the money that they're receiving fraudulently, they get very upset,' he said. 'And they basically want kill me because I'm stopping their fraud and they want to hurt Tesla because we're stopping the terrible waste and corruption in the government. And, well, I guess they're bad people. Bad people do bad things.' He repeated claims that there could be left-wing groups 'coordinating' the protests, without providing evidence. The protests have took a violent turn on Tuesday morning when an arsonist used Molotov cocktails to firebomb five Teslas before firing rounds into the burning vehicles at a dealership in Las Vegas, Nevada. Last week, roughly 250 activists gathered outside a showroom in New York City, holding anti-Musk placards that read 'Block Fascism Now and 'Musk Must Go' as they shouted 'Elon Musk is not elected! Democracy must be protected!' The chaos and anger directed at Musk and Tesla have swelled to the point that Trump came out and declared it domestic terrorism. 'They're harming a great American company,' Trump said at the White House, referring to the demonstrators. 'Let me tell you, you do it to Tesla, and you do it to any company, we're going to catch you, and... you're going to go through hell.' SpaceX's feat to recover the stranded astronauts trapped aboard the ISS is a miracle feat. But Elon Musk's foray into politics appears to have tainted the reception, with deepening mistrust 'poisoning' his affiliated brands. The nine-month mission to the ISS began in one political climate and ended in another. For the astronauts at the centre of the story, the important thing is that they are home and safe.